underachieving students; bilingual children; and allocations for parent involvement coordinators and middle school and high school guidance counselors. They also restored some recessionera salary cuts for teachers and administrators.
“Taking money out of teachers’ pockets on one side and handing it back on the other isn’t improvement.” “I feel very good that we could get together and provide almost a billion dollars,” says Rep. Susan Fagan, R-Pullman, one of the members of the bipartisan committee charged with approving the report. “I think we went well beyond it with all this other additional funding.” But Ahearne notes that these education “enhancements” came at several costs, especially to public school employees: Lawmakers saved almost $300 million by once again suspending voterapproved cost-of-living raises for teachers. “Taking money out of teachers’ pockets on one side and handing it back on the other isn’t improvement,” he says. Ahearne also calls the state’s claim that it’s increasing full-day kindergarten “disingenuous” and disagrees that the state has made significant improvements toward funding school transportation. “There are several full-day kindergartens that are not accepting state money because Send comments to they don’t have enough classrooms to put editor@inlander.com. them in,” he says. “With regard to pupil transportation … what they now claim is full funding is less than half of what their court testimony said full funding would require.” He adds that because new funding in reducing class sizes only applies to children in kindergarten and first grade in high poverty schools, “second graders and third graders are being written off.” “The last time, for the 2013 budget, the court said, ‘Look, state, you fell short,’” he says. “We’ll see if the Supreme Court thinks they did better job this time.” Rich Wood, a spokesman for the Washington Education Association, agrees. He says it’s clear the state still has a long way to go, particularly in increasing teacher compensation and reducing class sizes. “While it was good that the Legislature finally increased funding for K-12 schools instead of cutting it more,” he says, “this K-12 budget fell far short of proving what our kids need.” n deannap@inlander.com
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SEPTEMBER 5, 2013 INLANDER 19