By a vote of twen­ty-six to twen­ty-three, the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate has con­curred in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive’s amend­ments to E2SSB 6194, Steve Lit­zow’s bill to bail out char­ter schools, which were declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al by the Wash­ing­ton State Supreme Court in League of Women Vot­ers last autumn.

The vote was most­ly along par­ty lines, though Democ­rats Mark Mul­let and Steve Hobbs crossed over to help the Repub­li­cans pass the bill, while Repub­li­cans Bri­an Dansel and Kirk Pear­son joined the remain­ing Democ­rats in vot­ing against it.

E2SSB 6194
Char­ter schools bailout
Sen­ate vote on Final Pas­sage as Amend­ed by the House
3/10/2016

Yeas: 26; Nays: 23

Vot­ing Yea: Sen­a­tors Angel, Bai­ley, Baum­gart­ner, Beck­er, Ben­ton, Braun, Brown, Dammeier, Erick­sen, Fain, Hewitt, Hill, Hobbs, Hon­ey­ford, King, Lit­zow, Milos­cia, Mul­let, O’Ban, Pad­den, Par­lette, Rivers, Roach, Schoesler, Shel­don, Warnick

Vot­ing Nay: Sen­a­tors Bil­lig, Car­lyle, Chase, Cleve­land, Con­way, Dansel, Darneille, Fras­er, Frockt, Habib, Har­grove, Hasegawa, Jaya­pal, Keis­er, Liias, McAu­li­ffe, McCoy, Nel­son, Pear­son, Ped­er­sen, Ranker, Rolfes, Takko

E2SSB 6194 now heads to Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee. Inslee has not said what he will do with the bill. We at NPI urge him to veto it in its entirety.

As we said yes­ter­day in our open let­ter to the Leg­is­la­ture:

Your para­mount duty is to fund our pub­lic schools. It is not appro­pri­ate to tell the one mil­lion chil­dren in our pub­lic schools that they must wait at least two more years for that duty to be met while at the same time sud­den­ly com­ing up with new mon­ey for pri­vate char­ter schools.

We’re extreme­ly dis­ap­point­ed that majori­ties in each house have seen fit to ignore the Supreme Court’s orders in McCleary, leav­ing over a mil­lion kids in the lurch, while bend­ing over back­ward to ensure that the twen­ty-two lob­by­ists work­ing for a char­ter schools bailout got what they and their employ­ers wanted.

The Supreme Court, a coequal branch of our gov­ern­ment, spoke loud­ly and clear­ly when it said char­ter schools are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, just as it did in McCleary when it ruled that Wash­ing­ton’s schools were being mas­sive­ly under­fund­ed. But leg­is­la­tors aren’t lis­ten­ing. They’ve been held in con­tempt. They’ve been fined. They’ve been repeat­ed­ly instruct­ed to do their jobs. And yet, they col­lec­tive­ly refuse to act.

Pro­po­nents of this leg­is­la­tion keep talk­ing about sav­ing schools. 

If the majori­ties that passed these bills real­ly care about Wash­ing­ton’s kids, why aren’t they work­ing on pro­gres­sive rev­enue reform to get our pub­lic schools the fund­ing they need? Our pub­lic schools are the schools that need sav­ing — not char­ters!  The wealthy inter­ests that favor divert­ing pub­lic mon­ey to schools that are not pub­licly owned and oper­at­ed for the ben­e­fit of all have more than enough mon­ey to keep the eight remain­ing char­ters open with­out a dime from taxpayers.

Gov­er­nor Inslee should rec­og­nize this and uphold the Supreme Court’s deci­sion in League of Women Vot­ers by veto­ing E2SSB 6194. If the leg­isla­tive branch will not respect the deci­sions of our judi­cia­ry, at least the exec­u­tive depart­ment should.