Ready for some good WA budget news? Local school leaders happy with spending plan
As state lawmakers await final approval of their proposed budget for the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years, superintendents at Pierce County school districts say that the roughly $36 billion in the budget for education addresses some of their top concerns, but they cautioned against relying on funding K-12 education via local levies.
Education takes up nearly half of the roughly $77 billion two-year spending plan, and some superintendents at school districts in Pierce County said the roughly $5 billion in appropriations for special-education programs will address a strong need. Both the Washington Association of School Administrators, also known as WASA, and State Superintendent Chris Reykdal have said that special-education funding was among their top priorities for the 2025 legislative session.
As costsrise due to inflation, school leaders were also happy to see lawmakers increase funding for materials, supplies and operating costs – a category also known as MSOC.
University Place School District Superintendent Jeff Chamberlin said the special education and MSOC funding will help districts equitably because they’ll receive funding based on the size of their student population.
“I feel like in this session, with this economic reality that the state is facing, the majority of the additional money that they put towards education, the additional policy funding for education, they did the right thing,” Chamberlain told The News Tribune. “They put it in special education, and they put it in material supplies and operating costs, which is exactly what they should’ve done.”
Superintendent Ron Banner of Clover Park School District said the changes to special-education funding and MSOC could help Clover Park particularly because the district needed an additional $14.6 million from its own coffers to cover costs in those two categories in 2024.
“Imagine what we could do if we had that $14.6 million and we spent it on student enrichment?” Banner told The News Tribune.
Both Chamberlin and Banner said small to mid-sized districts like theirs, which serve communities with smaller tax bases than cities like Tacoma and Seattle, suffer when state lawmakers prioritize funding schools using local, property tax-based levies, and they said they’d like to see officials move away from such a funding model in future budget discussions.
Though not in the budget, Chamberlin cited a bill passed by the Legislature last month, House Bill 2049, which increased the maximum amount for a local levy that school districts might put to voters to raise more tax revenue. Sponsored by the House Committee on Finance, the bill seeks to address inequity that the levy-lid increase could facilitate by offering smaller districts more funding in other areas, but Chamberlin said it’s not enough to counteract the increased levy lid.
He said state officials should move towards collecting tax revenue from across the state and distributing it to school districts based on need, to ensure that districts in lower-income areas with lower property values don’t see their budget woes exacerbated by their circumstances.
“Some districts are able to raise almost nothing for each of their students in those formulas, while other districts, the wealthier districts that have more valuable property, are able to raise much, much more money,” he said.
WASA agreed.
“As school districts face increasing financial difficulties, however, school administrators have ongoing concerns about the state’s K–12 funding structure that must be addressed,” the association cautioned in their 2025 legislative priorities.
Reykdal said in a statement issued after the close of the 2025 legislative session on April 27 that the state Legislature has tasked his office with finding a more “adequate and equitable” funding model for K-12 education in Washington.
“I look forward to updating this analysis and providing the Governor and lawmakers with a roadmap that moves our state beyond the very bare minimum of investments that are contained in the current ‘prototypical’ funding model,” Reykdal’s statement reads.
