Redesigning Washington’s School Finance System to Better Serve Students: Eight Policy Recommendations from UW SUPES

Abstract

Over the past two years, beginning in the summer 2024 to the summer of 2026, a group of 29 school district superintendents (UW SUPES) have convened on a quarterly basis to learn about school finance policy in Washington state, identify short term challenges, policy remedies, and advocacy plans, and develop a shared vision of: (a) an adequate and equitable state school finance system; (b) the key budgetary challenges facing school districts; and (c) policy reforms that would address these challenges. This document summarizes the following school finance policy reforms recommended by UW SUPES, which would improve, and largely transform, Washington’s school finance system to better serve students:

1. Replace the funding mechanisms for the Learning Assistance Program (LAP) and the Traditional Bilingual Instructional Program (TBIP) with student weights. Household income-based weights that replace LAP need to be substantial and increasing with higher rates of poverty to account for the impacts of concentrated poverty on educational opportunity. Weights for multiple language learner students that replace TBIP should adjust for students with limited or interrupted formal education and for districts serving a student population with a larger number of heritage languages.

2. Replace the single funding weight for special education with multiple student weights based measures of "intensity of services,” which will correspond to the staffing and equipment requirements needed to provide students with access to grade-level curriculum aligned with a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment.

3. Coordinate the state’s mixed-delivery early childhood programs into an integrated P-12 system, ensuring that Transition to Kindergarten, Early Childhood Education and Assistant Program, Working Connections Child Care, and the federal Head Start program are braided in ways that avoid competition and embrace complementary approaches to ensuring access, equity, and effective early learning and care services. Create a mechanism to provide universal childcare.

4. Fully equalize the tax base for both enrichment levies and capital projects levies by expanding the Local Effort Assistance program.

5. Identify district costs that are fully outside the control of school districts and provide a separate funding stream outside the funding for Materials, Supplies, and Operating Costs.

6. Replace regionalization factors with a cost of labor index and use larger regions.

7. Provide additional property tax relief to households in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and lower income levels to address the state’s regressive tax structure.

8. Establish structures that ensure parents, students, and community leaders, particularly those most impacted by educational inequities, have meaningful roles in shaping state school finance and school district budgeting policies, setting educational priorities, and evaluating outcomes.

Enacting one or more of these policy recommendations would improve the state’s school funding model. However, we note that school finance policy reform alone will not address all educational equity issues. A perfect funding model will not produce positive outcomes if it fails to change the underlying structures of who makes decisions in schools and whose voices matter. School finance policy reforms must be paired with accountability measures that empower community members including students and parents to have a voice in establishing goals and determining how to measure progress, at the classroom, school, and district level. District and school budgets reflect values and should be align with the goals and purposes of public education that local community members prioritize. More broadly, education policy will never fully address the economic inequality, structural racism, and childhood poverty that permeates Washington communities and U.S. society. Improving school finance policy is one critical step towards creating a more just society that provides equitable opportunity for all children.