Dear friends and neighbors,
I’m reaching out with a final update about our work this session. Folks who have received these emails from me for a while will remember that during election years there are increased restrictions on official legislative communications. This includes e-newsletters, social media accounts like my official Facebook, press releases, and other similar communications tools. The rules are designed to help foster fair elections, ensuring that incumbents can’t use public resources for campaign purposes. These increased restrictions are in place starting Monday, May 6th, and continue until the election results are certified this fall.
While I won’t be sending out e-newsletters or posting on social media, you are still welcome to reach out to our office whether it’s to raise concerns about a topic or to get help accessing state resources. I’m still able to respond to your messages and our office can help you get the support you need.
With that, here’s the last update on our work during the 2024 legislative session.
|
|
As a legislator, and as a parent myself, I believe we have an obligation to the young people in our state. This includes funding K-12 education, preventing gun violence, cleaning up our air and water, and a whole lot more. It also includes fixing a system that has frequently excluded many of our youth – LGBTQ+ students, students for whom English is a second language, students of color, and more.
You’ve likely seen national coverage about how a small minority of people (in some cases even just one person in a district) have worked to remove books from school libraries just for mentioning LGBTQ+ people, or for talking about racism and the impact it has. Here in Washington, we think public resources shouldn’t be subject to the whims of one person, but should be managed by the community. That’s why we passed legislation to involve the community in these decisions and prevent school boards from using discrimination to ban or remove books. (HB 2331)
Dual language education is another way we can make our schools more accessible and encourage better outcomes at the same time. Increased dual language education gives English language learners additional support and helps all our students become bilingual, whether English is their first language or not. (HB 1228)
We know our LGBTQ+ students are particularly at-risk (the statistics on this are hard to read) and as leaders we have an obligation to do better. This year we passed legislation that will require school districts to adopt age-appropriate curriculum that includes the contributions, histories, and perspectives of people who have historically been left out of the history books like our LGBTQ+ community. (SB 5462)
Most of the work we do is bipartisan, and I’m very proud of that, unfortunately HB 2331 and SB 5462 both passed on party lines. As I said in an article for OutNW earlier this year, it matters who sets the agenda. It matters for our kids, and it matters for the future of our state.
For those of you who followed this session you also saw that we passed an initiative, the parental bill of rights, that might feel in conflict with the values I mentioned above. I want to pass along some thoughts about why we did that, and what you can expect.
Initiative 2081 largely re-states current law and common practice. If you read the language, you might be concerned that it could amend protections we’ve passed for our LGBTQ+ youth or for youth seeking reproductive care or behavioral health treatment. Our best legal analysis is that it does not. We are watching our school districts closely to ensure that none misinterpret the language, and if any do, we will step in immediately to challenge them in court and/or to make necessary changes to the law. We passed this initiative in part because it makes no substantive changes, and because we wanted to avoid the additional hatred aimed at our LGBTQ+ youth that would likely come with a statewide campaign this year.
If you want more information about I-2081 you can read an opinion piece that Sen. Pedersen and I had published in the Seattle Times here (Note: this is the language of the piece as we submitted it to the Times. They made some edits prior to publication that I believe change the message, which is why I’m including the language as we submitted it here).
|
|
We know that building a better future starts with our youth, but it doesn’t end there. We also worked this session to reduce the inequalities that women, people of color, people with disabilities, people with different religious beliefs, and many other Washingtonians face.
We expanded the WA Equal Pay and Opportunities Act to include gender, race, disability, sexual identity, immigration or military status, and more. This act prevents employers from discriminating against employees or prospective employees, and the expansion means people don’t have to decide whether they were being discriminated against for one particular identity over the other when seeking a remedy for the discrimination. (HB 1905)
We established a hotline that makes it easier for individuals who have experienced hate crimes to report those crimes. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in reported hate crimes in Washington state, and this hotline will help centralize those reports, provide support for victims, and direct cases to law enforcement when requested. (SB 5427) We also closed a loophole that prevented hateful vandalism or destruction of property from being charged as a hate crime if the targeted area was public property. Hate crimes by definition target entire communities; hateful vandalism is no less offensive on a library or school, and it should be taken just as seriously. (SB 5917)
While these bills received some bipartisan support, the final votes were largely along party lines.
|
|
 In my opening remarks this year I said that as long as I’m Speaker of the House, we will protect every person’s bodily autonomy. This year we held to that promise, expanding protections for the health care professionals that prescribe medications like misoprostol and mifepristone. (HB 2115) This builds on our significant work last year to protect access to abortion and reproductive care. Since 2016 Republicans in the Legislature have sponsored over 40 anti-choice bills restricting access to abortion and reproductive health care. We have blocked every single one and will continue to do so. When the decisions you make for yourself do not impact the health or safety of others, no one but you should be making them. |
|
|
It’s an honor to serve you in the Legislature and I’m continuously grateful for the opportunity you all have given me. Thank you.
