On September 16, 2024, State Superintendent Chris Reykdal published an Education Funding budget proposal stating that “Washington currently underfunds K–12 education by around $4 billion per year.” He then requested an additional $2 billion per year to reduce this school funding gap. So while claiming our schools are under funded by $4 billion, he is asking for $2 billion – with the other $2 billion apparently to come later after he is re-elected. To get this additional $2 to $4 billion per year, Reykdal wants to impose a State Income tax – a plan which is doomed to fail because it has been voted down many times in the past (and is likely against our state constitution).

Since the Reykdal proposal, there have been more than a dozen articles published by experts all over the state about how we can fix our school funding problem. Some claimed we need to remove the levy lid so that voters in wealthy school districts can fund their local schools. This claim ignores Article 9, Section 2 of our State Constitution which requires a “uniform” system of public schools. Our state is therefore not allowed to have wealthy school districts that can pass levies and poor school districts that can not pass levies. Other experts claim we should just cut $4 billion in funding for other state services to pay for schools. This would raise school spending up to 50% of the total budget. While there is serious bloat in our state government, it is unlikely that $4 billion in cuts can or will be found. In fact, it is unlikely that even $1 billion in cuts can or will be found.

On September 26, 2024, Seattle City Club hosted a debate between Chris Reykdal and his challenger David Olson. Both candidates were repeatedly asking during the debate what they will do to fix the school funding problem if the legislature fails to comply with their Constitutionally duty to fully fund our schools. Reykdal claimed that he was confident the legislature would provide the needed revenue. David Olson said he would ask our Supreme Court to intercede. Unfortunately, we already tried going to our Supreme Court from 2007 to 2018. All we got was the current McCleary school funding mess which jacked up taxes in King and Snohomish Counties by 60% in past 6 years without any real increase in school funding. Teachers are still being fired. Class sizes continue to go up. Schools are being closed and the Student Absentee rate has skyrocketed from 15% to 30%.

Student Achievement is at an all time low and the Opportunity Gap is at an All Time high. Here is a chart of Washington School Funding since 1996 with the McCleary case in the red box from 2007 to 2018:

Source: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/school-finances/data/tables.html

You can see that Washington state school funding has been 10% or more below the national average since 2000 with the exception of 2020. Near the right side of the above table (2020), it appears that Washington state school funding came close to national average. This was a one year outlier due to the fact that the McCleary Fix Levy Swipe had a double taxation year in 2018 in which both the new State Levy and the old Local Levy rates applied. We are currently back down to 3.2% of State Income which is where we were in 2011 – with the only difference being that homeowners are now paying much higher property taxes.

We cannot solve the school funding problem by re-electing the same people who caused the school funding problem in the first place. It is time to finally look at and fix the underlying problems that caused this mess 24 years ago and advocate for real solutions that permanently fix these underlying problems. That is the goal of this report.

In May 2024, the Seattle School District announced that they were facing a $100 million dollar budget shortfall – which will grow to a $150 million dollar budget shortfall in the next couple of years.

To partially address this problem, they have proposed closing 20 elementary schools. As each elementary school has about 300 students, the plan to close 20 elementary schools will harm about 6,000 children.

The estimated savings for closing each elementary school is about one million dollars. It should be obvious that closing all of these schools will only address $20 million out of a soon to be $150 million budget shortfall. What is really going to happen is that eventually dozens of teachers will be fired and class sizes are going to go up – meaning that struggling students are less likely to get the help they need.

This is going to be difficult for parents to accept given that in the past 6 years they have seen their property taxes skyrocket by more than 60% - and just a few years ago, they were told that the “McCleary Fix” meant that there would be “ample funding” for our public schools. Clearly we have all been misled.

But it is our children who will be most harmed by closing local elementary schools. This is because the ability of children to learn is not only related to secure and stable family relationships – but also to secure and stable community relationships. The reason for small local elementary schools is to have schools very close to where children live.