OLYMPIA — The state of Washington says it is making progress complying with a court order to change the way it pays for K-12 schools and is urging the Supreme Court to cease daily fines of $100,000 after it found the state in contempt.
In a brief filed Friday afternoon in connection with the court’s ruling in 2012 that lawmakers weren’t meeting their constitutional responsibility to fully fund basic education, Attorney General Bob Ferguson said the “Legislature has not sat on its hands” and the justices should dissolve their contempt order.
The Supreme Court gave the Legislature until the 2017-18 school year to fix the problem, and ultimately found the Legislature in contempt in 2014 before sanctioning them last year.
Since the 2012 ruling, known as the McCleary decision, lawmakers have spent more than $2 billion to address issues raised in the lawsuit. But lawmakers and other officials have estimated the Legislature needs to add about $3.5 billion to the state’s two-year budget to comply with the court’s order, including ending dependence on local tax levies to pay for the state’s responsibility for basic education.
In his brief Friday, Ferguson said lawmakers should no longer be held in contempt because they have submitted a plan identifying the final steps needed to comply with the court order by 2018 and pledged to reform education funding to offer competitive teacher pay and eliminate dependence on local levies.
He said that justices found the state in contempt in 2014 to coerce the state into saying how it will meet its education funding obligations, not to make sure that all the work is done before 2018.
“Although the remaining steps are big, the Legislature has been progressing along a path toward compliance,” Ferguson wrote.
The state has assessed $100,000-a-day sanctions since last August that are supposed to be set aside in an education fund, something that lawmakers have not yet done, though there’s enough in state reserves to cover the amount.
In their own court brief filed late Friday, lawyers for those suing the state over education funding said lawmakers adjourned this year without detailing how they would increase K-12 funding and instead delayed meaningful action until after the November elections. The plaintiffs urged the justices to maintain pressure on the Legislature.
“If Washington children’s paramount and positive constitutional right to an amply funded education is a right rather than a platitude, and if Supreme Court Orders are orders rather than suggestions, this Court must now issue a strong and firm enforcement order that leaves the State’s 2017 regular session no reasonable choice other than to fully comply without any more excuses, gimmicks, or delays,” the plaintiffs’ brief said.
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