Teacher pay might derail Washington state budget

A budget deal might just hinge on the billion dollars the legislature wants to spend on education and who will end up getting that money.

A small provision in the education funding bill could end up being the biggest hurdle to getting this budget done. Republicans don’t want most of the billion dollars they’ve set aside for the schools going to teachers in the form of pay raises.

Republicans want the money to go into better training those teachers and for training new hires. Senate Democrats like Mark Mullet tried to oppose it without success during floor debate earlier this month.

“That’s the key element of this bill that needs to be addressed,” Mullet told the Senate June 13. “There’s a lot of good policy in there, but we all know if you have good policy with one piece of bad policy you just don’t pass the whole thing. You got to fix the piece that needs to be fixed.”

The Herald reports the state house will not pass the budget with this language included.