Back in Olympia, Fighting for Schools

Over the weekend, the House and Senate released their proposed operating budgets. Both include substantial cuts to K-12 education.

No one is blind to the state’s budget challenges. It’s been a multiyear streak of overly optimistic revenue projections, lots of new spending, and never getting a handle on some of the key cost drivers that stack every year.

But these proposed education cuts are exactly what I’m talking about when I say Olympia does policy with a myopia that obscures the view beyond the Puget Sound.

The cuts go after Transition to Kindergarten — again — a proven program for closing opportunity gaps, but not one you will find in places like Seattle, Bellevue, Mercer Island or Lake Washington.

They also move forward with the governor’s proposed cuts to Local Effort Assistance, which I wrote about previously and is such a big deal to school districts in places like the 16th LD. Most districts out here just don’t have local property values to support higher levels of levy collection.

The House budget even includes a provision that would punish districts that used grants to help replace diesel buses with electric buses by taking away the funding districts will need to replace them when they reach the end of their useful life. This terrible idea died last year, after districts made clear the impacts, but somehow reemerged this past weekend.

I testified in the House and the Senate last night on both budgets. Watch below for more.