(image courtesy of TVW)
The State Schools Superintendent took the first day of the legislative session to urge lawmakers to make sure schools are fully funded.
Superintendent Chris Reykdal says pandemic learning loss is a misnomer and, while they did see English and Math scores drop a bit, he says there was a quick recovery but work still to be done.
Enrollment is down 4% as some families who found alternatives that work well for their kids during the pandemic stayed with those alternatives. Funding is dependent on enrollment, so Reykdal says a 4% drop translates to $500 million less funding. He says they need more funding for student mental health, special education and retaining teachers and staff as they watch funding drop down near where it was before the court’s McCleary decision.
In McCleary, the State Supreme Court ruled that the State Constitution required money for all basic education costs to come from the state rather than from the levies districts were using to cover what the state didn’t provide. Reykdal says that while education passed 50% of the state’s “near general fund spending”, it’s down to 44%, not far from the pre-McCleary level. He also says that Washington spends 3.11% of its gross domestic product on education, with a national average of 3.6% and that we should never spend less than the average, especially when the state’s economy is one of the tops in the country. “The key to success is making sure that public K-12 shares in the prosperity of our state,” Reykdal says, “The entire workforce of our state, at least 90% of it, is a product of our public schools.”
On mental health, Reykdal says the youth suicide rate dropped during the pandemic but is back near pre-pandemic levels, so he chastised those who said the pandemic rate was higher and admonished them not to use kids to fuel their politics. He says schools have more mental health resources, and more students seek help, but he says there’s still a big shortage in that workforce, like so many others, that needs to be addressed.
Reykdal also addressed the Seattle Public Schools lawsuit against big social media, saying that when adults now were in school, they could leave bullying and other problems behind, but now they follow kids home and are with them in their pockets 24 hours a day. He says if the lawsuit sheds light on the harms of social media for kids it’s a good thing, adding that some speech is harmful, so he’s hoping for a way to limit that harmful speech within the bounds of the First Amendment.
