How to Restore Local Control of Public Schools in Washington State

Local control means that local parents control the policies in their local school district through the election of their local school board members. Until recently, thanks to several clauses in the Washington State constitution, our state was a “local control” state. In this article, we will review our state constitution with the goal of restoring local control of public schools here in Washington state.

Despite the fact that the Washington State Constitution includes several sections to protect local control over public schools, the past 20 years has seen corrupt politicians in Olympia increasingly tighten their draconian policies over our public schools. These insane policies have gone way beyond imposing “Sex Ed for Kinders”, promoting “Racial Division” and allowing boys to enter girls bathrooms and compete in girls sports. The past two years as seen corrupt Olympia politicians shut down all schools across our state - harming the development of over one million children - despite the fact that no students were ill and despite the fact that children lack the ACE 2 receptors needed to catch or transmit the corona virus. Even when schools reopened, children were required to wear masks for an entire year – despite the fact that masks have never been shown to stop any virus. Olympia politicians even had the audacity to require that teachers take experimental clot shots – violating their God given right to medical freedom – firing thousands of highly qualified teachers – and leading to the current teacher shortage crisis here in Washington state.

During this time, I spoke at numerous school board meetings to ask school board members to defy these state-imposed draconian policies. I pointed to sections of our State Constitution that prohibited Olympia from controlling local schools.

Sadly, school board members - as well as parents and teachers – seem to be completely unaware of the history or meaning of our state constitution. Therefore, in order to help parents, teachers and school board members better understand what it means to be a “local control” state, we will take a trip down memory lane back to 1889 and the drafting of the Washington state constitution.