Assuring School Funding Top Duty

It was enough to make a teenager blush. It was enough to make a legislator turn white as a sheet. It was a resounding display of community spirit. It was an indictment of the Legislature’s failure to fulfill its “paramount duty” under the state constitution: funding public schools.

It was the final Saturday-night performance of Ferris High School’s well-known fund-raiser, Ham on Regal. Middle-aged moms and dads pranced and sang in fairy-tale costumes while a capacity crowd roared its approval. It’s a tremendous effort. Hundreds of parents invest huge amounts of volunteer time - all to raise roughly $40,000 in donations. The money is used to buy computers, textbooks and other needs that taxes don’t cover adequately.

This kind of thing occurs in schools all over the state. Carnivals. Auctions. Dinners. Bake sales. Car washes. With fund-raisers large and small, parents pour heart and soul into better education.

The results are peanuts, though, in comparison with a battle under way in the state Capitol, where the costumes are duller but the stakes are measured in millions of dollars.

Most of the cost of kindergarten through grade 12 schooling comes from state taxes, now being divvied up by the Legislature. But over the last 20 years, the Legislature has shifted more and more of the cost to local voter-approved property tax levies.

This year, disaster looms. Unless the Legislature acts, its most recent increase in the lid on local levies will expire. Unfortunately, legislators are not proposing to shoulder again their old share of school operating costs. At best, they might make permanent the current higher levy lid.

And that is what they must do. If they refuse, the impact will be severe. Spokane School District 81, for example, would have to chop $6 million from its budget. That’s a lot of teachers. Mead would have to chop $1.4 million; Central Valley, $750,000.

By wide margins, voters in many districts have agreed to pay the current property tax levels. Having failed to do its own duty in funding schools, how can the Legislature justify a rollback in the power of local taxpayers to support their schools?

House Bill 2069 would preserve the local levy authority. It also would provide needed funds to lighten the load on districts with a weak property tax base. But the bill faces opposition in the Senate.

Perhaps those Ferris parents and their counterparts at other schools need to suit up one more time and invade Olympia. What politician could refuse a corps of hairy-legged dads dressed as dancing pink swans?

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board