Sen. Andy Hill hasn’t done as much for education as he claims.

Claim 1: $1 billion for K-12 education added without accounting gimmicks or tricks.

First, more than half of the additional money that was put into K-12 this last biennium came from one-time sources, which will be gone next year.

Second, Sen. Hill orchestrated a complicated swap, taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Public Works Trust Account and moving it to education accounts. He then back-filled just a portion of that infrastructure funding with $155 million worth of bonds to be paid over 25 years at 4 percent interest. Essentially, instead of working to find a stable source of funding for education, he led us to accrue long-term debt on an annual operating expense.

Here’s another way to think of it: Preschoolers today will be paying for this year’s K-12 spending after they have graduated from college. I think most people would agree that is an accounting trick!

Claim 2: Added $4 to education for every $1 of non-education spending increases

This refers to the supplemental budget passed in March 2014, which added an additional $58 million to education. This sounds like a lot of money, but unfortunately, it equals just 1 percent of the amount required by the Supreme Court’s McCleary decision, which requires the legislature to increase education funding by $4-5 billion per biennium. Fifty-eight million is just a drop in the bucket.

These are Sen. Hill’s education accomplishments. His leadership in the Senate has failed our children. The Senate failed to chart a plan to adequately fund education by 2019, and it now stands in contempt of the State Supreme Court. Sen. Hill does not deserve our vote for another term!

Kathleen Reynolds

Redmond