District at center of fair funding fight
Ground Zero in the fight for fair education funding this week has been 750 N. Washington St.
That’s the address of Pottstown High School and the place where the action has been in the last 24 hours.
First there was the special Superintendent’s Forum May 30 that featured the provocative question — “Why Are My Taxes So High?”
The next morning the school was the Montgomery County location for a series of statewide press conferences calling attention to Pennsylvania’s rank as the worst in the nation for the gap between funding for rich and poor schools.
For better or worse, Pottstown is in the thick of it.
“We know public education is under attack and we know we have to fight back,” explained Pottstown School Board member Ron Williams.
As budget season enters its final cycle — with school districts submitting plans for spending millions in public dollars that must be adopted by June 1 and Harrisburg facing the same deadline and some increasingly difficult choices — the pressure is mounting on all sides.
It’s a complex and fluid situation with political, financial and even moral issues as part of the mix, with all sides jostling to justify their claim to part of Pennsylvania’s dwindling budget pie.
Pennsylvania’s budget year started with the prediction of a $3 billion deficit — just under the amount education advocates say is needed to adequately fund public education — and the picture has not become any rosier in the ensuring months.
In the meantime, the use of the year-old Fair Funding Formula for only 6 percent of the Commonwealth’s entire education budget makes that attempt at fairness almost invisible to the 130 school districts identified as being underfunded.
In Pottstown’s case, that under-funding has risen to nearly $14 million out of a $62.5 million proposed budget.
Add to that, the discovery by researchers applying the Fair Funding Formula to all funding that a racial bias exists in Pennsylvania’s methodology that discriminates against districts with high minority populations.
Even when poverty levels are equally high, the whiter the district, the greater the funding per student, a revelation that Pottstown Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez calls “a moral dilemma” for Harrisburg.
There’s even a lawsuit brought by a coalition of school districts charging that the state’s education funding system violates a clause of the state Constitution.
It is into this mix of issues and cross priorities that the district — its board members, administration and students — has waded, attempting to advocate for the district and its needs without taking too many sides or making too many enemies.
“There is no villain, no demon we can go after,” Rodriguez said toward the end of his forum night. Instead, he said, the district must look for partners wherever they can be found to advance Pottstown’s cause.
“Our purpose is not to divide, our purpose is involved advocacy,” he said.
That includes working with folks like Tim Hennessey, the longtime Chester County-based Republican state representative who represent’s the 26th House District, and the southern portion of Pottstown borough.
He was the sole member of the legislature present for the forum and he said he agreed with much of what Rodriguez and Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg and Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center said about Pennsylvania’s education funding model — particularly as it has become very harmful to the southeast region of the state.
But despite his agreement — and the requisite citing of how much the state pays for public education as a share of its budget, “37 cents of every dollar we take in goes to K-12 education” — Hennessey had some political realities to share as well.
“I think most of the legislators from the southeast region would vote for an increase funding through the formula,” said Hennessey. “That’s an easy vote for us, but not for legislators whose districts would lose money. And at the end of the day, if you want to change things in Harrisburg, you have to come up with 122 votes in the House.”
In addition to what he called an “anti-Southeast, anti-Philadelphia sentiment” among many of the state’s legislators, much of the leadership of both parties “has moved west,” with legislative and caucus leaders representing the two thirds of districts that are “over-funded.”
They are the ones who decide which bills get put up for a vote.
As for increasing the amount of money the state contributes toward education — at 36 percent, one of the lowest levels in the nation — Hennessey said “my phone does not ring off the hook with people asking me to raise their taxes.”
But neither do school board members’ phones, argued Churchill, who said by refusing to increase a “broad-based state wide tax,” such as the personal income tax, the Legislature is forcing the issue upon school boards and local property taxpayers.
That puts administrators like Pottsgrove Schools Superintendent William Shirk and his business manager David Nester in a constant discussion about budgets.
“We start talking about the next year’s budget in October, one month after school gets back in session,” Shirk said at a press conference. “We’re constantly looking for ways to save money without disrupting the integrity of our education or co-curricular program.”
So too does Pottstown, said School Board President Amy Francis. “For people who say we have to do more with less, I say we already do. We do a whole lot with a whole lot less,” she said.
Courteney Parry, a Pottstown High School junior and student member of the school board, has seen both sides of the educational inequality question.
As a freshman at wealthy Souderton High School, Parry said she saw “tons of teachers for just one subject,” saying the school had a teacher for every level of Spanish, as opposed to just one Spanish teacher.
When she moved to Pottstown and wanted to take Spanish 3, she was told there are not enough students to justify the cost of a teacher — something that also happens with many AP courses in Pottstown.
“In Souderton, that was
“We know public education is under attack and we know we have to fight back.” Ron Williams, Pottstown School Board member
never a question. They just had the course,” Parry said. “In Pottstown, they don’t have AP classes if not enough students sign up. I know students who are taking AP physics as an on-line course. That’s insane, that is a hard course, you need a teacher to help you.”
“We’re always trying to catch up in Pottstown with students who have these resources given to them,” she said.
Nevertheless, Parry insisted, “Pottstown finds ways to compensate. When I told my guidance counselor I wanted to take Spanish four, he didn’t hesitate. He said ‘we’ll find a way to make it happen,’” she said.
Given the same opportunities, Pottstown students would excel, said Parry,noting “if we do this well when we’re at a disadvantage, just imagine how well we would be doing if we started in the same place as the students in the districts that are better off.”
But budget season aside, said Williams, there are large forces in motion.
He said the federal budget proposal for education “is attacking us directly. This is about more than fair funding. This is about support for public education and we are not going to quit this fight.”