Commentary: School funding lawsuit over but not its headaches

By Bill Keim

For The Herald

With the state Supreme Court’s June 7 order, the McCleary school funding case has officially ended. School districts across the state are now trying to make sense of the changes created by the McCleary legislation.

These laws create three major changes in how school districts are funded. Within each of these new formulas, some school districts are relative winners and others lose. Those differences will present unique challenges for each district as they negotiate the impacts of this legislation with their local bargaining units this summer and fall.

One of the biggest changes eliminated a decades-old system in which teacher salary allocations were linked to the average experience and training level of each district’s teaching force. That “staff mix” system was replaced with a statewide average allocation that is the same for each district regardless of their teacher costs. For 53 districts, this change creates a funding windfall, while the remaining 242 receive less than they would if the previous formula had been retained. A small adjustment was made during the 2018 legislative session, but it won’t take effect until the 2019-20 school year and it only funds a fraction of what the original formula would have provided.

The second significant change is the creation of a new regionalization formula that attempts to recognize cost-of-living differences among school districts. A total of 99 districts receive this bonus with rates ranging from an additional 6 percent to 24 percent. This formula also underwent some changes in the 2018 session, but that modification only improved funding for six school districts.

The third change is a dramatic reduction in the funding that can be raised through local levies and levy equalization. The full impact of this reduction takes effect during the 2019 tax year and it represents a total loss of over $1 billion for school districts in the 2019-20 school year. As with the other two changes, this one has a variable impact with some districts losing thousands of dollars per student and others losing little or nothing in local funds.

In addition to these three major funding changes, the Legislature also eliminated the state teacher salary schedule. As a result, each school district will need to negotiate its own salary schedule when those contracts reopen, and they’ll need to do that without any experience predicting the impact of all the new funding changes.

Within that context, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Lake Washington was the first school district to settle its teachers’ contract because they were a relative winner with all three funding changes. According to our calculations, when compared with the teacher salary funding they would have received under the old system with a 1.91 percent COLA added, Lake Washington’s new allocation is $23,285 more per teacher, the second highest increase in the state. And unlike most other districts, their levy capacity isn’t dropping much in 2019. Given those facts, the district leadership negotiated a substantial increase which represents 8.3 percent for beginning teachers and 15.2 percent at the top end.

Make no mistake: Lake Washington’s teachers certainly deserve a healthy salary increase after so many years without state-funded COLAs. Unfortunately, their good fortune will likely create problems for other school districts, many of whom were relatively losers with all three of these funding changes. If Washington Education Association Vice President Stephen Miller’s June 6 tweet is any indication, they feel all districts should be able to match or exceed the Lake Washington agreement: “now that the Lake Washington EA and SD have reached a TA on a 15% pay increase, who is going to top that? Hey districts, there isn’t a cap! If your district refuses to bargain, they are stealing $ the legislature intended for educator salary.”

That perspective does not bode well for the contract negotiations that will play out in the majority of school districts who don’t have the resources Lake Washington could bring to the table. So if negotiating new salaries doesn’t go well in your community, keep in mind that it may well be that the school district doesn’t have the resources that are being demanded at the bargaining table.

Bill Keim is the executive director of the Washington Association of School Administrators.