Funding reform needed
to avoid crisis, says SPI

By Editor Ken Harvey

Despite a record state budget for education, many school districts are having to lay off personnel, say school officials from around the state. And State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) Terry Bergeson says the problem will lead to a “train wreck” in education if not addressed right away.

The state’s overall kindergarten-through-12^th grade (K-12) biennial budget jumped from about $13.5 billion to $16.4 billion, according to Bergeson, but if the state doesn’t fix its “jerry-rigged” system of financing education, “we could put in another billion dollars and still be laying people off.”

The public schools’ $16.4 billion biennial budget includes a $15.1 billion operations budget and a $1.3 billion capital budget. Despite the nearly $3 billion budget increase, however, only $309 million is considered as “new resources” to enhance education. The rest is considered “maintenance” of current programs.

That “maintenance” included $510 million in cost-of-living and other personnel-related enhancements for educators paid out of the state’s general school apportionment. It was the increase in this part of the funding that is leading, apparently, to hundreds of layoffs statewide.

Bergeson spent the first week of August meeting with educators in the SPI-sponsored Summer Institutes, discussing the successes and failures of this year’s legislative session. She admits it took her some time to understand how such a large budget could lead to layoffs.

It was Federal Way Supt. Tom Murphy who first sounded the alarm, she says. He wrote a scathing letter to Gov. Christine Gregoire and Supt. Bergeson about the continued underfunding of basic education despite state officials’ mutual back-patting over its record budget. Murphy told officials they had done school districts no favor in pigeon-holing funds in such a way that he would have to lay off numerous employees.

“The Legislature doesn’t get it, and the governor was mad,” says Bergeson. It was when the state superintendent finally understood the problem herself that she concluded: “We have a train wreck coming.”

The problem is that not all school employees are paid out of the school general apportionment fund. Some are paid out of local levy money that districts collect from property taxes or from levy equalization funds, and other employees are paid from federal funds or from the School Achievement Fund created by Initiative 728, which assigned state lottery revenues to education.

District contracts negotiated with teacher unions require all certificated educators to be compensated in a consistent manner. But the other revenue sources have not increased adequately to pay for the enhancements mandated by the Legislature for educators funded by general apportionment, Bergeson explains.

Consequently, several school administrators at the Vancouver Summer Institute reported the same results as did Murphy – layoffs of teachers, librarians and paraprofessionals in order to balance their local budgets.

“We have a system that has been jerry-rigged for 35 years,” says Bergeson. “Fixing it will cost a lot of money, but we need to do it. We need to open this thing up and try to figure it out.”

 “None of it turned out the way we were expecting,” said one principal attending the Vancouver meetings.

While the Legislature increased the education budget dramatically, “we still don’t have enough money for general education,” Bergeson says.

In addition to shortages in general education funding, student transportation is underfunded by $100 million statewide and special education is also underfunded, the state superintendent says. The underfunding problems are serious enough that several school districts, including Federal Way, have decided to sue the state for failing to fulfill its constitutional mandate to provide full funding of basic education.

The legislative session was complicated by several situations, including the battle over what to do with the statewide WASL exam, and, in particular, the math portion that thousands of high school students were still failing despite it being a requirement for graduation in 2008.

The final decision to postpone that graduation requirement while changes in the test and in math instruction are made was not finalized until the Legislature was about to adjourn.

But even before that, newspapers were beginning to speculate that the math WASL would be killed. Indeed, the day students around the state were to begin taking the WASL, newspapers declared that the Legislature was about to dismantle the statewide test.

“It’s miraculous to me that scores didn’t go down,” Bergeson says.

There were also too many cooks in the kitchen, she says.

Besides recommended changes from the state superintendent’s office (OSPI), the governor’s office was weighing in with its own recommendations, the Washington Learns commission was making recommendations for revamping and reprioritizing funds for a seamless “cradle to career” education system, the Washington State Board of Education came out with its own reports and mandates on how to fix the perceived problems, and many legislators – including many not on the House and Senate education committees and lacking a full understanding of the history of education reform -- were preparing bills for legislative consideration.

There were 15 brand-new legislators, many of whom were elected with the support of the Washington Education Association (WEA) teachers union, which was taking an adversarial role on the WASL and some other OSPI reforms.

Bergeson says OSPI needs to work more closely with the WEA and to devote time to help educate newer legislators. After one of the legislators heard her explanation of the history of school reform, he said, “The WEA elected all of us, but they never told us that story.”

Federal decisions and mandates could not be overlooked, either. For example, the U.S. Department of Education continues to dictate which students are required to reach state standards – even if they are English language learners or special education students.

The feds recently eliminated some developmentally appropriate tests for such students, demanding the students achieve standards most educators consider beyond their reach. And the feds are penalizing schools, districts and states whose students cannot reach those standards in adequate numbers.

This is “one of the unexpected consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act,” Bergeson says. “And the U.S. Department of Education is getting more punitive and more invasive. They are threatening your whole program and taking money away. I’ve had all the fights I can handle at the federal level until we get a new administration.”

All these elements came together to form a “perfect storm” that made the recent legislative session very chaotic.

“It was the most complicated legislative session I’ve ever been through, and I’ve been through a lot of them,” says Bergeson. “We need to get some coherence out of this. There is a lot of money out there, but we need to know how to access it.”