State lawmakers head back to Olympia on Monday for the short legislative session. One Democratic state senator says a high priority will be boosting funding for special education.

Washington state is moving closer to adopting a new system for tracking school quality and student progress. The state superintendent’s office has gotten feedback on its plan from the federal Department of Education and will submit its revised version on Thursday.

The holidays can leave many of us feeling financially depleted, but instead of trying to forget about that, BECU says it’s an opportunity for a family discussion on how to manage money.

School districts in Washington state are filing fewer petitions to juvenile court for kids who are truant, according to a recent report from the state superintendent’s office. But almost all of the kids who wind up in the juvenile court system for unexcused absences – 93 percent – come from low-income families.

Seattle Public Schools is in the midst of figuring out how to relieve overcrowding in Garfield High School’s highly capable program. That’s where kids who test into the district’s gifted program are assigned unless they opt for a different school.

Three counties in the Puget Sound region are going to receive a substantial amount of money to spend on education because of an amendment in a state transportation law. The King County Council is figuring out its priorities for its share of the money, which will total about $315 million spread out over a number of years.

The vast majority of gifted programs in public schools across Washington state are filled with white and Asian students. It's one reason Federal Way Public Schools has been expanding its “gifted pool” to bring in more students of color and children from low-income families. But Seattle Times education reporter Claudia Rowe discovered the district was an outlier among others in the state. She also found out the state mandates for gifted programs are more lax when compared to other districts

A high school senior from Mill Creek has won a prestigious $25,000 dollar scholarship in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Sriharshita Musunuri’s research focuses on sepsis, which is one of the leading causes of death in U.S. hospitals.

It’s been more than five years since the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state was failing to fully fund basic education and more than a decade since the McCleary lawsuit was originally filed. The McCleary kids have graduated from high school in the meantime. In Seattle, fundraising by parents has helped to fill the void at some schools. Other, higher-poverty schools don’t have the ability to lean on parents to augment budgets.

(Updated at 12:50 pm, Dec. 4, 2017, to correct how much money was raised by the Lafayette Elementary and Genesee Hill Elementary PTA auctions.) Public schools are supposed to be paid for with taxes. But in Seattle, depending on which school your kid attends, you may be asked to kick in substantial amounts of money.