Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
A call to action
Rumor of $100 million funding cut rattles fair funding campaign
PHOENIXVILLE » Worried by rumors that the state Legislature may cut the additional $100 million planned for K-12 education funding in the state budget, advocates called a press conference Monday to press their point that the money is needed to begin leveling the playing field for underfunded districts.
Pennsylvania already ranks worst in the nation for the gap between rich and poor school districts and Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed budget had included $100 million more in education funding to be distributed through the fair funding formula adopted last year by the Legislature.
All other state education funding is distributed the way it always has been, an opaque political method which has resulted in the current disparity between rich and poor districts.
Without that additional funding, the state would be making no effort whatsoever to try to close the nation’s worst funding gap, the advocates said.
However, it is not at all clear that funding cut is on the table at all.
Donna Cooper, executive director of advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth and a former top aide to former Gov. Ed Rendell, said she had heard about the cut from Democratic aides in the room
where the representatives for the state Senate and the House are working to reconcile their budget proposals.
“It’s just that I’ve seen it happen before, and it happens so fast, everyone agrees and then they move on, so we wanted to raise awareness of it before it happens,” Cooper said. “But to be honest, I don’t know for sure if the $100 million is at risk.”
State Rep. Tom Quigley, R-146, is home sick but at Digital First Media’s request, made some calls to other legislators Monday afternoon. He reported back that from what he learned, all anyone is talking about is the $50 million cut to transportation
funding.
“The governor’s budget proposed the bussing cut and we passed it in the House, and the only thing I’m hearing is that some of the Senate members may want to put it back in and they’re trying to figure out where the money would come from to pay for it,” said Quigley, who sits on the House Education Committee.
At this point in the budget calendar, things move quickly and Cooper said the need to keep the fair funding issue on the front burner is paramount for the Campaign for Fair Education Funding, a coalition of school districts and advocacy
groups in which her organization plays a leading role.
For poorer districts, the potential cut is serious because it represents the only new educating funding and the Legislature has decided that only new basic education funding will be distributed according to the new fair funding formula which takes things like local wealth, population size and special education population into consideration.
For example, the Delaware County districts of Upper Darby and Chester-Upland, would each would lose about $1.2 million in state funding if the $100 million
is cut.
In Montgomery County, Pottstown would lose the most — $761,473 followed by Norristown at $438,221 and North Penn at $297,068.
The school districts of Coatesville and Oxford Area top Chester County’s list at — $369,284 and $257,893 respectively.
In Berks County, Daniel Boone stands to lose about $88,000 and Boyertown about $160,000.
These raw numbers all apply only to basic education finding allocations, but the final impact can be changed by other factors.
For example, Phoenixville Schools Superintendent Alan Fegley said while the basic education numbers show his district losing $164,661, when you fold in pension costs, transportation and charter school funding, the net loss “is about $60,000,” which is not going to break a district that just passed a roughly $90 million budget.
But while the immediate potential loss is not that unsettling, the broader trend is, he said.
Under the fair funding formula, growth in student population is a factor.
Phoenixville has grown by 584 students in seven years, an 18 percent jump. Were population a factor in all education funding, Phoenixville would be getting $2 million more in state aid, he said.
Instead, when you remove pension costs from the equation — which has jumped 632 percent in the same time period — Phoenixville’s relative aid has dropped by 6 percent, said Fegley.
Jim Scanlon, superintendent of the sprawling West Chester Area School District, said he supports the pension reform bill Wolf signed last
week, while acknowledging that it will not result in a savings for local taxpayers for another 10 to 12 years.
Pensions represent the largest of the “unfunded mandates” about which school officials complain regularly and which they say mask the reduction in state funding that makes its way into the classroom.
He and Fegley both urged the Legislature to “stop the bleeding” of local districts by cutting back on unfunded mandates as a way to help districts weather static state aid.
Scanlon said $4 million of the $6.2 million increase in spending in the recently adopted budget is “directly related to unfunded mandates,” including pensions, special education and transportation.
He criticized the bill championed by state Rep. Warren Kampf, R-157, that would restrict a school district’s ability to challenge property tax assessments.
Last year, West Chester challenged assessments on 17 commercial properties, raising their collective assessments from $93 million to $363 million and garnering an additional $1.4 million in tax revenues that did not have to be extracted from homeowners, said Scanlon.
Both also called on the state to lessen the burden from standardized testing, like the Keystone Exam, which over the last three years has cost West Chester $1.5 million to provide additional support for students to enable them to pass the test.
“I understand that there may be no more money, but stop adding to the bleeding with all these unfunded mandates,” Scanlon said.