Cutting aid now for struggling students will cost a lot more later

In Olympia, there’s been a lot of positioning around education this year. A lot of talk about holding K-12 sacrosanct amid the general budget-squeezing climate.

But the spending plans offered by both legislative chambers do, in fact, propose significant cuts to a certain category of school funding: programs that help struggling students. That is, foster kids, homeless youth and others at elevated risk for leaving high school without a diploma.

There’s a legitimate argument that in the face of a $15 billion budget shortfall, every branch of government must look for places to trim. But those cuts should be made judiciously, balancing immediate savings against the long-term costs.

In that context, proven impact matters. However, current spending proposals suggest lawmakers have abandoned their scalpels in favor of razing whole categories of aid for students on the margins.

Take the de facto elimination of Graduation Success, a program run by the foster care advocacy group Treehouse. It may surprise readers to learn that foster youth have the lowest graduation rates of all students in Washington — worse than the rates for homeless kids.

Ten years ago, only 36% of foster youths in ninth grade were graduating on time. Treehouse hired people to meet with these students each week, one-on-one. They acted as a parent might, bird-dogging missed homework assignments, making sure intermittent absences didn’t become habitual. A single specialist would follow the same student, as cheerleader and counselor, throughout high school, providing a rare form of consistency to kids who sometimes move between multiple homes or school districts in a single year.

After a decade of this work, Graduation Success has spread across the state, from Seattle to Spokane, and the rate of high school completion for foster kids is up by 15 percentage points. That’s more than double the increase for students overall.

But under the House’s proposed budget, all state funding for Graduation Success — $7 million a year — is wiped out, starting this summer. In the Senate proposal, it’s gone after next year. Either way, Treehouse leaders are preparing to cut the program, which serves 1,450 students annually, by about 65%. That means 940 kids currently getting help will be on their own.

It’s part of an overall squeeze of $49 million to $138 million for grant programs aimed at students who struggle. An effort known as Ninth Grade Success is also on the chopping block.

Driven by research that shows students who fail one course during freshman year are three times more likely to drop out, Ninth Grade Success trains schools to spot red flags in academic or attendance problems and work intensively with those kids so they don’t get lost.

Since Ninth Grade Success launched in 2019, the 68 schools using this approach have boosted their all-course passage rates for ninth graders by up to seven points. Mount Tahoma High School, in Tacoma, posted an incredible 20 point leap, from 45% of ninth graders on track to nearly 65% in three years.

Together, Graduation Success and Ninth Grade Success cost $10 million annually, a number dwarfed by the future expense of high school dropouts in public assistance and lost tax revenue. That totals about $600,000, per student, over the course of their lifetimes, according to the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. Multiply that by the number of foster kids facing cuts and you’re looking at a bill of $564 million in future costs.

All to say, these programs enable more young people to contribute to our state’s economy. Lawmakers must take that calculus to the bargaining table.