AWSP Blog

It was a busy, busy week in the Legislature with committees having to pass policy bills out by today, Friday, March 26. Several bills were changed significantly by the opposite house, particularly SB 5044 – related to professional learning on topics of equity and cultural competency – and SB 5265, which creates a bridge year program for an additional year of high school. In addition to work on policy bills, both the Senate and the House released their operating, supplemental, capital, and transportation budgets. Next week will be busy as fiscal committees have to meet the deadline of Friday, April 2 to pass bills out of these committees.

We reached the one-year anniversary of school closures to in-person learning this past week, and work continues to get all school buildings open once again. The ever-changing requirements and guidance for our schools keeps coming, among them being Governor Inslee’s announcement last Friday that requires all school districts to provide all K–12 students with the opportunity to receive at least two days per week of in-person learning no later than April 19. OSPI published a Q&A document that you may find helpful.

After this Tuesday’s bill cutoff, the surviving bills switched houses and the committee hearing process started up again. This week and next week’s schedule of bill hearings are listed below. Work on the supplemental, operating, and capital budgets continues. The state’s budget outlook seems to look better each month and a third round of federal funding is on its way. But our work for stable education funding is far from over. The next major revenue forecast will be released at the March 17th meeting of the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council and the Senate and the House will release their budgets shortly thereafter. Our job is to keep telling our stories about what financial support we need from the state to educate each and every student safely.

This week was all about floor action in both the House and the Senate. Listening to the discussion among legislators as they discuss bills and potential amendments - even on Zoom - can be very insightful. Legislators are working hard to get bills passed by their next deadline of March 9th when they have to be passed out of each house to stay alive.

The first fiscal committee deadline passed on Monday, and the list of active bills got even smaller as executive action by both the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Ways and Means Committee was not taken on some bills. The Legislature spent the rest of this week (and will spend all of next week) on floor action trying to get bills passed out of each house in order to meet the next deadline of March 9th. This is a much slower process in a remote session, so fewer bills will survive this session. We are watching to see which bills are still moving and will keep advocating to get bills of importance to the floor for votes.