Rossi wrote the budget that suspended your COLA (and bet on him to do it again)

As chair of the Senate budget committee, Dino Rossi wrote the 2003-05 state budget, which suspended the COLA and resulted in six straight years of lost wages for teachers and ESP staff. The overall impact of Rossi’s budget — lost funding for the COLA and lost funding for smaller classs sizes — deprived our public schools of nearly $1.2 billion.

Check out the two charts below and remember: A Rossi administration would mean more cuts for educators and public education — cuts we couldn’t afford in the past and can’t affort now.

For a high-resolution downloadable and printable PDF of the Rossi Effect on the COLA, click here.

COLA losses to teachers. Cumulative salary losses to the average teacher due to Dino Rossi’s suspension of the voter-approved I-732 COLA in 2003-04 and 2004-05. (This excludes the adjustment of the state Salary Allocation Model as the result of elimination of Grandfathering in 2007-08. This “salary equalization” did not apply to all districts and so was not an across-the-board increase. WEA Research, September 2008.)

COLA losses to ESP staff. Cumulative salary losses to an 8-year ESP staff member due to Dino Rossi’s suspension of the voter-Approved I-732 COLA in 2003-04 and 2004-05. (This example is based on a full-time paraeducator working 182 days, 8-hours per day at $15.22 per hour in 2002-03.)