Walter Backstrom’s Jan 30th column, “There’s enough cash – just not enough courage,” contradicts itself.

It first says “There’s enough cash” for our schools, then says “Washington ranks 47th among the states in funding for education.”

Specifically, it would take more than $1 billion, just to bring Washington up to the U.S. average for K-12 schools.

Does Mr. Backstrom know of somewhere in the budget where we could get $1 billion? If so, he should let Rep. Skip Priest (who has worked indefatigably for the past two years on K-12 restructuring) know, so Skip can stop his considerable work to this end.

Backstrom goes on to state: “The freewheeling Democrats, led by the governor, gave away the store to all the special interests.” Does he believe that even a sixth of our $6 billion deficit was caused by wasteful spending on things like children’s health care and our expanding prison population?

Has he not heard of the unregulated junk mortgage crisis, triggering our economy’s collapse, the layoffs, the unemployment, and the huge drop in sales tax revenue caused by these cascading catastrophes?

The K-12 restructuring bill Reps. Priest and Pat Sullivan have been working on, now in front of the Legislature, is specifically designed to remedy the minority graduation rate disparity, which Backstrom finds so sobering. Do we have the guts to follow through with it?

Mr. Backstrom says we should raise taxes to adequately fund our schools. I agree. Our children are the first generation of students since 1776 who are less well educated than their parents.

– Pat Montgomery