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Friday, March 22, 2013
Kitsap legislators inform locals about current session By WES MORROW wmorrow@soundpublishing.com
All three legislators from Washington’s 23rd Legislative District returned home from Olympia Saturday to discuss the status of the legislative session with constituents. Sen. Christine Rolfes, Rep. Sherri Appleton and Rep. Drew Hansen hosted town hall meetings at the Kitsap Fairgrounds and Poulsbo City Hall on Saturday. The legislators took questions from residents and discussed issues under consideration in both the state Senate and House of Representatives. Topics ranged from background checks for gun purchases to K-12 education funding. Sen. Rolfes’ staff said there were about 80 to 85 people in attendance for the Silverdale town hall and even more later in the day in Poulsbo. Kitsap County Sheriff Steve Boyer attended, as did Bremerton City Councilwoman Leslie Dougs. “This was the most we’ve ever had on a Saturday morning in Silverdale,” Rolfes said. Rolfes said the issue of school
funding was especially strong among those who attended the Silverdale event. The state legislature has not yet discussed school funding to the extent that Rolfes’ said she would like. The legislature was ordered last January by the state supreme court to increase funding to schools. The decision, in McCleary v. Washington, stated the legislature was not meeting its constitutional requirement to “amply fund” schools as its “paramount” duty. “Schools will come out no worse, and hopefully better because of McCleary,” Rolfes said. Janet Kragen, a teacher in North Kitsap School District, attended the morning town hall at the fairgrounds. She said she was primarily interested to hear the legislators’ comments on education. “The big elephant in the room is we don’t have any money,” Kragen said. Because schools aren’t being amply funded, Kragen said, they’ve had to make sacrifices like increasing class sizes. “It seems … that they’ve (the state legislature) been avoiding
Wes Morrow/Staff Photo
Rep. Drew Hansen addresses a question about background checks for gun owners during a public Town Hall meeting last week in Silverdale. the money issue and trying to figure out other things to do,” Kragen said. She got some of the answers she was looking for on Saturday. Sen. Rolfes, the assistant ranking democrat on the Senate’s education committee shared a similar sentiment to that of Kragen. Rolfes said some members of the legislature want to reform schools or mandate new pro-
grams but are unwilling to increase the inadequate funding. She introduced a bill on McCleary to provoke discussion, Rolfes said. However, it never received a hearing in the Republican-controlled Senate. “I was pleased that (Rolfes, Hansen and Appleton) are very clear about McCleary,” Kragen said. “They don’t need to re-evaluate schools or change schools or reform schools —
they just need to get more money to schools.” Rep. Hansen talked to the crowd about his feelings toward background checks for guns, comparing the problem of gun violence to that of car accidents. Hansen said that, just as the state doesn’t use one solution to solve all car crashes, it shouldn’t try to find one solution to every kind of gun violence. Kragen praised Hansen for the clarity of his remarks and his multi-faceted attitude toward gun-control. Washington’s 23rd district covers all the area on the Kitsap Peninsula from Hansville to Silverdale and East Bremerton. Bainbridge Island also lies within the 23rd district’s boundaries. West Bremerton, however, is split between the 26th and 35th districts. Also on Saturday, Sen. Nathan Schilcher and Rep. Larry Seaquist hosted meetings in west Bremerton, Port Orchard and Gig Harbor. The 26th district covers the southeastern majority of west Bremerton and Port Orchard down highway 16 to Gig Harbor and Longbranch.
CK District set to lose even more impact aid By WES MORROW
wmorrow@soundpublishing.com
Central Kitsap School District lost more than $8
million annually in impact aid for school years 2010 to 2014. Now, as the effects of national sequestration are set to hit federally-funded
programs, the district stands to lose a substantial chunk of what remains. The U.S. Department of Education, which adminis-
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ters impact aid to school districts throughout the nation, is set to reduce funding by 5 percent due to acrossthe-board cuts. For Central Kitsap those cuts will equal a loss of more than $200,000 this year and even more next year. Superintendent Greg Lynch said that the effect of the cuts won’t hurt the district as much as they could. According to Lynch, the administration and school board thought cuts might be coming so they preemptively scaled back the budget for this school year. “We wound up cutting somewhere around a half-amillion dollars,” Lynch said, going on to mention cuts the district has had to make in recent budgets. “We’re getting pretty good at that cause we’ve done it the last four or five years.” A number of programs were impacted by the preemptive cut, according to Lynch. Class sizes were increased, interventions for at-risk students were impacted, summer school programs were reduced and a number of vacated staff positions were not filled. Impact aid funding was already volatile, as the amount districts received
fluctuates from year to year depending on the number of districts that apply for funding and how many students qualify. Despite planning ahead for the losses this school year, if Congress doesn’t change across-the-board cuts the district could lose the same amount of impact aid next year, as well as another $225,000 in Title I, special education funds and other federally funded programs. Central Kitsap is in the process of creating its budget for the upcoming school year. Lynch said since the majority of funding comes from the state, the district usually waits to set its own budget until after legislators in Olympia have set the state budget. In the face of these drastic cuts in federal funding, Lynch said he isn’t worried the district will have to make the same sacrifices in the upcoming budget cycle. “I’m assuming that we’re going to be in the positive in terms of cash from the state for the first time in a long time,” Lynch said. “I actually anticipate being in the black for next year, based on what we’re hearing out of Olympia.”
Lynch said the talk coming out of Olympia indicates a positive upswing for schools in Washington state due in part to the State Supreme Court putting pressure on the legislature. That upswing would come at a time when schools in the area have been trimming their budgets year after year. According to Lynch, Central Kitsap’s budget has been reduced systematically over the last few years. “It’s amazing to me we’ve done as well as we have considering the amount of dollars we’ve cut out of our budget the last four or five years,” Lynch said. In spite of his optimism, Lynch said they haven’t been able to save everything from the chopping block after losing heavy impact aid. The district has more than $120 million in back-logged maintenance and repairs, according to Lynch. “If you can’t do preventative maintenance, you ride it until it breaks and when you break it it’s probably going to cost you a whole lot more than it would have if you’d maintained it,” Lynch said. “You can go a relatively short amount of time … but the longer you go the more expensive it’s going to get.”