A bill advocates say would have restored local school districts’ ability to raise local levy dollars appears to be dead before ever reaching the Senate floor.
Cause of death? Late amendments decried by the state teachers union.
Senate Bill 5313, sponsored by Sen. Lisa Wellman, D-Mercer Island, would allow school districts to levy $2.50 per $1,000 in assessed property value or a levy rate that raises $2,500 to $3,000 per student, depending on the size of the district and whichever levy rate is lower.
The state’s new school funding formula caps local levy dollars at $1.50 per $1,000 in assessed value or a levy rate that would generate $2,500 per student, whichever results in a lower rate for local taxpayers. School districts say that levy cap is partially to blame for multimillion-dollar budget deficits projected in the upcoming school year, along with declining enrollment and teacher contracts adopted last summer.
But at 1 a.m. Wednesday, the Senate Ways and Means Committee adopted an amendment by Sen. Mark Mullet, D-Issaquah, that would add limits to the extra money teachers receive on top of their base salaries. Mullet’s not optimistic his peers in the Senate will buy in further, though.
“I think it’s dead,” Mullet said Monday. “I think the unions came out so aggressively against it.”
Teacher salaries are generally divided into two or more streams: base pay and TRI pay, or time, responsibility and incentive pay. TRI pay, essentially, is supposed to pay for the extra duties a teacher takes on outside of the classroom, like tutoring students or leading clubs. But as the Legislature delayed fully funding basic education under the landmark school funding lawsuit known as the McCleary decision, school districts used TRI pay to boost teacher pay and keep salaries competitive.
A new teacher with no experience in Evergreen Public Schools, for example, receives $46,262 in base pay, according to the Evergreen Education Association’s salary schedule. They receive an 8.8 percent TRI stipend and some additional pay for professional development, bringing their total compensation to $51,619.
Mullet’s amendment, meanwhile, limits how large those TRI packages could be. If the amended bill passes, the average TRI package offered by school districts must be reduced by the cost-of-living increase applied to base salaries through September 1, 2022, effectively freezing teacher pay until then. Beginning that year, the average TRI package must be 3 percent or less than the average district salary.
“We have to get local levy dollars back into programs and get it out of teacher pay,” Mullet said.
The response from the Washington Education Association was swift. The union lambasted Mullet’s amendment as an attempt to undercut collective bargaining, and said the result is that teacher salaries would effectively be cut within several years.
“We fought so hard with the districts to get what we were told was money for salaries and now they’re saying ‘Sorry, not OK,'” said Linda Mullen, communications director for the Washington Education Association.
Local union leaders, who led their members through historic teacher strikes in pursuit of increased salaries last summer, offered a similar response. Bill Beville, president of the Evergreen Education Association, called the amendments a “poison pill” attempt to limit local bargaining. Rick Wilson, executive director of the Vancouver Education Association, called the amendment “bad public policy.”
“We finally made some inroads on salary where our new teachers at least could see some hope in eventually paying off huge student loans,” Wilson said.
Mullet called the unions’ characterization of his bill false.
“If the unions weren’t planning to rely on these local funds to pay teachers’ salaries — which was a huge problem in the McCleary case — why are they now trying to kill a bill that would give schools access to hundreds of millions of potential dollars to support programs and other staff?” Mullet asked in a written statement last week.
Wellman, meanwhile, said the bill as amended does not reflect her “values or the values of the Democratic caucus.
“I have no desire to cut teacher salaries,” she wrote in a statement. “Our teachers are professional and must be compensated accordingly.”
Wellman wrote that she’d continue to press the issue, however.
“There are 25 days left in session, and I plan to use that time to find a solution that works,” she said.
