As the front page of this week’s Beachcomber so clearly shows, the picture is mixed when it comes to the state of the Vashon Island School District.

On the one hand, thanks to grants, a generous community and resourceful teachers and administrators, innovative programs continue to crop up. The fact that a new outdoor education program is beginning to take shape around a detention pond-turned-natural area is one such indication: Just walk out the school doors on Vashon, and environmental ed — under the right teachers and with a good curriculum — can unfold.

On the other hand, we’re seeing indications that it will take a lot more than generosity and hard work to maintain the programs we’ve come to expect from our small but resourceful district.

Despite an outpouring of community support over the past two years, our district is continuing to suffer from the state’s longtime inability — or, more to the point, refusal — to fully fund education. Parents are paying more each year for co-curricular activities. Supplies for basic needs are hard to come by, and teachers, long used to scrimping to get by, are having to make do with less.

Particularly noteworthy is the example that Camp Waskowitz’s uncertain future provides. Beloved programs, like this 32-year tradition of sending our fifth-graders off to a week of camp in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, are no longer guaranteed. Indeed, Waskowitz, like so many other things anymore, it seems, will continue only if parents, teachers and community leaders hold enough bake sales and car washes to wrest enough dollars out of a finite number of Vashon residents to make it happen.

It’s fantastic that environmental education can take place a stone’s throw from school buildings. Indeed, teachers should take advantage of Vashon’s rich backyard, an outdoor classroom with its forests, shorelines and dynamic ecosystems.

But a good natural science curriculum can’t make up for what Waskowitz provides in the way of environmental education — robust day hikes, hours of stream exploration, starlit walks back to the cabins after an evening program. Nor can it make up for those less tangible but still very real parts of the experience — the community-building rite of passage that this week away has provided countless Vashon children.

It’s incumbent upon the school district, of course, to be frugal and fiscally responsible. And it’s important to tell district administrators — from the school board to the superintendent — what we value and how we want to see our precious dollars spent.

But after a certain point, there’s only so much this small school district can do. After a certain point, it’s time to turn our attention to Olympia, where initiatives sponsored by Tim Eyman and passed into law by voters and lawmakers are effectively dismantling government.