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It’s been nearly a year since the Commonwealth Court declared Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional, marking a landmark victory for students and communities for the Lancaster School District and others.
Serious proposals are now being made to transform this funding system to meet the needs of students and the petitioners who filed this lawsuit, as they have been fighting for since 2014.
Are Pennsylvania’s leaders ready to improve the unacceptable conditions in our schools?
Those deficiencies are now being seen in the Lancaster School District. Many students who need intervention in basic subjects such as math do not receive it. There is a shortage of staff to support students who are learning English, students with special education needs, and students who need mental health support. Some students study in classrooms with outdated electrical systems, inadequate heating, or no air conditioning. Some people learn in closets, hallways, and trailers.
The state Basic Education Funding Board received testimony detailing similar school deficiencies from dozens of Pennsylvania educators and advocates in hearings across the state.
Committee members listened to testimony recognizing their constitutional obligation to create a school funding system. The majority of these members have now indicated a course of action.
On January 11, the committee majority voted that the General Assembly should inject billions of dollars into Pennsylvania’s public education system to undo decades of inadequate and inequitable funding. He made a bold and well-founded recommendation that there be. The report, supported by Gov. Josh Shapiro’s appointees to the commission, will bring major changes to the way public education is funded in Pennsylvania and will help right the wrongs experienced by hundreds of thousands of students. You can do it.
The committee’s majority report does something simple but important. Instead of funding levels determined by political expediency, this report sets meaningful funding targets to fill existing gaps based on what students need. This proposal responds to the realities of school districts facing rising costs and increasing needs for special education and services for English language learners. Through an analysis of the actual costs for school districts to meet Pennsylvania’s academic goals, the commission identifies Identified costs to the school district.
The committee majority calculated a total adequacy shortfall of $5.4 billion and proposed that the state fund 95% of it (and the full amount to underfunded school districts like the Lancaster School District). He created a seven-year plan to phase in increases, increasing state funding by $5.1 billion to underfunded districts.
Additionally, the proposal would ensure continued and predictable funding increases of at least $200 million each year, shared among all districts and distributed through the current funding formula to help with rising costs. Masu. The plan also calls for states to share responsibility for school facilities and recommends $300 million a year to help school districts modernize their buildings. Finally, one-third of the state’s school districts (the ones that have had to raise school taxes the most because their tax bases are so constrained) are You will receive a Tax Fairness Supplement.
If passed, the commission’s plan would overturn the current inequitable system by prioritizing funding for underserved students.
Plans aren’t perfect. Petitioners in this landmark case argued that the state should increase adequacy funding by more than $6 billion instead of $5 billion. It will take a long period of seven years for sufficient funding to be phased in. Facility funding is a small down payment on the great need for safe and healthy facilities. The plan lacks investments in kindergarten education, which the court has found to be critical to the constitutional public education system.
But if the commission’s plan becomes law, it would change the education of children across Pennsylvania. Within seven years, the Lancaster School District will receive an additional $4,000 per student per year. Such changes are not limited to her one school district. In Lancaster County, seven school districts will ultimately receive at least $3,000 in additional state aid per student each year. This will allow districts to cover essential resources such as classroom instruction, special education, remedial support, career and technical education, principals and counselors. These essential resources are currently not available to too many students across the commonwealth.
Overall, the report first recommends increasing state funding by a record $1.4 billion from 2024 to 2025.
As the committee acknowledged, these are big numbers and “big because they represent a comprehensive solution to a big problem.” The payoff is even greater: changing the trajectory of hundreds of thousands of children’s lives.
Republican committee members, on the other hand, voted against the plan but acknowledged the reality of the funding shortfall and the General Assembly’s responsibility to address it. That work begins now.
The governor will present the 2024-25 budget on February 6th. To bring this system into compliance, the governor and legislators need to come together to make this proposal a reality – including a substantial commitment in the first year and firm and predictable funding targets for the future. — State leaders can be held accountable, school administrators can plan, and today’s students can reap the benefits.
This year, we must begin fulfilling our state constitution’s promises to our children.
Maura McInerney is the legal director of the Pennsylvania Education Law Center. Dan Jurevic-Ackersberg is a senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. These law centers, along with the O’Melveny law firm, represented petitioners in a successful lawsuit alleging that Pennsylvania’s school funding system was unconstitutional.
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