John Braun: Instead of failing our children, focus on making their lives better
Friday, August 15, 2025
In November 2020, about eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I called attention to how classroom closures were causing academic, emotional and social harm to the majority of K-12 students across our state — especially those from lower-income families, and children with special educational needs.
The 2020-21 school year was only about two months along, yet there were already obvious signs that the state’s remote-learning approach was failing our children both “literally and figuratively,” as I put it in a policy paper shared with my fellow legislators and the news media at that time.
While most classrooms eventually reopened the following spring, the damage had already been done. That could and should have been the low point for our state’s children. Yet the failures have continued in the nearly five years since, and in more ways.
On the education front, the Democrats’ post-pandemic response was tragic. Former Governor Inslee and state schools superintendent Chris Reykdal, the champion of learning-loss denial, got in the way of every Republican effort to address the learning opportunities lost when classrooms were closed.
As recently as November 2023, after the latest round of sinking student test scores confirmed what some of us predicted two years before, I was still working to convince our Democratic colleagues of the need for interventions like intensive tutoring and summer-school programs. The majority never supported these ideas.
Legislative Democrats have also failed our children aside from the pandemic fallout. This year, for example, they gutted the new parental-rights law and instead, positioned government to interfere in how children and their parents interact.
Recently I read a scathing review of how the Democrats this year also didn’t reallocate the funding that helped foster children graduate on time from high school. These are children who were removed from their family homes with a promise that the state would care for them.
The critics correctly labeled the multimillion-dollar cut as “feckless, slapdash budgeting.” However, they incorrectly blamed it on legislators as a whole. The majority Democrats alone are accountable.
If the goal was to shame those who failed foster kids, being vague about who’s responsible doesn’t get it done.
This would not have happened with the Senate Republicans’ proposed “$ave Washington” budget. Our plan balanced without any tax increases, and everyone receiving services through the previous budget would have continued to do so. The majority rejected the $ave Washington budget twice.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just education where our children are being failed. Because Democrat policies are making the lives of Washington children worse in multiple ways, Senate Republicans have updated our list of legislative priorities.
For the past few years, it’s been public safety, affordability and K-12 education, in no particular order; now it’s public safety, affordability and building a better future for Washington’s children. Education is a part of that, of course, but more must be done to keep kids from getting hurt.
For instance, Republicans have tried year after year to add fentanyl and other synthetic opioids to the state’s child-endangerment law. House Democrats consistently choose to kill this simple, common-sense change and defend those who expose children to such poisons.
Then there are the disastrous decisions made by the state Department of Children, Youth and Families. For example, they chose in early 2024 to place a 3-week-old infant, born with fentanyl in his system, with the drug-addicted father. The baby was later found dead in a Port Townsend park.
DCYF also is accountable for the tragic disappearance of Oakley Carlson, the young Grays Harbor girl not seen since 2021. She had been taken from a safe and stable foster home by the agency and put back in the care of her parents, despite their history of drug use, child-endangerment and controlled-substance charges.
The DCYF secretary appointed in January has a lot on her plate. I don’t know what her plans are regarding foster care and Child Protective Services. Our interaction has focused on the many problems at Green Hill School in Chehalis, another of the agency’s responsibilities.
Still, this agency needs to start turning things around, and fast – as in lit-on-fire fast. No one is seeing enough of the “better outcomes for at-risk kids” that was the goal when DCYF was created in 2017. We don’t have the luxury of waiting four more years to see if things get better.
While we all hope our children have long lives, they’re young only once – and as the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Knowing that, Republicans are working to build a better future for all our children. That’s how our state gets better.
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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.