OLYMPIA — Republicans in the state Senate said Wednesday they want most teacher salary negotiations to be statewide, with fewer local dollars going to pay educators.
Such a change in state policy, along with transforming most local levies into a statewide school tax, is essential to meeting the requirements of a 2012 state Supreme Court decision, GOP leaders said at a news conference. The high court ruled that the way Washington pays for public education is unconstitutional, and more state money must be spent on schools.
The Republican proposal was one of several ideas being tossed around Olympia this week about how to fix the way the state pays for public schools.
Most lawmakers involved in negotiations over the state education budget and the so-called McCleary court decision seem to agree on the following:
The state needs to pay for all-day kindergarten across Washington.
Student-teacher ratios of 17-to-1 are needed in kindergarten through third grade.
It is a state responsibility to pay for the full cost of basic education.
Something has to be done about the state’s overreliance on local levies to pay for basic education, including teacher salaries.
They have yet to agree on how fast changes should be done, how much the moves will cost, where the money will come from and what state policies must be changed to make it happen.
On Tuesday, Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn said lawmakers should add $2.2 billion to the state education budget to pay down most of its McCleary obligations during the next two-year budget cycle.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats unveiled three bills that would create a six-year spending plan to address the McCleary mandates. They also endorsed a new capital-gains tax on high earners and proposed overhauling the way local property taxes are used to cover education costs.
“What we’re trying to do is thread the needle between what actually needs to be done and what is politically feasible,” said Sen. Kevin Ranker, D-Orcas Island.
The Senate Republicans chimed in with their plan, which would prohibit local districts from bargaining over basic education salaries in the future and would move some local levy dollars into a state tax to pay those salaries.
“We want it to be fair, we want it to be equitable and we want it to work over time,” said Sen. Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup.
The state teachers union called the Republicans’ proposal an attack on local decision-making and on school employees.
“It appears to be more about the state grabbing more control over how local school districts run,” said Rich Wood, spokesman for the Washington Education Association.
House Democrats also proposed a bill Wednesday that details some of their plans for answering the 2012 McCleary decision. Their proposal outlines the decisions that need to be made concerning statewide teacher pay and local levies and sets a timeline for making those decisions but doesn’t mandate any approaches.
Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said Democratic and Republican leaders in the Legislature are moving on a similar path, but neither side has the buy-in needed yet.
The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn on April 26.
The coalition of teachers, parents, school districts and community groups that sued the state over education funding in the McCleary case gave a letter to lawmakers on Wednesday, saying the Senate and House budgets both fall short of the state Supreme Court’s demands.
“In the hope of cutting through rhetoric, partisan spin and mistaken interpretations of the Supreme Court’s McCleary rulings, we want to remind you of the state’s own testimony underlying those rulings,” the Network for Excellence in Washington Schools wrote in the letter.
The Supreme Court says it will hold the state in contempt if the Legislature can’t come up with a plan this year that shows it is going to fulfill the McCleary requirements before the 2017-18 school year.
AP writers Derrick Nunnally and Rachel La Corte contributed to this story from Olympia.
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