📝 Report Card 04/09/26

Budget cuts. Financial crises. Binding conditions. It feels like about half of all education stories in Washington these days surround school funding.

It feels bleak, and often, it is. Schools strive every day to serve all kids, but consistent deficits threaten that mission.

The Legislative session ended this year with a thud on schools. There was no movement on remedying persistent underfunding issues, plus some cuts. What that means for us, locally, is no real relief to the consistent budget troubles rocking local districts.

Here’s the latest on Whatcom and Skagit school district finances over the last month:

School districts in Washington have three major funding sources: state dollars, federal dollars and local levies.

State funds are allocated through the “prototypical funding model,” which relies on a series of student-staff ratios. It falls short, consistently. In Bellingham, for example, state funding pays for just 1.9 full-time nurses to serve the 22-school district, according to nurses at the district. Bellingham needs significantly more than just under two school nurses, so it must rely on funds from local levies to fill the gap.

But local levies can be unstable sources of funding. A couple of districts have had levy failures recently, (although both were able to garner a majority in a second try). Others have passed by a hair.

Price increases in operations have also created pinch points for districts. The state provides funding for materials, supplies, insurance, transportation and more. But as costs the district doesn’t control have gone up (insurance costs, utility bills, gas prices), state funding hasn’t filled the gap.

Federal funding hasn’t been cut the way some feared it would be, but it remains, at best, unstable. President Donald Trump’s recent budget proposal (which is not law, and will likely look very different from Congress’ final budget) seeks cuts to billions of dollars of programs, according to Education Week.

I hear a lot from folks about this issue. It’s true, Washington school administrators are well-paid. Most superintendents in our region make $200,000 or significantly more (Bellingham superintendent Greg Baker was making just under $400,000 in 2024-25, making him the 12th highest paid superintendent in the state).

Teachers in Washington are also well-paid, relatively. The average teacher salary was $91,720 in FY 2023-24, according to the National Education Association, making them the fourth-highest paid in the nation.

With much of a district’s budget made up of salaries, this plays a role. But the financial challenges districts are facing are driven by more than simply salaries.

Thank you for all your thoughtful responses to last month's survey on what you'd like to ask high school seniors in our region. Some of those questions will be incorporated into our senior spotlight discussions next month.

For this month's poll, I wrote recently about an AI tool introduced in Ferndale elementary schools, in part to provide reading interventions that were previously provided by special education teachers (many of those teachers were cut to address Ferndale's budget challenges). I’m interested in how these tools are being introduced in local schools and, a bit down the line, whether they actually work.

Education Week: Early educators are sounding the alarm about the impact of excessive screen time on school readiness, motor skills, social-emotional maturity, attention spans and overall independence.

Houston Landing: At the now defunct online news outlet, I came across this piece when it was nominated for a national award. English language learners are more likely to become valedictorians than their classmates in Houston's school district.

On Background: Demystify Local News: A shameless plug for our new podcast. I'll be on an episode in a few weeks talking all things education in our region.