Seattle Schools Community Forum

Yesterday, Rep Reuven Carlyle had an opinion piece at Publicola .  He says that Sound Transit and public education funding cannot be done at the same time.  In 2015, he says he supported the financing for the light rail system.  (partial) And yet, as I review the updated financing plan in more depth, I continue to grapple on a deeply personal level with the genuine burden the Sound Transit proposal places on public education . It is unsettling at best to serve as a state legislator while Olympia is under a contempt order by the Supreme Court for failing to meet the state’s paramount duty of fully funding public education. This is historic and unprecedented and we are recreating our educational finance plan for the next generation in real time. After putting an additional $2.5 billion into K-12 funding over the last three legislative sessions since the McCleary ruling, Democrats and Republicans are struggling to find a final path forward for the last $3.5 billi...

Update:  State Superintendent Dorn's filing . Interview with Summer Stinson of Washington's Paramount Duty, Rep. Reuven Carlyle and Superintendent Dorn on Q13 yesterday. Dorn is pushing for all kind of answers including, yes, closing down schools in 2017.  (That would give the legislature a whole year - a year - to get this done which, by their own requirements, they should have it all done before school year 2017-2018.)

Following up on Charlie's post about Crosscut's article on how business says it cares about public education, here's more input from The Stranger Slog.  David Goldstein has been laying out the case against the levy swap for our school districts and the supplied graphic says it all. King County, with roughly 29 percent of the state population, produced 42 percent of state tax revenues, yet it received back less than 26 percent of state benefits. That's a return of only 62 cents on the dollar for our state's Democratic stronghold. Compare that to the generous $3.16 return on each dollar enjoyed by taxpayers in hard Republican Ferry County in deep northeastern Washington. All in all, only six counties qualified as "net donors" to the rest of the state—San Juan, King, Skagit, Kittitas, Whatcom, and Snohomish—while the remaining 33 counties enjoyed an average return on investment of over $1.40 on every tax dollar sent to Olympia. If King County...