State should shift cuts in education to less-urgent programs

THE cuts in state money for public schools in the proposed Senate and House budgets are unnecessarily deep. They need to be shifted to programs less urgent.

The Legislature should eliminate the General Assistance Unemployable program. It is medical care and cash — typically $339 a month — for adults of working age who the state believes are unable to work because of injury or mental disorder, including drug use, alcohol use and depression. These are people who don't qualify for state unemployment pay, state institutions, federal welfare or federal disability.

Not all states have such a program. Washington has because we are a humane state and could afford it. The program does, however, cost $412 million in the coming two-year budget period, and attracts no federal money.

In her budget, Gov. Christine Gregoire judged that the state should cut the program entirely to make room for more important things. The House of Representatives, however, proposes to keep 92 percent of it, and the Senate proposed to keep 60 percent of it. The two chambers would spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on unemployable adults than Gregoire would, and hundreds of millions less on kids in school.

That is a bad trade. Education is the best social program there is. To slash that — to fire the foreign-language teacher or the math teacher, to cancel band, to eliminate the guidance counselor, to push up class sizes, to eliminate programs for the gifted, all in order to run an optional state disability program — is a mistake.

Some in the Legislature would save the unemployable program and cut public education on the belief that the people would vote to tax themselves to save education. But what if they don't?

There is another untapped source of money for schools: the ability of state employees to pay more for their health insurance. The House and Senate budgets promise state employees they will pay no more than 12 percent of the premiums — a figure that is about one-third the average in the private sector.

If public employees paid even 18 percent of their health-insurance premiums, tens of millions of dollars could be saved for education.