Patchwork policy-making on local levies creates disparities for WA students

Political shift prompted rewrite of original McCleary deal

The third part of our series on public education financing post-McCleary looks deeper at the rules governing local money in K-12 education. If you haven’t yet, please read parts one and two of our series, as some concepts and political history are explained there. 

In the 2024 session, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction pitched two bills that would have boosted the amount of money school districts could collect from local taxpayers.¹ The bills came along with urgent appeals from public school districts for more money. House Bill 2215 and Senate Bill 5956 seemed a win-win solution that would have given more money for public education with no fiscal impact on the state budget, but lawmakers didn’t bite. 

One of the reasons the bills died was the lukewarm-to-hostile reception from low-income and middle-income school districts. The response was tepid because the bill's proposal to apply the regionalization factor to local levy money—which would have allowed affluent school districts to collect more money from local taxpayers—did not include a request for more levy equalization money.