Lawmakers give raises for teachers, those that remain

Sometimes, more is less.

While public school district officials in Shoreline, Edmonds and Everett were already planning to make cuts in coming years due mainly to declining enrollment, the state Legislature has added to their woes.

Wanting to play the good guys, lawmakers this year passed a budget that begins to restore cost-of-living increases voters approved eight years ago, but were frozen by many of those same lawmakers.

That’s good news, isn’t it? Teachers are important, the voters knew that and voted to keep them happy with their paychecks, lawmakers torpedoed the voters’ wishes, but have now seen the light.

Well, good news for teachers turns out to be bad news for their employers, the school districts.

When lawmakers get magnanimous like this, sometimes they don’t actually have the cash to cover their largesse, kind of like paying the bill at a very expensive dinner, but then asking your date to get the tip. Such is the case with pieces of the increases for the teachers. When it happens at dinner, it’s called bad planning. When it happens in Olympia, it’s called unfunded mandate. Either way, someone else is on the hook to pay.

For example, officials in the Edmonds School District knew they had some hard work ahead of them, about a $2.6 million gap between revenue and expenses for the coming school year. It isn’t that covering such a discrepancy is easy, just that the forces at play such as declining enrollment, retirements and negotiated union contracts all have trend lines and can be anticipated to a degree.

However, the size of the Legislature-approved pay raises and other adjustments came as a surprise. For Edmonds school officials, the lawmakers’ throw from left field bumps their challenge from $2.6 million to $4.1 million.

To get a sense of scale, the district had a $4.5 million problem this past year which resulted in 22 full-time teaching jobs being eliminated along with other belt-tightening.

Without too many notches left on that belt, officials are now contemplating the depth of the coming cuts.

Edmonds’ isn’t unique; the numbers may be different for Shoreline and Everett school officials, but the story is same.

So, while it is true that Olympia took care of the teachers this session, it also appears to be true they’ll be taking care of fewer of them.