WA education task force fails to agree on any recommendations for McCleary fix

Washington leaders apart of the Education Funding task force failed to come to an agreement on any recommendations to help fully fund basic education.

While Democrats released a plan which called for more than $7 billion of spending, Republican Senator Ann Rivers defended only releasing a set of guiding principles without a price tag.

"Throwing numbers out willy-nilly when we don't have all of the data that we need in order to make a recommendation about funding, so our feet our held to the fire for a standard that may not be correct," says Rivers.

But Democrat Pat Sullivan criticized the GOP party for this move.

"Simply passing the buck again, after 7 months worth of work and not complying with the legislation that we all voted for. We all said that we were going to make recommendations and here we with a motion to adopt a report that just outlines the work that we did, I think that is a failure," says Sullivan.

After seven months of meetings, Monday marked the last hearing of the task force and each vote came down to a party line split of 4-4. Lawmakers have been working to comply with the state Supreme Court ruling in 2012 which states they must come up with a way to fully fund education. Lawmakers have already used more than $2 billion to help fix the issue, but have yet to figure out how much the state will provide for teacher salaries.