Welcome to This Week in Olympia, your weekly briefing on what's happening under the dome and why it matters for Washington's public schools. I'm your host, Marissa Rathbone, and each week we'll break down the fast-moving action in Olympia. The hearings, the headlines, and the bills you'll want to keep an eye on. Whether you're a district leader, educator, or just policy curious, we're here to make the legislature feel a little more accessible and a lot easier to follow. Let's get into what moved this week and what's coming next. Welcome to This Week in Olympia. I'm Marissa Rathbone, a proud product of Washington Public Schools and your Assistant Executive Director of Government Relations with the Washington Association of School Administrators. Before we dive into this past week in Olympia, a quick note to mark your calendars. Public Education Advocacy Day is coming up on Thursday, January 29th, right here at the Capitol in Olympia. I'll share more details at the end of the podcast and hope to see many of you there. Now, before we get into bills, I want to start with a quick story. As many of you know, I feel very lucky to have been born and raised in Olympia, Washington, and I went to all grades K through 12 in the Olympia School District. I was also really lucky that my parents bought me a car when I turned 16. I just didn't love the type of car that it was. It was a 1965 Plymouth Belvedere, but this was 1994. From my perspective at the time, the car had just one advantage. It was big and sturdy, and it fit a lot of my friends in it, and also on it. One afternoon at the Capitol campus, actually around the Capitol dome, a few friends decided that we would have them sit on the hood in the trunk of my very large, big and sturdy car. We thought it was a great idea at the time. It was not. As I was basically driving the vehicle with them on the hood and the trunk, slow rolling around the Olympia Capitol, a state patrol officer drove up beside me, rolled down his window, and looked at me in the driver's seat and said very calmly, don't do that. Okay, I heard him. He wasn't angry. He was not dramatic. He was just right. Probably not the best idea. So I think about that moment a lot during the legislative session, not just because it happened right there on campus, but because in education policy, we often see well-intentioned ideas that don't fully account for risk. And it's part of our job, yours and mine, to respectfully say, don't do that. At least not this way, not right now. That's a good frame for week two. Week two of a 60-day session, nine weeks in total, so we've got seven more to go. That was math on the fly, folks, is where momentum really starts to build. Committees are deeper into hearings, bills are stacking up, and pressure is quietly increasing. Education bills this week continue to reflect a similar and familiar tension. There is recognition that schools are under real financial strain, clearly. But many proposals are still moving forward without addressing basic education funding or real funding for the policy implementation outside of even basic education WASA along with our partners was again very active this week through testimony written comments and coordination with partners Our positions were guided by, again, a very clear principle. Districts cannot keep absorbing new costs and requirements while cutting staff and programs. Let's walk through some of the major bills we engaged on just this past week. Senate Bill 6113. It's a Department of Revenue cleanup bill. It came up this week and this one needs a little explanation. It is a cleanup request bill from the Department of Revenue. It addresses the implementation issues that they have found from Senate Bill 5814. You know this number, not with love. It was passed during the 2025 legislative session and expands taxation to include staffing services, IT services, and professional development on school districts. As implementation has moved forward, it has become clear that there have been unintended consequences to K-12. WASA testified with our partners as other on Senate Bill 6113. We appreciated that they are willing to revisit the issue, but this bill doesn't go far enough. As we viewed this bill as a potential vehicle to clean up those unintended impacts to public education. But before the public testimony began on this bill, we were told very clearly by a member of the committee that this was not the place to raise those broader K-12 concerns. So we made an adjustment on the fly and abbreviated our public testimony, followed up in writing instead. That follow-up communication, along with supplemental materials and talking points, is available on our website alongside this podcast. We will hear the House version of this bill next week in the House Finance Committee. That bill number is House Bill 2257 with sponsor Representative April Berg. We'll continue to communicate a simpler message there and hope that we're able to explain the full impacts during the hearing live. We still believe there's an opportunity for some relief to K-12 through this policy, so for now, stay tuned and keep communicating what those impacts are directly with your legislators. Senate Bill 5918 is on material supplies and operating costs funding. Of course we love this bill because it's one of our collective priorities. Right now its path forward is uncertain though. Senate Bill 5918 may or may not be voted out of the Senate Early Learning and K-12 Committee. We heard it earlier this week and we're grateful that one of our members was able to clearly communicate what its impacts were and that's Ashley Murphy from the Peninsula School District. She's actually a member of WASBO but spoke on our collective behalf about the importance of fully funding this basic education cost by illuminating for them what the real costs for Peninsula School Districts are versus what the state allocation is and obviously there's a very large gap. We've also heard that Senate Ways and Means is not particularly interested in hearing the bill because as it's been put to us clearly they don't have the money and that's the reality but here's why this still matters if there is one bill this session that would do the most to support student learning it's 5918 far more than any other policy proposal this bill directly supports the conditions that allow schools and students to be successful textbooks technology utilities supplies these are absolutely not extras again as Ashley communicated directly to the members of the Senate Early Learning and K Committee Thank you Ashley That why we are encouraging you too to continue placing pressure let call it encouragement on your legislators If the legislature is serious about supporting student learning this year, which seems evident in the sheer volume of bills impacting K-12, this is the one bill that really truly shows it. Senate Bill 5883. This is the companion bill to 2160 on SEB eligibility expansion, ultimately the biggest unfunded mandate that we've seen so far this session. We again testified con. This bill represents, in our view, the most significant unfunded mandate this session, and as introduced would change SEB eligibility assumptions in a way that shifts costs to districts without state funding to cover those costs. We understand amendments may be coming forward to clarify that the 630-hour look-back would apply only within the same school district, not across any employer in a similar role, which is what the current version of the bill says. That clarification does matter, but even with that change, there are still real fiscal implications for districts. Some legislators are questioning the cost estimates that they've received, And so we need to continue to push on communications related to district level data. So I'll ask all of you again, in partnership with your school business officers, please look at the transition from the 2023-24 school year to the 2024-25 school year. if a substitute worked 630 or more hours in 2023 and they returned in 2024, how many additional employees would your districts have had to cover, assuming that the 2023 school year, 2023-24 school year was the first year that they worked that number of hours for your district? So we assume that that number is more than zero, but even if it is zero, we need to know because there is a presumption that the number is far less than the number that you have all been communicating to me and also with your legislators. So let's crunch those numbers again and be sure we're communicating a consistent message that this is absolutely an unfunded mandate, unquestionably. Those real numbers are critical to making sure legislators understand what this policy means in practice. Let's talk about bringing it back to don't do that. I'll go back to my Plymouth Belvedere story. The car was solid, the intentions were good, but what we're doing with it didn't make sense. That's how parts of this week felt. There are policies moving forward that would genuinely help schools like MSOC funding and there are others layered around them that add cost and complexity without any funding. And the list goes on. Please see the bill watch on our website to see more. If the goal is ultimately increasing and supporting student learning, then we're asking the legislature to do the thing that actually supports student learning. Fund the basic costs of running schools and don't pile on new mandates at the same time. Sometimes the right answer really is don't do that. Looking ahead, week three is the biggest doozy yet, I gotta say. Here's why. The first fiscal The first policy cutoff is February 4th. Some bills will executive out of their committee next week, but many others will wait until the first half of week four, so the start of February right before the cutoff That creates a lot of pressure for legislators and for us Committees are trying to keep options alive and hear bills that they haven heard in the first two weeks, so bills are moving very fast because of that calendar. That's why week three is particularly packed with new bills that have significant consequential outcomes for districts should they pass in their current versions. You'll also start hearing the term NTIB, necessary to implement the budget, which changes the rules later in session, and we will dig in more later. But I'll just note that some of the bills we're going to hear next week may ultimately be considered necessary to implement the budget, if they are, because someone decided they were. So it's important that we continue to stay involved, even if it seems like they may not pass out of committee before the February 4th deadline. Before we close, I want to be very clear about how you can engage right now. Please read TRIO when it hits your inbox on Monday mornings. TRIO will tell you which bills to address, what's moving, and how legislators may be considering them. And as a heads up, the House Education Committee meets next Monday at 1 30. They're scheduled to hear House Bill 2593, a minimum and maximum fund balance bill, and House bill 2551, which is dressed as district financial solvency. Both are really big bills, consequential to pretty much every district across the state, some more than others, so I would encourage you to take a look at those bills over the weekend, and more will be included in TRIO on Monday. Please feed me, feed me, please do feed me. I'm always hungry, but really please provide me your feedback by email because your perspective really matters. It helps to inform who represents us and the types of feedback and remarks we offer the legislature. And that's before, during, and after the hearing on any particular bill. That district level insight is what makes our advocacy effective. That old Plymouth Belvedere was big, sturdy, and in my parents' perspective, very well-intentioned. It just wasn't designed for what we tried to use it for, what I tried to use it for. The same is true for policy sometimes. Our job is to make sure ideas work in the real world. Sometimes that means saying yes and sometimes it means saying don't do that and I hope to see many of you very soon saying say yes or don't do that. Public Education Advocacy Day at the Capitol is an opportunity to do so Thursday, January 29th. We'll kick things off together on the North Capitol steps at 8 30 a.m. After the meetings you've scheduled with your legislators, we'll regroup around 2 o'clock for a debrief, and then at 3 o'clock have an open house for any legislators who are available. It is a very challenging time to get legislators in the room, I will tell you, because there are hearings going on and meetings already scheduled. Hopefully a lot of those meetings will be with you on that day. You can find details about this day on our website or of course you you can email me anytime at m-r-a-t-h-b-o-n-e at wasa-oli.org. Thanks for staying engaged. Week three is coming fast. We have seven more to go and every day matters. I'll be back here with you next week. And again, so very grateful for everything that you do. We'll see you next time.
