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North Mason superintendent criticizes funding

North Mason School District Superintendent Dana Rosenbach spoke out at the school board’s April 21 meeting about how the decade-old McCleary v. Washington decision has affected funding for smaller school districts.

Rosenbach criticized the effect of “regionalization” on the legal funding mechanisms for school salaries and compensation.

“A group will present the 2023 Legislature with a report on how it’s working, with some recommendations for adjustments,” Rosenbach said. “The committee is taking input from school districts.”

As a member of the Washington Association of School Administrators Board, Rosenbach has contributed to that report, noting that WASA makes its recommendations “based on the needs of all the school districts in the state, so they’re maybe not going to have quite as strong a stance on regionalization and its impact as a district like ours.”

Rosenbach said WASA is representing not just smaller school districts, but also “the I-5 corridor districts that are really appreciating getting more than other districts in their funding models.”

Rosenbach pointed out to WASA the number of “commonly

accepted” economic models for determining and projecting cost-of-living expenses “that we could use to compare districts,” but when the Legislature wrote its McCleary resolution, Rosenbach insisted “they didn’t use any model that looks anything like those that are commonly accepted in the business world,” and instead based their models almost exclusively on housing.

“The common models include not only housing, but also energy costs, the cost of medical and other services, the cost of food and clothing one’s family,” Rosenbach said. “If you compare Belfair to Bremerton by any commonly accepted model of determining cost of living, it is 0.3% less (expensive) to live in Belfair than in Bremerton, but the WASA funding model gives Bremerton 12% more than they give North Mason.”

By the “commonly accepted” models Rosenbach cited, she argued that a difference of less than 1% between school districts’ respective costs of living should not count as a difference at all between them.

“We had to fight to get 6% more, or the difference between us and Bremerton would be 18%, not 12%,” Rosenbach said. “If they were to adjust our regionalization properly, we might not have to run another school levy again. We could pay our teachers comparably to what our neighbors do, because we’d be back in the place we were prior to McCleary.”

Although Rosenbach credited the North Mason School District’s ability to retain newer teachers to the district being “frugal in other ways,” she said the top end of the regionalization model has caps that are specific to the various school districts.

“The cap in Bremerton, North Kitsap and Central Kitsap is 18% high, or 12% higher than the cap in North Mason,” Rosenbach said. “By law, I can’t agree to pay over that cap.”

Rosenbach empathized with older teachers who decline to spend their imminent retirement years in a district like North Mason because their retirement is based on the highest salaries they can earn over five consecutive years.

“If they can drive a little bit farther for those five years, and make more money than they can make here, they have to take care of themselves and their families,” Rosenbach said. “That’s why I made these statements to the compensation committee.”

“One of the consistent ways in which our district is shortchanged by the state is via equity,” District 4 Director John Campbell said. “We have students who are just as bright as the kids in Bremerton, but we get consistently underfunded.”

Rosenbach nonetheless expressed optimism that the state’s graduation requirements would recognize other ways that students demonstrate learning, besides just testing, which would allow districts to provide school credits for experiences and credits earned in other ways.

“It’s very exciting that our state Board of Education is considering how to support us,” Rosenbach said, “but again, it’s an equity issue, since a smaller rural school district like ours is not funded to provide all of the currently available pathways to our students, that they might have access to in Tacoma, Seattle or elsewhere along the I-5 corridor, and that needs to be fixed as well.”

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

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Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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