The Seattle Times provided a fairly good overview Sunday of school funding and why some districts are dealing with budget shortfalls. However, they understated the spending increases related to the McCleary decision.

The Times writes, “The state spent about $9 billion a year on education a couple years before the overhaul — dubbed the ‘McCleary fix’ — took effect. After 2018, the state’s annual spending on schools has grown to more than $13 billion.”

That $9 billion a year is total state spending in state fiscal years 2016 and 2017—that is not the pre-McCleary baseline. The state Supreme Court decided the McCleary case in January 2012. In FY 2012, total state funding for public schools was $6.814 billion. The Legislature began to make McCleary-related enhancements to public schools spending in the 2011–13 biennium, and they were fully phased in for school year 2018–19. Total state spending on public schools was $12.455 billion in FY 2019 and had grown to $13.409 billion in FY 2021. In our final accounting of the McCleary-related changes, we estimated that McCleary-related enhancements from 2011–13 to 2019–21 totaled $8 billion.

The Times continues,

Lawmakers financed the increase in part through a higher state property tax.

At the same time, lawmakers also placed limits on how much school districts could raise and spend from their own local taxes. This was intended to reinforce that the essential dollars to run a school district were the responsibility of the state. Those limits were phased in over time. In 2017, the year of the overhaul, local tax revenues made up about 18% of the money going to schools. In the succeeding years, that figure has been closer to 12%.

As we discussed in our report, the Legislature made property tax changes in 2017. The state property tax was increased in CY 2018 and local levy authority was reduced in CY 2019. The statutory property tax growth rate was also suspended temporarily. Then, in 2019, the Legislature increased the levy authority limit. The chart below was in our report, but I’ve updated it with the most recent years of data. From 2017 to 2022, state property tax revenues increased by 111.2% while local enrichment levy revenues decreased by 5.6%. Together, state property taxes plus local enrichment levies increased by 48.3% over that period.

Local enrichment levies accounted for 17.48% of school district revenues in 2017–18 and that percentage dropped to 10.45% in 2019–20. But it has increased since then to 12.10% in 2021–22.