Wilder Legislative Issues

 

March, 2010 

Wow, what a month in Olympia! We all know that the state legislature is in a special session trying to deal with the budget mess, but just before the regular session ended, a number of  bills were passed on to the Governor for signature that will affect us here at Wilder. The following are excerpts from legislative updates from Bill Williams and Kim Howard, of the Washington State PTA:

This past week Washington State PTA came together with seven other education advocacy organizations in a coalition to lobby the Legislature to retain funding in four key education categories:  smaller class sizes in grades K-4; classroom aids; levy equalization funding for 225 districts and maintaining the existing funding for all-day Kindergarten in high poverty schools.  In addition to a joint letter to every legislator and the Governor, representatives of the coalition members spent the week meeting in teams with individual members and with legislative leadership in both houses and with the Governor’s key budget officer.  Because the coalition members have not always agreed—and in some instances have been diametrically opposed to each other—on legislative issues, the fact that they have joined forces has been noticed, as one report notes.   Perhaps because of that the efforts appear to be paying off.  By week’s end we were getting informal assurances that all four of these programs—plus another technical budget issue affecting how local district’s levies are collected—will be protected in the final budget.  Of course there will still be cuts to education funding as well as to other state-funded programs such as health care and social services, and of course nothing is final until the Legislature completes its business.  However it appears that the cuts to education funding will be far less than anticipated in the “all cuts” budget developed by the Governor last December.  The question now is when and how the two houses of the Legislature will agree on a package of tax changes necessary to maintain the funding levels.

6696 and 2776 – Both have passed the legislature and await the Governor’s signature!  Final bill summaries below.

On Thursday night as the regular legislative session concluded, the House and Senate agreed on final versions of these bills.  While they may not be all that we wanted, they do keep us moving forward during these difficult times.  

2776 Bill text represents commitment to follow up on the education reform bill 2261 passed last year, which is something to be celebrated.  The new, much more transparent funding formulas based on the prototypical schools model will be implemented at current funding levels.  The bill also contains the following:

• Phase in of all-day K to continue in 2011-2013 until full phase-in is achieved in 2017-18.

• Phase in of reduced class sizes for grades K-3 starting with schools with the highest numbers of free and reduced price lunch meals, until class size reaches 17, beginning in the 2011-13 biennium. 

• Phase in of the transportation funding formula will begin in 2011-13 and be fully implemented by the 2013-15 biennium.

• Enhanced funding for utilities, maintenance and operations costs, which should be closer to actual costs, begins in 2015-16.  After that adjustments will be based on inflation.

• Local levy work group to begin April 1, 2010.  Its report to the legislature is due June 30, 2011.  This group is to develop options for a new system of supplemental funding through local school levies and local effort assistance.  It has also been charged to address facility needs associated with the phase-in of all day K and the reduction of class sizes in K-3. 

• Teacher Compensation work group to begin July, 2011 and make an initial report to the legislature June 30, 2012.  The purpose is to recommend the details of an enhanced teacher salary allocation model that aligns state expectations for educator development and certification with the compensation system.

• A member of the Achievement Gap Oversight and Accountability Committee has been added to the Quality Education Council and a focus around the achievement gap is added to the QEC charge.

With significant funding increases slated to begin in the 2011-2013 biennium, the Quality Education will need to start working in earnest on an initial funding plan during the interim. 

6696 bill text or what has commonly called the “Race to the Top” legislation follows up on some of the provisions of 2261, but also expands on these to help our state satisfy federal requirements for competitive federal grant funding.  In general we feel that this is a very good start for our state.  Here are some of its provisions:

Accountability Program:  Implements the accountability program developed by the State Board of Education, which allows the state for the first time to require action plans for our lowest performing schools.  The accountability index will identify schools for recognition, for continuous improvement and for additional state support. To address concern about a district’s ability to appeal a decision by the State Board of Education to reject a school district’s plan, a required action review panel is created, to be composed of five individuals with expertise in school improvement selected by the legislature and the Governor.  This group will serve four year terms and will only be convened if there is an appeal.

Teacher/Principal Evaluations: A new four level evaluation system will be developed (currently teachers have a 2 tier satisfactory/not satisfactory system), which includes 8 minimum criteria.  Three criteria for teachers which are of particular interest are “recognizing individual student learning needs and developing strategies to address those needs”, “using multiple student data elements to modify instruction and improve student learning” and “communicating and collaborating with parents and community”.

OSPI will convene the work group to create models for implementing the evaluation criteria, student growth tools, professional development programs, and evaluator training for certified teachers and principals. The work group will include representatives from associations representing teachers, principles, administrators and parents!  The models must be ready for use in the 2011-2012 school year.  A set of school districts will collaborate with the work group and begin piloting the new evaluation system in the 2010-2011 school year.  Pilot districts are required to submit data back to OSPI so that they can review and make recommendations to the legislature both in July, 2011 and July, 2012. 

Piloting will continue in the 2011-12 school year.  Implementation for all districts will begin in the 2013-14 school year.                                                                                                                                                           

Alternative Routes to Teacher Certification: Changes the alternative routes to teaching program from a competitive grant program to a preparation program model to be expanded to all approved program providers.

Common Core Standards: The new proposed national common core standards will be reviewed by OSPI.   They have the option of provisionally adopting them, subject to review by the legislature in 2011.  They are also required to provide the legislature with a detailed comparison and estimated costs to the state and school districts for implementation.

Outreach to Parents and Community:  OSPI will convene a work group to develop a model feedback tool to assist schools with their new requirement to include feedback in their annual report.   Representatives from organizations representing parents, teachers, principals and diverse communities will be included.

Next Steps:  Once the budget is finalized we will provide an update. As we said at the start of this newsletter, most of this work will now be done in closed sessions.  The Governor continues to sign bills that have passed.  She also can veto entire bills or sections of bills.  To see the daily bill signing schedule, go to the Governor’s website http://www.governor.wa.gov/  and choose “2010 bill action”. 

 

For those few of you who have gotten this far;  

On a more local level, the planned, public LWSD budget input meetings that were scheduled for this week have been postponed until the state has a budget to work with. Makes sense to me… PLEASE ATTEND when rescheduled! This is a very important opportunity for parents to give input into what the school district funds, or cuts, next year. 

Also, congratulations to the LWSD secretaries (Lake Washington Educational Support Personnel (LWESP)) on a successful grass-roots effort in securing a collaborative bargaining process to reach a settlement in the support staff’s year-long contract negotiations.

That’s more than enough for now…

Jason Rothkowitz

Wilder PTSA Legislative Advocate