Governor plans to pay education lawsuit obligation a year early, keep freeze on tuition

Gov. Jay Inslee has a plan for putting $2.3 billion more into preschool through college education and workforce training and for paying off the state Supreme Court’s education- funding mandate a year early.

But he won’t say where he’s going to get the money until Thursday, when he releases his full budget proposal.

On Monday, he announced his education policy initiatives at a town hall-style meeting in person in Bellevue and on video screens in Moses Lake, Spokane and Tacoma.

“We have a very solid, fiscally sound, secure and stable way of financing everything I’ve talked about today,” the governor said during his town hall meeting, which was shown at Jason Lee Middle School in Tacoma. “I can tell you it’s a real financing plan. It is not based on indebtedness.”

His agenda includes money for all-day kindergarten and smaller classes in the early grades by the 2016-17 school year, plus money to finish paying for classroom materials and supplies.

Inslee’s budget would also restore the cost-of-living increases for teachers that the Legislature has suspended repeatedly since 2008, while giving teachers a 3 percent raise in 2015-16 and a 1.8 percent raise the following year.

Much of Inslee’s budget focuses on meeting the demands of the state Supreme Court’s McCleary decision, in which the court ruled in 2012 that the Legislature was failing to fully fund public education. The court gave the Legislature until the 2017-18 school year to fix the problem.

Inslee’s plan would pay for previous class size reductions approved by the Legislature, shrinking kindergarten- through third-grade classes to an average of 17 kids.

But the governor’s budget wouldn’t pay for the entirety of the class-size reduction initiative passed by voters last month, which called for decreasing class sizes at every grade at an estimated cost of $2 billion over two years.

Inslee would instead devote $448 million over two years to reduce K-3 class sizes, one of the obligations laid out in the McCleary decision.

Plans for how to pay for more classroom space to house the required 7,000 extra teachers will come later, in the state building budget for the next budget cycle, said David Schumacher, director of the Office of Financial Management.

In addition to budget plans related to the McCleary education lawsuit, the governor is proposing:

Republican lawmakers are not happy with what they have heard so far of the governor’s education plans.

They want to see the governor’s plan for answering the Supreme Court’s criticism of the state’s overreliance on local levy dollars to pay for education. They think the governor is not showing leadership on what to do with the class size Initiative 1351, a measure that at least a few lawmakers in that caucus say they support suspending for the next budget cycle. And they don’t think new revenue sources are needed for education.

“We’re tired of our children being held hostage for the next tax increase,” said Sen. Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup. “We need a thoughtful and comprehensive solution for our schools. I have not seen that in the governor’s proposal.”

AP correspondent Rachel La Corte and staff writer Melissa Santos contributed to this report.

This story was originally published December 15, 2014 at 6:00 PM.