On April 19, Washington’s Paramount Duty President, Eden Mack, took part in Seattle Speaks: Making The Grade, a town hall debate that was broadcast live on The Seattle Channel.
Topics included class size, the need for more buildings, equity and the achievement gap, high school graduation rates, and the problems with insufficient funding from the Washington legislature.
Seattle School Board President Betty Patu said, “Money is very important in terms of us pushing education as far as we can. And when we looked at all the various areas in our school district, there are so many mandated from the state that it doesn’t seem to match up with the funding we receive. And when we talk about equity and how do we actually provide the best education we can for our students, it’s really hard to actually provide that education for our kids when we don’t have enough to be able to give them the excellent education that we want.”
Washington ranks 39th in the nation in terms of school funding. Moreover, over the last 12 years, the achievement gap between middle and low-income students has grown more in Washington than in any other state in the US. While the legislature has invested funds in basic education over the last few years, this has merely restored funding to 2009 levels, before cuts were enacted, and the town hall meeting included discussion about what a fully funded education looks like.
Representative Sharon Tomiko Santos (37th District) shared her thoughts:
“My vision is one where we’ve created an excellent and equitable education system that delivers deep and personalized learning for each and every student in the state….If we can focus on what’s best and what each child in our state needs, then we will actually be happy to pay for whatever it is that will deliver that kind of educational system, not just for us, for our society, but really for the economic needs of our state as well.”
But the chronic underfunding highlighted in the McCleary case continues, and continues to affect school districts across Washington. As Eden Mack explained, “We can’t bake sale our way out of this….You can’t drive the car if you don’t put the gas in it.…Looking at what districts pay for isn’t the actual question. The question is: how much does basic education actually cost and how much money do we need to find to pay for it?”
The full video is available here.