Letter to the Editor: Please take a moment to advocate for our kids

To the Editor:

Significant budget cuts are coming next year for the Shoreline School District Budget. It is undecided at this point if next year’s budget will be reduced by $13M or $19M. However, the scale of the cut is around 10% of our total budget. We need action from our parent community now.

We are still hoping that legislative action can help us decrease our potential budget cuts for Shoreline Public Schools next year. However, we are facing more deadlines as bills move to the floor. March 8th at 5 PM is the next big cutoff; this is the date and time by which bills must have passed the chamber in which they started to stay under consideration. We need to put pressure on our state legislators and senators. Increased state funding means our local levy money can be put towards other funding shortfalls and reduce the severity of our budget cuts in the years to come.

Please take the following action steps today, to help reduce the severity of budget cuts:

1) Write to State Legislators

To make it easy, the Shoreline PTA Council site has a sample letters to send to legislators. There are two buttons for sample form emails (one to house representatives, one to senators). There are a few places to insert the name of your child/ren’s school, how the cuts will affect your child’s education, and your name at the bottom.

(If you have already emailed in the past, THANK YOU. These are new, updated letters -- and each one helps.)

2) Call your State Legislators

Once you have written, you can call! You can make a difference by picking up the phone and asking your representatives to fund our schools.

1st Legislative DistrictSenator Derek Stanford: (360) 786-7600
Rep. Shelley Kloba: (360) 786-7900
Rep. Davina Duerr: (360) 786-7928

32nd Legislative DistrictSenator Jesse Salomon: (360) 786-7662
Rep. Cindy Ryu: (360) 786-7880
Rep. Lauren Davis: (360) 786-7910

Thank you so much for supporting our kids and our schools!

Maris Abelson
Shoreline Schools Parent