My oldest grandson wrestles for Sumner High School. It costs me $3 to watch a meet as a senior citizen. His parents pay a much higher cost. Each week of the wrestling season I got emails from the Sumner Wrestling Team requesting donations to pay their costs.
What’s going on? Why are Washington schools so strapped for cash? What happened to all the money from the McCleary decision?
Back in 2012 King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick ruled that the State was failing to adequately provide for basic education, saying “State funding is not ample, it is not stable, and it is not dependable.” (Wikipedia.org)
To get the government to comply, the State Supreme Court placed a fine of $100,000 per day (which was to go into a fund to fully fund schools) upon the state on August 13, 2015. This was called the McCleary decision after the family that brought the original suit. The court called on Governor Jay Inslee to convene a special session of the state legislature. The judicial contempt charge oversight supposedly ended on June 7, 2018.
But on April 11, 2019 Spokane Public Schools announced major staffing reductions, which the district and the court tied to the McCleary decision. State funding had increased but it also reduced levies from local funding.
Because of the McCleary decision, the court ruled that teacher salaries, along with class sizes were the major components of adequate funding. Average teacher salaries rose as a result, making Washington State teachers the fifth highest of any state in 2023.
Problem solved, right? Wrong.
There are a number of answers to this puzzling question, some of which are based on statistics from the Washington State Standard July 24, 2024, and some come from my own observations as someone who taught for 31 years at SHS:
No. 1) In 2013, the average expenditure was $9,600 per student. In the 2023-2024 school year “the Legislature has steadily increased funding for schools. Then came federal pandemic relief funds.” By July 2024, average expenditures per student were over $18,000, while average teacher pay was now $86,604, the 4th highest in the nation. 20,000 new education employees were hired, a 20% increase over the decade.
No. 2) School enrollment dropped by 7% in the 2023-24 school year. Federal pandemic funding ended in September 2024. Since schools are paid according to enrollment numbers, fewer students mean less money. Less money means shrinking programs, reducing staffing, and closing schools. All this means school districts have to dip into their rainy-day funds. Once those funds are depleted, school districts have to borrow money to pay their bills, creating a downward spiral of debt.
No. 3) My personal observations: The family unit is fragmenting and has been for at least the last fifty years. That means that family problems have been shifted to the schools to bear. More psychologists have been hired, more paraeducators are needed for more special needs students.
Meanwhile, due to the polarized nation with its conflicts over sexual identity and harassment, racism, bullying, anti-vaxing, and school shootings, many parents have opted to homeschool their children or send them to private schools. Or not send them to school at all, leaving their children to fend for themselves. All these issues have increased costs which public schools are not able to adequately cope with. Nor were they designed to.
No. 4) The current political climate has weakened trust in all institutions, not just education, but also the news media, and the government. Recent attempts to pass school construction levies in Enumclaw have failed by 75% and 65% margins respectively. Those high numbers indicate a deep level of distrust and financial fear.
No. 5) Inflation on food, rents, and housing, have put a bind on spending, making many families resistant to school levies and funding. Part of this factor is the increasing power of the 1% and billionaires who lower taxes for themselves through purchasing elected officials to do their bidding.
While I don’t believe that “trickle-down” economics really works, I do believe that national divisions and distrust and strife do trickle down, even to small towns and cities in far-off Washington State.
Our school problems are the result of bad decisions and motivations from a whole host of special interest groups and “acts of God” that we have no control over.
The first step in solving any problem is to figure out what is actually going on.
It will be a long, hard road to untangle the messes we are currently in. We’ve been in bad situations before. Eventually we will work our way out of them, but it’s going to get very messy and expensive in the meantime, even for grandparents.
