This year a bipartisan coalition of state legislators worked together to provide an historic investment in our state’s K-12 education system, boosting school spending by $1.3 billion, an increase of $1,237 per student. It was the largest education budget increase in state history and continues the major turnaround in education spending currently underway.

Since 2013, education spending has increased by $4.5 billion and state spending per student has increased 33 percent. For 30 years education was not a budget priority, but over the past few years, we’ve seen what a dramatic change is possible across the spectrum of education when we work together to make it our priority.

In fact, this dramatic change made national news when we passed the first college tuition reduction in the nation this year.

The question I’m hearing from parents is what these new investments mean for their children’s schools. In other words, what are we buying with all this new money?

First, we are filling in gaps created by decades of underfunding. These include paying for the actual transportation costs of the school districts, providing full funding of materials and supplies for the school districts and paying for all-day kindergarten statewide by next school year.

Once we addressed the chronically underfunded areas, we focused on the greatest opportunities for turning around Washington’s record on education. That meant major investments in reducing class sizes in kindergarten through third grade classrooms where research says it’s most effective, nearly doubling support for high poverty students, reforming bilingual education and providing salary increases and improved health benefits for teachers.

Achieving these results required the support of a broad, bipartisan coalition. Parents, teachers, advocates and legislators came together to agree on directing this major investment in schools, passing the Legislature by landslide margins in both the Senate and House.

We began this year with many budget challenges but Republicans and Democrats came together on education, agreeing on many of the results you see listed here, even before the final budget agreement was reached.

This huge improvement toward fully funding education came in addition to historic expansion of early learning access and quality. Research shows that high quality early learning pays major dividends throughout a student’s education and life. This led us to pass the Early Start Act which improves the quality of early childhood education while rapidly expanding early learning opportunities in the budget by 85 percent.

Our focus on education did not end in high school, but addressed the full spectrum of education from preschool through college. We are now a nationally recognized leader because our budget actually reduced the cost of college for our state’s students.

After decades of skyrocketing tuition rates, we successfully fought for and passed a significant reduction of college tuition. Students at our major research universities such as UW will see tuition drop by 15 percent. Regional colleges such as WWU will drop tuition by 20 percent. Community colleges will drop tuition by 5 percent.

Once again, these were bipartisan victories that will fundamentally alter Washington’s trajectory for education. Rather than seeing new state investments go two-to-one toward programs other than education, we are now on course for the opposite: education spending is rapidly rising at a rate of two-to-one over non-education spending.

These monumental investments were made possible by the economy roaring back to life in the Puget Sound Region, providing $3.2 billion more in revenue than the previous budget – a 9 percent increase. As other parts of the state struggle to recover, we made sure that all of our education investments put the highest-need school districts first to ensure equal and fair education advancement across the state.

Thirty years of neglect will not be undone in just one or two budgets, but if the progress we’ve made working together is any indication, we are set for a major transformation of education across the spectrum, from preschool through college. The news on education in Washington is good and our children’s schools are already benefitting.

Sen. Andy Hill represents Kirkland, Redmond, Duvall, Sammamish and Woodinville (45th Legislative District) in the Washington State Senate and serves as chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.