The Renton Education Association (REA) is fighting for more funding from the state during the legislative session while pushing the local school board to consider making systemic changes, such as scheduling structure.
The REA is a union representing about 1,100 teachers, counselors, nurses, therapists, deans and instructional facilitators in the Renton School District.
“The biggest thing right now is just support for students who have unmet needs, whether they’re mental health, just housing insecurity, you know, making sure that the kids have what they need, so that they can be ready to learn,” REA president Julianna Dauble said.
Dauble said they are currently in open contract bargaining and are negotiating with the district to try to lower class sizes and get workload relief.
“We really, really need more support when it comes to students with what we call tier three behaviors — kids that are dysregulated and a threat to themselves or others,” Dauble said. “We don’t have nearly enough when it comes to mental health care providers.”
Dauble said the REA is fighting for state funding right now while the state Legislature is in session. Dauble said Washington is the 49th most regressive state in the country when it comes to how citizens are taxed, meaning the low-income taxpayers pay a larger percentage of income than middle- and high-income taxpayers.
Renton School District will be cutting 5 percent of its budget next year, a total of $15 million, according to the school district website. The reasons for the cuts are due to “the state’s inadequate school funding.”
“We don’t know where those cuts are going to come from. We have a lot of confidence in our school district leaders that they are doing the best they can to keep those cuts away from the most vulnerable student-vital programming,” Dauble said. “But $15 million in a district our size is a lot and last year we cut $22 million, so we’ve already gone through this. We lost a lot of our classroom support positions last year, so everyone’s pretty scared right now.”
Dauble said because of the cuts, many teachers will not have their contracts renewed, while others will have to deal with increased workloads due to understaffing.
One issue brought up by many students and teachers alike during the Jan. 22 Renton School Board meeting is the problems that arise from the current trimester schedule system.
Dauble said the Secretary of Education during the Obama administration, Arne Duncan, pushed for special funding to states to adopt state laws to require higher standards for graduation. These standards resulted in adding more credits to the high school diploma, causing the districts to look at how they were arranging classes for high school students. Dauble said this resulted in the Renton School District moving to a trimester system to “squish” the required two semesters of classes like math into two trimesters to free up more time for students to take electives.
Dauble said this has led to weird schedules for students and teachers. For example, a student may have algebra one the first trimester, no math the second trimester, and then algebra two with a different teacher in the third trimester, according to Dauble.
“So the pacing, the sequencing of a curriculum for a class is completely broken down,” Dauble said. “I think the worst part of trimesters is the fact that all learning is relational and when kids don’t have time to get to know their teacher, they know they’re going to have a new teacher in 12 weeks, there’s no incentive to try to understand their teachers very well. And teachers don’t have time to get to know 150 students once every trimester.”
Other districts in Washington that had moved to trimesters have since moved back to semesters, according to Dauble. She said she wants the district to work with teachers to explore what the best option for Renton would be.
In Washington, the amount of funding a school receives is based on the number of students at the school, according to Dauble.
“Washington uses what’s called a prototypical school model to figure out how many dollars every school district gets based on how many kids are in elementary, middle and high school,” Dauble said. “It is just ridiculously out of whack. In no way does it match what we’re actually spending.”
This year’s legislative session runs from Jan. 13 to April 27 in Olympia. They will be writing the state budget during that time, a process that occurs every other year.