— from Cathy Ferran —
When NEWS and the State return to the Temple of Justice next week to appear before the Washington State Supreme Court, NEWS will ask justices to take a strong stand for schoolchildren and reject the State’s longstanding procrastination and excuses for failing to comply with the Court’s mandates in the McCleary case.In a brief filed with the Court today, NEWS urged the Court to keep its contempt order against the State in place and to consider even stronger sanctions – including giving the Legislature the choice to either act on McCleary or to accept the sanctions of shutting down schools in September 2017 or invalidating all tax exemptions (except the voter-approved sales tax exemption on food) to pay for McClearymandates.
“Either way, it’s the 2017 session’s choice,” NEWS’s brief noted. “But the 2013 session’s prompt and concrete action in response to Boeing’s tax break request illustrates that lawmakers respond swiftly when State tax exemption statutes are involved.”
NEWS’s court brief also contended that:
- The deadline for full compliance with McCleary – meaning that the State must amply fund K-12 public education for all students – is the opening of the 2017-18 school year, not the 2018-19 school year as the State contends.
- “Full funding” does not mean simply funding whatever formulas the Legislature chooses to fund – again as the State contends – but providing the full costs of what school districts must spend to educate students as defined by the courts in McCleary.
- The State has failed, despite repeated direction from the Supreme Court, to determine how much it will cost and how it will pay for the McCleary funding mandates. “After all these years, the State still does not know how it will come up with the billions of additional dollars needed to pay the long-pending ample funding bill that is due in full next year. From a basic finance perspective, that’s like a person telling the bank he’s still thinking about getting some sort of a job at the last minute to pay the huge balloon mortgage payment he’s known about for several years,” NEWS stated.
- The Legislature’s passage of E2SSB 6195 in 2016 does not constitute the Court-ordered plan for addressing McCleary. “This Court has repeatedly been ordering the State to produce its complete year-by-year phase in plan making steady, real, and measurable progress towards full compliance with Section 1’s ample funding mandate by the firm deadline in this case. E2SSB 6195’s punt to come up with possible ideas for trying to do something at the last minute is not the complete year-by-year phase in plan this Court has been repeatedly ordering the State to submit since 2012,” NEWS said.
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