In November 2020, about eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I called attention to how classroom closures were causing academic, emotional and social harm to the majority of K-12 students across our state — especially those from lower-income families, and children with special educational needs.
The 2020-21 school year was only about two months along, yet there were already obvious signs that the state’s remote-learning approach was failing our children both “literally and figuratively,” as I put it in a policy paper shared with my fellow legislators and the news media at that time.
While most classrooms eventually reopened the following spring, the damage had already been done. That could and should have been the low point for our state’s children. Yet the failures have continued in the nearly five years since, and in more ways.
On the education front, the Democrats’ post-pandemic response was tragic. Former Governor Inslee and state schools superintendent Chris Reykdal, the champion of learning-loss denial, got in the way of every Republican effort to address the learning opportunities lost when classrooms were closed.
As recently as November 2023, after the latest round of sinking student test scores confirmed what some of us predicted two years before, I was still working to convince our Democratic colleagues of the need for interventions like intensive tutoring and summer-school programs. The majority never supported these ideas.
Legislative Democrats have also failed our children aside from the pandemic fallout. This year, for example, they gutted the new parental-rights law and instead, positioned government to interfere in how children and their parents interact.
Recently I read a scathing review of how the Democrats this year also didn’t reallocate the funding that helped foster children graduate on time from high school. These are children who were removed from their family homes with a promise that the state would care for them.
The critics correctly labeled the multimillion-dollar cut as “feckless, slapdash budgeting.” However, they incorrectly blamed it on legislators as a whole. The majority Democrats alone are accountable.
If the goal was to shame those who failed foster kids, being vague about who’s responsible doesn’t get it done.
This would not have happened with the Senate Republicans’ proposed “$ave Washington” budget. Our plan balanced without any tax increases, and everyone receiving services through the previous budget would have continued to do so. The majority rejected the $ave Washington budget twice.
