Education funding stiffs support staffing

As hundreds of school employees meet in Spokane this week for an annual convention, school districts in the Inland Northwest and across the state find themselves in an absurd predicament: Despite more money from the state, school districts are being forced to cut educational support staff.

Here’s the problem. While the state provides school districts virtually all the money they need to hire teachers, it funds less than half the cost of such critical educational support programs as transportation, custodians, secretaries and instructional assistants. Local school districts are forced to rely on levies to fund the balance. Increased costs, including fuel costs, and, ironically, higher labor costs due to the recent cost-of-living adjustment for school employees, has made it more expensive for districts to pay for the support staff they need. Many are responding by actually reducing their support budgets.

This budget squeeze on local levy dollars is hitting the Spokane area hard:

• The Central Valley district has just gone through a process of cuts resulting in 112 fewer hours per school day of service to our kids from support staff. This means fewer instructors in the classroom, less time with reading tutors and fewer media specialists in our libraries.

• Mead schools are cutting 62 hours of instruction per day, specifically one-on-one instruction, and are dipping into reserve accounts to pay for some basic services.

• Growing districts such as Cheney and Deer Park can’t hire the additional playground monitors needed to keep up with the additional enrollment.

• In Newport, there are no custodians in the schools during the day to deal with emergencies and routine maintenance.

• A new elementary school in Medical Lake suffered significant damage to its roof last winter because there wasn’t sufficient maintenance staff to keep up with the ice and snow.

• To help deal with rising fuel costs, some local districts – Cheney, Selkirk, and Columbia, to name a few – are having bus drivers take their buses home at night to save mileage.

This budget squeeze again highlights the fact that the real crisis in education funding is not in the area of hiring teachers. It is in the area of state support for basic service such as transportation, school secretaries, security guards and custodians. For the past year our Stepping Up for Smarter Safer Schools campaign has been drawing attention to this problem and urging elected leaders to take action.

Our schools are changing. We are raising standards and expecting more from students. At the same time, our schools are taking on more responsibilities and dealing with new issues. The people who support our teachers – educational support professionals – are more important than ever.

We depend on bus drivers, and the vehicles they operate, to get kids safely to and from school. Custodians are critical in performing routine maintenance on buildings and grounds, saving money on repairs and keeping schools and campuses safe.

As more students depend on schools to provide hot, nutritious meals, our food service workers become more vital. And school secretaries are the glue that holds our schools together.

Highly trained paraeducators are helping students achieve higher academic standards. It’s a big title for an important job. Like their counterparts in other fields, such as paramedics and paralegals, paraeducators assist teachers and are a smart and efficient way to reduce class size by putting more trained staff in the classroom.

Why are school districts forced to rely on the uncertainty of levies to fund the majority of these vital services? Because our state’s school funding system has changed very little over the past 30 years and doesn’t recognize the heightened importance of support professionals and the jobs they do.

It is time to modernize and reform school funding. The state needs to fully fund pupil transportation, and we need to recognize the importance of custodians, nutrition programs, secretaries and other school support staff.

And, most importantly, we need to change the school funding formula so school districts have adequate state resources for critical support programs, rather than relying on the uncertainty of levies.