Time to get educated about K-12 education

School districts across Washington state are struggling to make ends meet as the cost of doing business continues to skyrocket while the money to pay the bills continues to shrink. 

“We’ve deferred budget cuts by using fund balances as much as we could,” Camas School District Business Services Director Jasen McEathron told Camas School Board members earlier this week, adding that the $7.2 million infusion from the district’s general fund balance to help bridge the budget gap in 2024-25 will take the reserves down lower than they’ve been since the 2008 Great Recession. 

“Our four-year budget projection assumes we are addressing the gap, with budget reductions to bring expenditures down so (they) are below our revenues,” McEathron said. “And we have to build our fund balance. We can’t survive on 4%. We can hardly survive on 5%. Our target is 8%.” 

This means that — unless something changes pretty drastically at the state funding level — the Camas School District is facing another round of painful budget cuts ahead of the 2025-26 school year, just two years after the district cut staff positions and tightened its belt ahead of the 2023-24 school year. 

As McEathron told the school board Monday evening: “We’re covering the gap in 2024-25 with our fund balance. But once you bring the fund balance down, you’re only left with budget reductions.”

Camas is not alone in its inability to afford the increasing cost of running a school district. The Washougal School District announced earlier this summer that it was entering into a second round of budget cuts and would eliminate $1 million from its budget, including cuts to its administrative, classified and teaching staff, ahead of the 2024-25 school year. Vancouver Public Schools recently cut 9% from its 2024-25 budget, and Evergreen School District leaders have said that the district will need to cut between $16 million and $20 million from its 2024-25 budget to make up for a revenue shortfall. 

According to a Seattle Times report published May 27, school districts across the state are struggling financially as expenditures outpace revenues. 

“The tight budgets hearken back to financial struggles anticipated five years ago — one year after the state Legislature injected nearly $1 billion into K-12 funding to resolve the decadeslong lawsuit calling for the full funding of basic education, known as the McCleary decision,” the paper reported. “Yet districts said significant gaps in funding remained, and a Seattle Times analysis of districts’ financial projections at the time showed 191 of the state’s 295 districts were already in the red.”

State funding has not kept pace with school districts’ needs, the report said, pointing out that “the state has poured more money into K-12 each year since the 2018 McCleary decision. But when adjusted for inflation, the state is distributing $1,000 less per student today than when the lawsuit ended, according to OSPI. That comes to about $1 billion less to K-12 per year.”

In fact, according to the Seattle Times, although the Quality Education Council has recommended that Washington state dedicate half of its general fund monies to fund K-12 schools, the state is only spending around 43% of its general fund on K-12 education.

COVID-19 pandemic relief dollars may have helped shield the problem for a few years, but it is clear now that many Washington state school districts are in rough financial shape. 

On Monday, during the Camas School Board’s regular monthly meeting, Camas School District Superintendent John Anzalone urged community members to get involved by staying abreast of the school district’s financial issues and by advocating for changes at the state level. 

“I would encourage (state legislators) to look inward and determine whether or not its school funding decisions are student-focused,” Anzalone stated in a slide showing what community members can do to help enact change on a local and statewide level. 

We would add that community members who are concerned about school funding and the possibility of slashing budgets — which means losing many talented teachers, paraeducators, school district personnel and building leaders who have worked hard to earn Camas regional recognition as one of the best school districts in the Portland-Vancouver metro area — should also think carefully about their choices in the upcoming presidential election. 

The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project was crafted by the Heritage Foundation — with the help of, as a Politico report recently pointed out, dozens of former Trump Administration “Cabinet secretaries, top White House officials and senior aides, including former Trump appointees to EPA, the Interior Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission” — to act as a blueprint for the next Republican president. If re-elected in November, Trump would likely use Project 2025, a body of work he has praised, to guide his administration’s actions. And, when it comes to public education funding, Project 2025 would be disastrous to the state of K-12 education as we now know it, cutting more than $16 billion from low-income schools that receive Title I funding over the next decade, eliminating the federal Department of Education and pushing for nationwide “school choice” initiatives that suck money out of public schools to give taxpayer dollars to people who choose private schools for their children. 

As the progressive grassroots movement known as “Indivisible” recently warned: “If elected, Donald Trump will destroy public education as we know it. We need well-educated citizens to compete in the 21st-century economy, think critically, and defend our democratic values. Trump’s denial of knowledge about Project 2025 is simply a lie to protect his campaign from the expanding backlash as citizens learn its cruel, destructive details.”

Over the next few months, we would encourage Camas-Washougal voters to really dig into not only what is happening at the state level when it comes to adequately funding our K-12 education system, but also what a Trump versus Harris presidency would mean to the future of our public education system.