Seattle Schools Community Forum

Next Tuesday, Feb. 9th, Seattle voters will decide on the Seattle Schools' Operations levy and the BTA levy.  Both are renewals but at higher amounts than were voted on last time. Most of you know this is a sticky wicket for me.  I've frequently spoken out frequently against capital levies but not because they aren't needed, but because I don't think this district spends the money in either levy in a transparent manner.  I'm also not sure of their priorities for spending and, given how much parent unhappiness there is out there on many issues, failing a capital levy might be a good way to get the district's attention. Let's be clear on a few things.

Two good political reads today. First, from Publicola , the explanation of how we don't have enough money for McCleary but boy, do our legislators have enough money to continue tax breaks.  It's just ridiculous and wrong.  From their story(bold mine): Following up on a legislative session in which lawmakers fell $420 million short on funding specific line items to meet the Washington State Supreme Court's McCleary mandate to fund basic K-12 education, the Joint Legislative Audit Review Committee (JLARC), a bipartisan task force of legislators that evaluates the worthiness of tax breaks, signed off on more than $500 million in expenses that are vague and unclear. Why spend the full court-mandated $141.6 million on school buses, $597.1 million on materials, supplies, and operating costs, and $219.2 million on reduced class sizes, I guess, when you can give money away for ambiguous policy goals? (The most recent budget spends about $1 billion on K-12 rath...

Thanks to Goldy over at The Stranger Slog for the alert to the three-part series at the NY Times about the $80B a year in subsidies states give to businesses.  From his piece : The Times has also included a handy little interactive database that allows you to explore these incentive programs state by state. For example, Washington State taxpayers spend $2.35 billion a year on incentive programs . That's roughly 15 cents per state budget dollar, or $349 for every man, woman, and child in the state. Imagine how different our education funding debate might look if our state had an extra $2.35 billion a year to spend on schools? As Hallmark CEO Donald J. Hall Jr., put it it about the budget-depleting subsidy border war between Kansas and Missouri: “If you’re looking at the competitiveness of a region, the most important thing a region can do is to focus on education. And this use of incentives is really transferring money from education to businesses .” (bold his) ...

I have been desperate to get a thread on this issue because both McKenna and Inslee have been talking about it (along with Rep Carlyle and Rep Hunter) but pulling it altogether was going to be a task.  Enter Goldy with a good article (and a chart!).  It pretty much completes what I thought - Seattle and other "wealthier" districts would get less.  My understanding of the property tax swap is that it would phase out levy equalization and yet, wealthier districts would STILL be subsidizing poorer ones.  I am all for equity but when every single district in this state is cash-strapped, it seems unfair. Read on and tell me your thoughts.  The Property Tax Swap (or "State & Local Property Tax Shift" as it is more technically known) is also the only one of four levy reform options to be dismissed as "Not Recommended" in the final 2011 report of the state's Levy and Local Effort Assistance Technical Working Group . The idea is simple, though...