Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Funding education in hard times

Last night I did some interesting math. It was mostly word problems, involved a lot of variables, and the final number was always depressing. Here’s an example: how many after school athletic programs, plus school secretaries, plus school nurses equals 44.7 teachers?

The answer: we need a better way to fund our schools!

44.7 is the number of kindergarten and first grade teachers my school district, Lake Washington, serving Redmond, Sammamish and Kirkland, is proposing to layoff in order to fix a $7.7 million projected budget shortfall. This is the district’s share of the around $900 million Washington is likely to cut from its own K-12 education expenditures. It is 3.5 percent of an already shoe-string school district budget.

I was able to pore over these ugly numbers at a meeting I attended in a jam-packed high school cafeteria last night for the purpose of guiding the district in their mission to balance their books while causing the least pain to students and families as possible.

Enough numbers. What parents like me learned last night is what the numbers are connected to: “safety net” classes for kids who have trouble in math or learning to read, more teachers to keep class sizes small in the lower grades where it helps learning the most, pre-school for at-risk children and buses.

It was pretty hard to select anything from that list that I wanted to eliminate. The alternatives were pretty shocking too: charge families $300 per child to ride the bus to school? How about paying $500 so your daughter can run track or play the flute in the band?

Washington’s unprecedented state budget deficit is causing financial crisises like this one in school districts all over state, and is mostly due to the national economic meltdown, but if the state were equipped with a more stable tax structure, our budget problem would not be so severe.

Washington needs more money for schools and it needs a stable source of revenue so that we don’t slash programs and staff in our bad years and then have to restart them again in the good years.

I hear people in my community discussing ways to create a more fair, more stable tax system and more and more of these people are sharing their support for a state income tax. Only six other states in the country don’t have a state income tax. Interestingly, Washington ranks forty fourth in the nation in per-pupil funding, way down at the bottom of the list, along with most of the other states without a state income tax.

Any way you look at it, the math ain’t pretty.

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