OLYMPIA—Testifiers praised bipartisan work, but “disappointment” and “frustration” frequented their statements at the first hearings for Senate and House bills that address teacher compensation in the 2016 state legislative session.
Teacher compensation is a part of basic education, which must be fully funded by 2018 under the Washington State Supreme Court’s McCleary decision. The court determined local tax levies have paid teacher salaries, which the justices found to be unconstitutional. Since August, the court has held the state in contempt for not producing plans to fully fund basic education from a reliable resource. That order carries a $100,000 per day penalty until the court’s mandate is fulfilled.
“The apple gets bigger and the bite you’re going to take next year is going to be bigger than, probably, if you would have done it a year ago.” said Alan Burke, executive director of the Washington State School Directors Association, during testimony. “The politics are very difficult, but the reality is it’s going to be incredibly challenging to try to take care of the entire levy-compensation issue in one year.”
The bills, HB 2366 and SB 6195, establish a task force and provide $500,000 toward consultations to create recommendations for funding teacher pay. The bills also require the Legislature to take action to eliminate dependency on local school levies by the end of the 2017 legislative session.
A bipartisan work group organized by Gov. Jay Inslee in September created the bills. Members of the work group said they believe they produced bills in good faith from compromise on both sides of the aisle. Members of the work group said they could not determine the amount of teacher compensation paid through levy funds, so they could not determine how much the state needed to increase its share of teacher pay. The task force intends to complete this work.
“The (Senate) bill represents kind of a foundation for what we all could agree on,” Sen. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge, said during the Senate committee public hearing last week. “It keeps members at the table and keeps the Legislature moving forward.”
