Don't shortchange our children on Families and Education Levy

To be a first-class city, we must have a first-class public educational system that provides positive learning environments and ensures improved academic chances of success for our children.

For our city to produce the future Nobel Prize winners, CEOs or Rhodes scholars, we must continue the effective partnership between the city of Seattle and Seattle Public Schools that first was envisioned under former Mayor Norm Rice.

Once again, Seattle's voters will be asked to carry out this vision by supporting the 2004 Families and Education Levy.

In 1990, when we first supported the levy, we wanted to provide supplemental educational and development services to improve student academic achievement. This powerful partnership yielded programs for preschool and early childhood education, family support and involvement services, out-of-school activities, and student health services.

The renewal of the Families and Education Levy is before the City Council, and an affirmative vote by the council on July 12 will send it to the ballot on Sept. 14.

We agree with Mayor Greg Nickels' focus on academic achievement with measurable results. But in redirecting the goals of the levy, we cannot abruptly pass on programs that have worked for our children the past 14 years.

To keep the levy amount to $103 million under the mayor's original proposal, the mayor eliminated the middle-school support program, cut family-support workers and nurses, and shifted other programs to the city's general fund.

If we are committed to making a difference, we must provide adequate funding to prepare and support our children in schools. We must also reach out to students who have already dropped out of school, and re-engage them and their families.

The city's general fund has increasingly augmented the levy throughout its life. Current projections show at least a $25 million shortfall in the general fund in the next couple of years. Reliance on the general fund to pick up other levy programs will leave such programs at the mercy of other competing programs.

So we are asking you, the voters, to make some conscious choices on behalf of our children. We ask that you consider the following:

• Preschool and early education. Based on the mayor's recommendation, we seek to establish neighborhood-based early learning networks in low-income areas of the city that serve preschool to 4-year-olds and include support for children in day care and preschool-to-kindergarten transition services. We also propose adding funding for training, curriculum materials and assistance with accreditation for child-care centers serving children from infancy to age 3 to help fill a gap in structured care at a vital time of their development.

• Family support and involvement. This allows for growth of programs that help families of children in schools. Support workers based at the schools use a case-management approach to ensure a child has support at home, as well as at school, to overcome obstacles to learning. We recommend supporting existing programs and beginning new partnerships with community groups to provide these important services.

• Middle- and high-school support. We propose to continue with a case-management approach that identifies and helps high-risk students in middle and high schools. At the same time, we will add school-based mental-health counseling and truancy/dropout prevention services and coordinate all these services with programs for after-school activities, giving kids a positive after-school support system.

• Student health services. The strain on our public-health system only heightens the need for adequate school-based health services. Our proposal supports school health clinics, provides for no cuts in the number of school nurses and offers funding to better coordinate the delivery of health care to students.

• Evaluation. After two renewals, how do we know if the levy programs work? We are adding research-driven analysis of measurable outcomes for each program. This will inform the School District and the city about which programs prove effective for our children.

We can fund these identified programs with a levy proposal of under $120 million. It's not just about test scores, or about dropout rates. It's about engaging our children in the learning process and keeping them pointed in the right direction. This is a sound investment in our future generation.

Seattle City Councilman David J. Della chairs the council's Committee of the Whole, which is considering the proposed 2004 Families and Education Levy. City Councilwoman Jan Drago is council president.