LIVE from Bellevue: Governor Inslee unveils plan for investing in Washington’s schools

Good evening from New­port High School in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton. I’m here with sev­er­al dozen oth­er activists, reporters, and cit­i­zens to par­tic­i­pate in a town hall on edu­ca­tion with Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee and his staff. The gov­er­nor is using the event to unveil his plan to strength­en Wash­ing­ton’s schools, which his office is call­ing the most sub­stan­tial invest­ment in edu­ca­tion in decades.

Peo­ple are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the town hall from sev­er­al loca­tions via video link: Colum­bia Basin Tech­ni­cal Skills Cen­ter in Moses Lake, Rogers High School in Spokane, and Jason Lee Mid­dle School in Tacoma.

In his intro­duc­to­ry remarks, the gov­er­nor explained that we can no longer afford to delay or post­pone invest­ing in our schools. He remind­ed the audi­ence that the Supreme Court has held the state in con­tempt for fail­ing to com­ply with Arti­cle IX of our Con­sti­tu­tion, which declares that it is the para­mount duty of Wash­ing­ton’s lead­ers to amply pro­vide for the edu­ca­tion of every child.

The gov­er­nor is call­ing on the Leg­is­la­ture to respond by walk­ing its talk.

“In the bud­get I will be releas­ing this Thurs­day, I will be propos­ing adding $2.3 bil­lion to put us back on track,” Inslee said.

His K‑12 plan calls for the following:

• Ear­ly learn­ing: Pro­vide $79.8 mil­lion for 6,358 new spaces in the state’s preschool solu­tion for chil­dren of low income fam­i­lies, and $70 mil­lion to train child care providers, which will help 50,639 more children.
• Reduce ele­men­tary school class size: $448 mil­lion will go towards reduc­ing kinder­garten, first, sec­ond, and third grade class sizes to sev­en­teen kids, down from twen­ty-three kids.
• Statewide full-day kinder­garten: $107 mil­lion will pro­vide full-day kinder­garten for all stu­dents in Washington.
• Mate­ri­als and sup­plies: To ensure teach­ers have the tools they need, $751 mil­lion would go towards mate­ri­als, sup­plies, and curricula.
• Pro­fes­sion­al pay for teach­ers: $385 mil­lion will ful­ly fund Ini­tia­tive 732 and pro­vide a cost of liv­ing increase for teach­ers, in line with increas­es rec­om­mend­ed for state employees.

For high­er edu­ca­tion, Inslee is call­ing for a tuition freeze for the 2015–2017 bien­ni­um. He wants to increase fund­ing for the oppor­tu­ni­ty schol­ar­ship by $100 mil­lion and the col­lege bound state need grant by $25 million.

After pre­sent­ing an overview of his plan and dis­cussing some of the high­lights, Inslee began tak­ing ques­tions from edu­ca­tors and cit­i­zens at all four video-linked schools, begin­ning with Spokane, Taco­ma, and Moses Lake.

You can read the plan your­self by check­ing out this PDF from the gov­er­nor’s site.

Ques­tions from ranged to imple­ment­ing I‑1351 to poten­tial changes to the sys­tem used for eval­u­at­ing teach­ers to secure a waiv­er for No Child Left Behind.

Anoth­er ques­tion zeroed in on how the invest­ments would be funded.

“We have a sol­id, fis­cal­ly sound way of financ­ing every­thing we’ve talked about today,” Inslee said in response to a ques­tion about how the plan would be fund­ed. “I can tell you it’s a real financ­ing plan, not based on indebtedness.”

He promised to share details at a press con­fer­ence on Thursday.

“The way I look at this… we real­ly are at a fork in the road,” he said, explain­ing that mak­ing an invest­ment is the way to hon­or our state’s finest tra­di­tion­al val­ues and pur­sue excel­lence in edu­ca­tion. The unac­cept­able alter­na­tive would be fail­ing to ful­fill our con­sti­tu­tion­al oblig­a­tions as a state to our young people.