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Court rules against state on school funding!
Today Judge John Erlick of King County Superior Court ruled that the state not met its constitutional requirements for “ample” funding of schools. I’m still working my way through the ruling, but released the following statement earlier today. Statement from Rep. Ross Hunter on King County Superior Court’s school funding ruling “Today’s court ruling doesn’t…
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Thanks for attending my telephone town hall
We made almost 30,000 calls to people in the 48th district tonight. Over 6000 attended part of the town hall, with about 500 people on the call for most of the time, and 160 die-hards who stayed until the end. I’ve never had more than 200 people at a town hall before, so this reached…
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New Newsletter Available
I emailed out a newsletter today. I’m attaching a link to the PDF version of it – this is somewhat easier to print out and read if you’re a print person. 2009-12-15 Newsletter I expect to produce much more regular newsletters now that we are approaching the session. Please let me know if there is…
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Education Agenda for 2010
I just posted a bunch of entries on my blog (www.rosshunter.info) that are part of what needs to happen this year on the K-12 front. I broke it up so that the items would be readable, unlike my multi-page newsletters… 2010 will be a pivotal one for education in Washington at all levels. There are…
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Local School Levies
School districts are allowed to raise local levies to fund things that are not “basic education.” The state limits the amount they can raise to a percentage of the total they receive in state and federal funding. This is so that districts like Bellevue don’t raise twice as much as districts like Yakima. The standard…
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Race To The Top Funding
The Obama administration under Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made $4.35 billion available to districts that demonstrate they are making progress in four areas: Standards and Assessments Data Systems to Support Instruction Great Teachers and Leaders Turning Around Struggling Schools We have real work to do in order to have even a remote chance of…
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Education Funding in 2010
This will be a difficult year for short-term funding of education in Washington, and in almost all of the other states. In 2009 we cut everything that moved in the budget, but made the smallest cuts in the K-12 budget. I expect this to be true in 2010 as well, and will work hard to…
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Education Standards
As all of you who have children know, they will often live up to what you expect of them, as long as they believe the expectations are reasonable. My consistent belief is that we should expect all of our students to graduate from high school ready to succeed in whatever it is they want to…
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Another Bizarre Supreme Court Decision
Today the WA State Supreme Court issued a decision in the Federal Way school district case. Federal Way sued the state complaining that our distribution of funds did not meet the constitution’s requirement for a “general and uniform” way of funding schools. In specific, the district complained that since allocations to school districts for teacher…
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McCleary Case – Education Funding in the courts
Closing arguments were heard last week in the “McCleary case.” The summary below from one of our non-partisan staff attorneys is very brief, but clear. (As is usual with her work – we are lucky to have someone this smart working for us.) This suit will provide further impetus for the legislature to finish the work…