Six School Districts Back on Ballot, Seeking Money (WA)

August 9, 2010

Six months after they last passed school levies, a half-dozen Puget Sound school districts are back on the ballot, asking for more.

They struggled over whether to file the measures, which are a temporary — and controversial — solution offered by the Legislature to offset the cuts in state education spending.

But it was either that or cut more programs, which they loathed to do as well.

"It’s just one of those awful choices," said Lisa Macfarlane of the League of Education Voters, an education advocacy group.

"You can’t not serve the kids in your district when you have a chance to grab a lifeline like this."

The Puget Sound-area districts on the Aug. 17 ballot are: Edmonds, Everett, Granite Falls, Marysville, Northshore and Riverview.

They seek to minimize the budget cuts they expect to make as the federal stimulus dollars run out, and they feel the full brunt of cuts the Legislature has made in the past few years.

"Wha t this is not is a windfall," said Edmonds School District Superintendent Nick Brossoit. "It’s a survival request."

"No frills," wrote the Northshore School District in its ballot statement. "No extras."

To soften the blow of state cuts, state legislators voted last spring to allow districts, for a limited time, to ask local taxpayers to pitch in more property taxes than usually is allowed.

In technical terms, they raised the cap on the amount of property taxes that school districts can raise from their local communities — a limit that’s in place to maintain some equity in school funding from district to district.

For most districts, that cap is roughly 24 percent of their state and federal funding, although a handful are grandfathered at a higher amount. In Seattle, for example, the cap is about 32 percent. The Seattle district expects to ask voters for an increase in November.

The bill added 4 percentage points to each district’s cap from 2011-2017.

That move flies in the face of a February ruling by King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick, who said the Legislature isn’t fulfilling its constitutional duty to adequately fund public schools. It was the biggest education-finance lawsuit in three decades and could mean big increases in state education spending.

But that hasn’t happened yet, and the case is now under appeal.

In the meantime, many educators and education advocates say lifting the levy lid is the opposite of what the state should be doing.

The legislators "are doing exactly what the court told th em is unconstitutional, which is shifting the burden to local school districts" Macfarlane said.

For some districts, passing an additional levy isn’t a realistic possibility.

"There are places in the state that will not try to do anything like this," said Paul Rosier, executive director of the Washington Association of School Administrators. "Their communities are at the limit, and they know it."

A number of others will be able to collect the extra money without having to hold a second vote.

Those are districts such as Issaquah and Mukilteo, which asked for extra money back in February when they renewed their maintenance and operations levies. If the bill hadn’t passed, then they wouldn’t have been able to collect it.

Bellevue also got approval to collect nearly as much as the new maximum, and Lake Washington can collect roughly 2 of the 4 percentage-point increase without a vote.

But not all districts felt comfortable making their requests before the Legislature voted.

"Our board wanted … to have an intentional conversation with the community," said Northshore School District Superintendent Larry François.

Some of the districts with measures on the August ballot did surveys and held focus groups to gauge voter receptiveness.

They know the economy is tough on everyone. But they also don’t want to cut more programs and staff if voters would prefer to chip in more instead.

"Philosophically, I still agree that the state should fund basic education," said Bros soit, the Edmonds superintendent, who opposed raising the levy lid.

But with the court case under appeal, he said, "it’s going to be months if not years before that’s all sorted out." In the meantime, he said, "we feel a responsibility to take the question to our community."