Schools seek funding fix

Candidates gunning for the White House won’t stop saying it: “Washington is broken.”

But how about this, substituting Washington state for the nation’s capital: “Washington’s school funding system is broken.”

That’s what worried educators in Clark County and elsewhere say, with increasing alarm, fearing that there’s no short-term fix in sight.

Rather, dark clouds are swirling into what some call the “perfect storm” of school budget crises.

Trouble surfaced here in May, when Vancouver Public Schools sliced two dozen employee positions and trimmed its proud food service program in favor of cheaper fare. To shave more dollars, classrooms will be kept a degree cooler this autumn and winter.

In August, the Evergreen district lopped after-school and summer school programs; classrooms will get cleaned only three days a week.

In Camas, teacher aides, lunch and library workers, nurses and bus drivers threaten to strike over salary and seniority issues, as their district tries to rein in costs.

The money issues appear small when presented individually, and they usually don’t dominate the headlines. But examined overall, public schools’ financial plight resulted in the loss of 600 staff positions across the state last year, equivalent to a staff needed to run a 4,000-student district.

Part of the problem is that costs are mounting: Utilities used to account for 37 percent of the cost of operating a school building, said Jennifer Priddy, finance director for the state schools office. Now they make up half. And for every penny that diesel fuel rises, Priddy said, Washington shells out $100,000 more to pay for busing.

What’s brewing isn’t a hiccup from a sputtering economy, however.

The problem is three decades old, dating back to when the Legislature last updated how it pays for schools. As the years went on, programs and price tags piled on “like a house of cards,” said the Washington Association of School Business Officials in a briefing paper. In Southwest Washington, these were flaws largely papered over by a booming economy and robust enrollment growth through the early 2000s.

The state has convened the Basic Education Funding Task Force, which will recommend changes to the Legislature in December.

Meantime, a coalition of school districts that includes Vancouver Public Schools has filed suit against the state for not fully covering school costs; districts must rely on local tax dollars to make ends meet. All the marching on Olympia won’t change circumstances, they say, but a judge could force the Legislature to direct more money to schools. A trial is set for June 2009.

Compounding matters, state legislators last winter approved a sizable cost-of-living pay hike for teachers and classified workers who fall under Washington’s basic education state funding formula. Problem is, most districts employ additional teachers and aides not supported by state money, and are on the hook to provide identical raises to those employees at their own expense.

Doubly confusing is that teacher salaries, which make up 85 to 88 percent of district budgets, are determined locally, even though the state covers most of the costs.

Asked one task force presenter: “How can the Legislature be accountable for state spending when it has no say in local bargaining?”

And so this is how a district like Vancouver Public Schools, with strong community and business support, an active foundation and no failed levies, finds itself in fiscal turmoil.

“The reason we’re sliding back into another lawsuit … is simply history repeating itself,” said state Rep. Bill Fromhold, D-Vancouver, who will retire from the Legislature in December with three decades of school finance perspective.

“We’re not focusing on the foundation and the substance of the basic K-12 funding program,” Fromhold said. Instead, legislators have been distracted by the WASL and myriad other issues, he said. “We’ve taken our eye off that ball, and these other things have happened. What you end up with is a funding crisis. It’s only going to get worse,” he added.

Mary Lindquist, Washington Education Association president, agrees: “In the 1990s, we just weren’t paying attention to (school funding). We dropped from being one of the best-funded education systems over a period of about 10 years,” she said.

Lindquist blames revenue-limiting Initiative 601, passed in 1993, as the trigger for when “education got squeezed out.”

Priddy offered another explanation: “In the early 1990s, we radically changed the expectations we had for staff and students. We didn’t know at the time what it would take to get students to state standards. It takes a much larger investment in the staff than we realized.”

Indeed, schools may be at a critical tipping point, just as they were a generation ago, in 1975. That’s when a big Seattle school levy failure launched a lawsuit that produced a defining legal ruling known as the Doran decision. The ruling reiterated that basic school education is “the paramount duty” of the state government.

But asked whether Washington could mimic Oregon’s situation in 2003, when some 100 school districts cut calendar days, Priddy got quiet.

“We’re facing pretty tough times financially in our school system,” she said. “Because the law requires 180 days, that’s not an option the way it was in Oregon, but that isn’t to say that very extreme options won’t be on the table.”

Howard Buck: 360-735-4515 or howard.buck@columbian.com; Isolde Raftery: 360-735-4546 or isolde.raftery@columbian.com.