Guest column: Some progress for state bilingual education program

Your July 8 editorial stated that funding for legislation to recruit and train bilingual students to become future teachers was not in the budget adopted by the legislature. I regret that I was the source of this inaccurate information.

To explain, the Commission on Hispanic Affairs sought legislation that would enable school districts, in partnership with two- and four-year colleges, to train and mentor bilingual high school students to become future teachers and counselors.

Students who complete the program would qualify for full-tuition conditional loans for college. To avoid loan repayment, they would be required to serve in the public schools in their respective region of the state for at least five years.

After significant political turmoil, the bill (SHB 1445) signed into law by Governor Inslee stated that the future bilingual educator portion of the bill was “subject to the availability of amounts appropriated for this specific purpose.” Despite this, the final budget approved by the legislature omitted mention of funding for the bilingual education initiative.

This caused me and senior staff in the administrative agencies to conclude there would be no funding. But we later learned that narrowly constructed budget language cannot override legislative intent. It’s a safe bet that neither the Legislature nor Gov. Inslee intended that only the Democrats’ portion of the bill would be funded.

Leading up to the funding confusion, what surprised even veteran political observers was how the bill played out in the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. Sen. Hans Zeiger (R-Puyallup), chair of the K-12 and early learning committee, navigated a bipartisan bilingual educator bill (SB 5712) through the Senate, where it was approved without a dissenting vote, 48-0. The Senate also approved $1.48 million to support the initiative.

Trouble loomed in the House. Rather than endorsing the Senate-approved bill, a House amendment attempted to remove one of the most important provisions — the full-tuition conditional loan for students who complete the program.

After we advocated against the amendment, House Democrats not only dropped the amendment, they eliminated SB 5712 from further consideration by failing to vote on it in committee.

Sen. Zeiger had other thoughts. He added the bilingual educator initiative to another education bill his committee had already approved. This led to a compromise bill, SHB 1445, which Sen. Christine Rolfes (D-Bainbridge Island) called “an elegant compromise.”

House Democrats, apparently, didn’t think it was so elegant. They tried, without success, to get Gov. Inslee to veto the bilingual educator portion of the bill once it reached his desk. They left intact a dual-language program, a part of the bill that was sponsored by Democrats.

Just this week, it was finally determined that funding for the bilingual educator initiative would be $400,000 for the biennium, less than 30 percent of the $1.48 million the Senate had approved. The dual-language grant program will receive $500,000.

In the end, there’s progress in spite of House Democrats’ resistance. I don’t believe their resistance to the bilingual educator initiative had anything to do with policy, purpose or funding. But as we learned in previous years, turf, who gets credit, and political retribution often can get in the way of sound, innovative, and needed policy initiatives.

If Donald Trump wasn’t president, it’s almost enough to make this lifelong Democrat change parties.

This story was originally published July 31, 2017 at 8:11 AM with the headline "Guest column: Some progress for state bilingual education program."