Washington lawmakers form yet another task force to fund education

Lawmakers in Olympia are coming together, yet again, to try and solve one of Washington’s most challenging tasks: funding education.

“They are starting, again, to find a final solution to meet the obligation of the constitution,” said Jerry Cornfield, with the Everett Herald, on Seattle’s Morning News. “It’s another task force called the Education Funding Task Force and they are going to begin where they left off in the legislative session; that’s finding out how to deal with local district’s reliance on levies (to fund education).”

Cornfield briefed Seattle’s Morning News on the legislature’s most current effort to meet its constitutional duty, fund education, and meet requirements set by the state’s supreme court. This comes after lawmakers were found in contempt for not moving quickly enough to fund the schools. A 2018 deadline has been set for Olympia to get the job done. It’s not certain how much money has to be found to do the job, but it goes into the billions.

Related: State superintendent says lawmakers are playing kick the can with education funding

“All the money that school districts now pay through local levies — to pay for teacher’s salaries and administrators salaries and other employees — you add it up over 297 school districts and it gets into the billions of dollars every year,” Cornfield said. “So the state has to pick up that tab somehow and reduce the costs for the locals.”

Cornfield said there are two ways for lawmakers to do this:

• Raise revenue through eliminating tax breaks.

• Do a swap: raise money somehow — such as raising everyone’s property taxes in the state — and then use that money to replace the levies currently relied upon.

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