Is it right that such a big chunk of the cost of operating schools rests on the shoulders of local property tax payers through voter-approved levies?

During my conversation with Representative Terry Nealey a couple of weeks ago (which I wrote about last week), he said that education funding is once again the number one issue facing Washington’s state legislators in the current session, which began last week.

And the specific education funding issue those folks are addressing this year is how to make it more even-handed. That is, kids in rich suburban districts around Seattle should not have an unfair advantage, just because property values are much higher there than in other parts of the state like, say, the Touchet Valley.

We can certainly hope that that issue will be resolved before long. But in the meantime, we’re stuck with a system where around a quarter of our local school budgets comes from local property owners through voter-approved tax levies. And a big part of the construction and maintenance cost for school facilities is paid for by locally approved and paid-for capital levies.

In about two weeks, voters in Waitsburg, Prescott and Dayton will all be asked to weigh in on whether to continue their current level of support for schools. All three school districts have put forward maintenance and operations levies to replace levies that expire this year.

In addition, Waitsburg and Dayton are asking voters to approve capital improvement levies to fund maintenance and improvements for school facilities. (You can find all the details elsewhere in this paper.)

Though I don’t have kids in our schools, I’ve always believed that schools reflect a community’s values. Do we want our kids and our community to have a brighter future? Do we want families who move to our area to feel like we are investing in our future?

These levies we’re voting on are NOT rewards to the people who work at our schools now for a job well done in the past. And they should not be withheld just because we may not be as happy as we could be with how they’ve been doing their jobs.

These levies are investments in the future – our communities’ and our kids’ futures. We need to vote for them.