mikala woodward

By Mikala Woodward

Last week I sat in a big circle with 40 other parents and a weary principal, discussing the PTSA’s possible contribution to next year’s school budget at Orca K-8. Then I went home and had Andrew pour me a stiff drink.

For those unversed in the day-to-day effects of chronic underfunding on our local schools, here’s how it works at Orca: every February the district tells us how much money we are going to get for the following academic year. The district’s funding mostly comes from the State, with smaller chunks from City levies and the Feds. Its allocation to schools is based roughly on expected enrollment: a certain number of kids gets you a certain number of teachers, a counselor, half a librarian, etc. There’s always a little bit of money the principal can shift around to cover gaps in the budget, but there’s never enough to fill all of them. Enter the PTSA.

Some of the gaps we are asked to fill are things you might consider “extras” but that are essential to our school as we know it: without our half-time Environmental Science / Garden Coordinator our award-winning Garden program — integrated into the science curriculum at every grade level — could not function. Other holes in the budget are simply maddening: the district only provides us with 5.6 middle school teachers, for instance. How we are meant to serve six classrooms of students with 5.6 teachers is beyond me — I suppose we could send one of the teachers home at lunch every day and lock all 65 6th graders in the gym for the rest of the afternoon? Last year $25K of our PTSA budget went to fill out the sixth middle school teacher’s salary, and another $30K paid the Environmental Science teacher. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is for our amazing group of committed parents to work all year raising all that money — Annual Fund letters and the Plant Sale and a Jog-a-thon and the Spring Auction — just to put a teacher in each classroom.

So — every March the PTSA commits a chunk of money to the school budget, based on staff recommendations, parent priorities, and our fundraising forecasts. And then in May (after the Auction, when we know how much money we have raised for the following year), we decide how to allocate the rest of our PTSA funds. The more we give the school, the less we’ll have for regular PTA stuff like music, snacks, art supplies, a volunteer coordinator, the MLK Celebration, etc.

Of course we are painfully aware of how lucky we are that our community is able to raise this kind of cash. A third of our kids qualify for free or reduced lunch: a significant percentage, but not compared to most of the schools in our neighborhood. Nearby Hawthorne Elementary, with 77% low-income kids, gets more money from the district to support those students’ greater needs, but Hawthorne families can’t provide the kind of “extra” stuff that we do. Sometimes it feels like all our efforts to make Orca the best school we can possibly make it only serve to increase the disparity in an already unfair world.

Other times it feels like we are the children of alcoholics, enabling our dysfunctional State to go on underfunding education year after year after year. Maybe if we didn’t keep sticking our fingers in the dike as the holes multiply and the cracks spread, as teachers get laid off and class sizes grow and building maintenance is deferred… Maybe if parents and teachers weren’t willing to turn themselves inside out to protect students from the effects of all of this, our legislators wouldn’t be able to go around telling themselves (and us) that the sky hasn’t fallen. Maybe they would realize that we don’t have time for yet another commission to study the problem, for another task force to report out its findings, or for that glorious plan to phase in new funding — eight years from now. Maybe they would be embarrassed to keep imposing “accountability” reforms, without holding themselves accountable for actually funding — oh, say — a whole teacher for every class. Lights, heat, and books. School bus routes calculated by actual mileage, not as the crow flies. Enough high school credits to go to college. (For a detailed analysis of the inadequacies of Washington’s education funding, check out the Quality Education Council’s recent report.)

In any case, whether we’re increasing disparity or enabling dysfunction or just doing the best we can for the kids in our community, this is how the system works right now — if you can call it that. But at last night’s budget meeting we finally came up against a hole in the dike that our fingers couldn’t fill. Orca’s allocation from the district was about $60K less than last year. The staff had done its best to squeeze every dollar out of every budget item, but the bottom line was this: if the PTSA didn’t up last year’s contribution by $27K, the librarian’s position would be cut by a day a week, and our kids would lose 1/5 of their (already insufficient) time with the art teacher — which would also mean less planning time for the classroom teachers.

We all knew there was no way we were going to raise $27K more than last year – with the recession, we’ll be lucky if we can even match last year’s dollars. After kicking around a few red herrings — getting a grant, finding a wealthy patron, recruiting interns to do the art teacher’s daily prep work for free — we eventually had to face the grim reality that if we really wanted to maintain our kids’ current levels of library and art time, we would need to cut more than half of everything else we fund.

With next year’s PTSA budget yet unknown (the Auction is a month away), these parents were understandably reluctant to commit to the full $27K. We wound up guaranteeing $9K — on top of the $55K we contributed last year — to fund another half day a week of library service, and agreeing to put an art assistant high on the list of priorities for the final PTSA budget allocation in May. (I hate to think what that budget meeting is going to look like, honestly. Will we have to eliminate Music completely? Axe the Volunteer Coordinator? Eliminate all funding for school events? I can’t begin to imagine — but Andrew is prepared with a large bottle of Knob Creek.)

The next day on the radio I listened to the Kansas City Superintendent of Schools explain why they’re closing 28 of their 61 schools. I heard an education reform advocate claim that “money isn’t really the problem” for schools, and tout national standards as the answer instead. I learned that our Legislature had cut another $149.1 million from K-12 education for next year (and yes, I know the State budget is in a shambles, and it could have been a lot worse — I know that, honestly I do – but if you break it down per student, that’s another $72K from Orca’s budget.) I heard a proposal for the State to raise revenue with a 4.5% tax on income over $200,000 hooted at as if it were the height of absurdity — by the reporter, no less. I went online and started looking at housing costs in Bali.

Washington’s constitution says quite clearly that “it is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children.” The paramount duty, folks. Not, like, something we really oughta do, gosh, wouldn’t it be nice, if only we had the money. No, people. This is the thing we are supposed to do first.

Last month the King County Superior Court formally declared that the State has failed in its duty. Washington’s education funding, Judge Erlick wrote, “is not ample, it is not stable, it is not dependable.” The legal tautology established by the Legislature in 1977 — “Basic education shall be considered to be fully funded by those amounts of dollars appropriated by the Legislature” — is a sick joke. If our constitution means anything, then we have no choice but to come up with more money for schools. Anybody who thinks it’s too much to ask someone making $250K a year to contribute $2,250 to make it happen, had better have a better idea to put on the table.

And if we’ve really decided as a society that we’d rather bring our kids up in overcrowded classrooms without money for books, that it’s okay for some schools to ask parents to pitch in to make up the difference (or some of it, anyway) while the neediest schools don’t have that option, and that the most privileged kids will get twice as much spent on them at private schools — well, maybe that’s the kind of society we deserve.

So tell me: is that what we’ve decided?

Find Mikala Woodward’s blog here. Photo/do communications

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