School Financing: Remember, it's a paramount duty

There's something about their responsibility for school financing that seems to prompt cold sweats, shifty eye movements and hasty subject changing among state leaders. The state constitution's "paramount duty" to provide for schools? Lawmakers prefer talking about their work on school vending machines, teacher accountability or some such busy work.

A state study, led by former state Treasurer Dan Grimm, could help lawmakers focus. The Basic Education Finance Joint Task Force is beginning to get down to key phases of its examination, which is supposed to produce recommendations for Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature by Dec. 1.

Last week, Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson laid out some of the fundamental needs to the task force (on which she also serves as a member). Among oh so many other things, she covered formulas for the numbers of teachers, librarians and support staff needed in elementary, middle and high schools. Her documentation was so comprehensive as to almost induce a degree of understanding for the Legislature's perennial difficulties of getting its arms around school finances. But not really, because legislators and, to a lesser degree, the state's governors have flunked school funding for lack of will and prioritization, not a need to know all the details.

As Bergeson warns, some state school districts are on the brink of financial collapse. A few are there. Others can keep afloat for now by dismantling innovative programs that allowed seniors to pass 2008's tougher graduation requirements.

Seattle Public Schools finance chief Don Kennedy says the district will do reasonably well for the coming budget, in part because of good reserves, but faces serious issues in a year. Like King and other counties, schools face structural financial problems ducked by Olympia. As with counties, local factors help determine the order and the degree to which everyone will crash and burn, absent more responsible state decisions.