PTAs shouldn’t need to be fundraising for school staff and programs! The state should fully fund public education, the “paramount duty” of our State Constitution. But the reality is Washington state chronically underfunds education and the SPS budget situation keeps getting worse each year.

1) McCleary, a 2012 Washington State Supreme Court case meant to address historic underfunding of rural districts, has over-corrected things such that urban districts like Seattle are not getting their fair share of education dollars. Especially given the cost of living crisis in Seattle, it simply costs more for our teachers to live here and more for us to fund their salaries and we are not getting this funding from the state.

2) As part of McCleary, the state caps the amount of funding school districts can raise in local levies. Seattle voters have generously approved property tax levies in excess of this amount that the state won’t let the district collect!

3) Education funding as a % of overall state funding has decreased from approximately 50% to 42% in recent years. Put another way, the state is underfunding education by approximately $4 billion a year. 

4) To limit state funding on education the state arbitrarily caps the % of special education services it will fund to 10% of the student population. But in Seattle the special education population is more like 14% – and this “extra” 4% of students are morally, ethically and legally entitled to receive the special education services they need. This creates a big hole in SPS’s budget.