From the Methow Valley to Seattle and everywhere in between, school districts will be going directly to voters on February 9 to ask them to say “yes” to higher taxes so that schools can keep paying for teachers' salaries, supplies and so that new buildings can be constructed to ease overcrowding.
Kelly McDonald lives in Phoenix, Arizona but grew up in Auburn. He’s been working on that district’s proposed four year levy which totals $176 million. It’s a replacement levy that makes up 21 percent of the district’s budget. According to McDonald, Auburn’s special education programs rely heavily on this money.
“What it means for Auburn is there is about 100 district teachers, personnel, para-educators, nurses, speech pathologists, audiologists, occupational therapists. Those folks who work in those programs, those roughly 100 FTE [full time equivalent] positions would have to be eliminated if the levy were to fail,” said McDonald.
There are a few arguments being made to not support school levies. The most common one is that the McCleary decision will transform how education is funded by taxpayers and voters should hold off on passing levies, or risk being billed twice.
“It’s definitely an argument that we hear,” said Greg Wong.
Wong has three children in Seattle in Seattle Public Schools. He’s been working on the campaign for the two levies on the ballot for the Seattle School District that total more than a billion dollars.
“So we’ve had this mandate to the legislature for the past few levy cycles and they have yet to do so. One thing we want to make sure we don’t do is we don’t want to punish the kids in our schools today for the problems adults have in the legislature in finding solutions,” said Wong.
Washington lawmakers still haven’t come up with a way to properly pay for basic education. Until that happens, school districts will continue to rely heavily on passing levies to pay for basic needs. Wong is frustrated by the inaction on this issue in Olympia.
“And to me, public schools are really the backbone of our democracy and our city. So if we don’t make this really basic investment in our schools, then I just don’t think we can get to the next steps of talking about how we want to form our children and how they'll grow and what the policy choices are that we should make in education,” lamented Wong.
Governor Jay Inslee says lawmakers have to come up with a sustainable way to fund education by the end of the 2017 legislative session.
