Legislature, school districts continue to seek solutions to teacher shortage, funding

By Izumi Hansen
WNPA Olympia News Bureau

A teacher shortage is slamming school districts in Washington, and as the Legislature reaches the end of its regular session, lawmakers are still looking for ways to relieve the strain.

While Washington has had teacher shortages for specific subjects since the early 1990s, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction in late 2015 was able to gather data pinpointing the newest shortage. The problem is statewide, affecting all subjects and even the availability of substitute teachers.

The shortage likely stems from a combination of causes, one of which is low starting salary, the legislators have heard at committee hearings on education issues this session.

The Democrat-led House of Representatives this session has included in its 2015-2017 supplemental budget proposal an increase in beginning teacher salaries to $40,000, as well as an increase in other teacher salaries. The supplemental operating budget in the Republican-led Senate does not include an increase in teacher salaries. In the final week of the legislative session, the House and the Senate must agree upon a supplemental operating budget for the next year. Otherwise, the governor said this week, he will call a special session or veto bills.

The complications of teacher salaries

Teacher salaries are paid through a combination of state and local school district dollars. For the 2015-2016 school year, the state is providing $35,069 to districts for teachers with a bachelor’s degree and teaching no experience. The state provides more money for additional years of experience, additional higher education and further teaching certification. However, a teacher’s true salary is determined at the local level, which results in very different salaries among even neighboring districts.

This difference in pay is part of the reason some teachers move from one district to another, thinning an already limited pool of teachers.

The Washington State Supreme Court found that districts contributions to teacher salaries come from voter-approved tax levy funds, and said the state must fund these salaries with other, reliable tax sources. This was part of an order in 2012 under the McCleary decision, in which the court ruled that the state must fully fund basic education.

The state has failed, in part, to produce plans to fund teacher salaries. Since 2014, the state has been in contempt of court, and the court has fined the state $100,000 per day since August 2015 for not creating those plans during the 2015 legislative session.

Last week Gov. Jay Inslee signed SB 6195, which creates a workgroup to create recommendations for adequately paying teachers with state funds and relieve district reliance on local levies. The workgroup must present its plan to the Legislature in 2017.

Throughout the 2016 session, many legislators said teacher compensation would be the most difficult aspect of funding basic education under the McCleary decision because teacher salaries are bound up in local levies and taxes. The legislators said they could not determine how much the state would need to come up with because they didn’t have the data. One estimate is that it could be up to a $3.5 billion.

Nearly all school districts rely on voter-approved property tax levies, typically called maintenance and operation levies or special levies. In 2013, for example, 285 out of 295 districts across the state had special levies, which means the education of 99.8 percent of students enrolled in Washington public schools is in part funded by levies. In that year, voters in 283 districts approved levies.

In February this year, 134 districts had special levies on the ballot, affecting 38 percent of Washington’s public-school students. These taxes totaled $3.39 billion. Three levies failed and at least two will be placed on the ballot again in April.

“When you have 99 percent of the levies pass it means people like their local schools,” said Alan Burke, executive director of the Washington State School Directors Association.

In 2011, a legislative workgroup recommended that the state increase beginning teacher-pay allocations to $48,687, a figure it arrived at after comparing teacher salaries nationally and locally, and with other jobs in the market. Levies weren’t included in the analysis.

Remedying the teacher shortage a preview of McCleary

Finding funds increase teacher salaries to address the shortage, and eventually comply with the McCleary decision by 2017, is a struggle. Some legislators advocate reprioritizing existing funds to pay for salary increases, while others call for new tax avenues—a decision that some legislators say will happen in 2017 when the Legislature plans to fully comply with the McCleary decision.

One legislative proposal this session, HB 2996, would mitigate the teacher shortage by increasing the sales taxes on bottled water and eliminate some tax exemptions for certain businesses. The additional revenue would target retaining and recruiting teachers with an increased salary.

Inslee included the parts of the tax proposal in his 2015-2017 supplemental operating budget this session. Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn has supported increasing the state’s salary allocation since the beginning of the session.

Jerry Bender of the Association of Washington School Principals said increasing the starting salary allocations to $40,000 would make Washington competitive with Idaho for teachers.

Rep. Kristine Lytton, D-Anacortes, the prime sponsor of HB 2996, said, “We are at a point in our state where we know that we are going to have to come up with revenue in order to fulfill our constitutional responsibility to fully fund education in our state.”

During the first House operating budget debate, Rep. Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, said these tax proposals were no guarantee even if the bill passed. Voters, for example, could repeal the bottled water tax, as voters did in 2010. In that case, the temporary tax was part of an effort by the state to create jobs and fulfill voter-approved bonds to add energy saving updates to K-12 and higher education schools.

“We don’t need to be taking more money out of the taxpayer’s budget,” Orcutt said.

In committee action this session some legislators said the bigger issue about raising salaries is where the funds would come from. They called the tax code regressive, disproportionately affecting people with low income.

“The bill (HB 2996) points out how desperate we are to find a nickel everywhere we can in order to fund the basic education services,” said Rep. Larry Springer, D-Kirkland. “We are often accused, when we look at our tax code and we pick an exemption to end, that we’re picking winners and losers. I would submit that our entire tax code has picked nothing but losers.”

The bill passed through the House Finance Committee along party lines and now sits in the Rules Committee, which determines when bills are debated by the entire House of Representatives.