Report: State shorted its neediest districts

Allentown and Bethlehem Area schools should have gotten $4.5 million more in coronavirus relief money, document says

If $174 million in federal coronavirus aid had been allocated to Pennsylvania school districts using the state’s traditional funding formula, Allentown School District would have received about $5.6 million.

Instead, the state allocated the money to public schools by giving them all $120,000 plus additional money based on the number of students they have. Allentown received $1.5 million.

The way the $174 million was allocated shorted the neediest districts, a report released Monday said. The Keystone Research Center found that districts with the highest density of poor, Black and Hispanic students received less funding than those with the least density, reinforcing existing inequities.

“This is a pretty simple story about getting the allocation of these funds backward,” Keystone Research Center Executive Director Stephen

Herzenberg said.

He said that within the context of the racial reckoning the country is going through, “there is a tone deafness to the distribution of these funds that is stunning.”

He said any new rounds of federal coronavirus aid funding should be distributed to schools through the regular funding formula, which takes into account factors like poverty, sparsity, English as a second language students and other factors. The allocations would have been decided by the Legislature and accepted by the governor, Herzenberg said.

The quarter of districts that serve the highest density of poorest students received $36 million, the least of any quartile. They would have received $90 million if the state allocated the funds using its fair funding formula.

Pennsylvania got about $5 billion in federal coronavirus aid. School districts saw some of that money in two rounds: one of $400 million that was allocated using the Title 1 formula, which takes poverty into account, and another $200 million that left the allocation decisions to the state.

Researchers at Keystone looked at $174 million of the second round, excluding roughly $25 million that went to charter schools and intermediate units.

“The way that the money highlighted in the report today went out, it wasn’t equitable,” Bethlehem Area Superintendent Joseph Roy said.

“People who needed less got more, people who needed more got less, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid with any future CARES Act money that might come.”

His school district would have received about $350,000 more if the funding formula had been used, money he could have put toward things like internet hot spots, cleaning supplies, substitutes and contact tracing.

Allentown and Bethlehem were the only Lehigh Valley school districts to receive less money than they otherwise would have. Other districts in Lehigh and Northampton counties received more, with Nazareth Area School District receiving about $150,000 more than it otherwise would have and Parkland receiving $269,000 more than it otherwise would have.

State Rep. Mike Schlossberg said he’d like to see future federal funding distributed to districts more along the lines of the traditional formula. He said he wasn’t sure how officials determined how to spend the federal aid in the per-pupil fashion, but that in the rush to distribute funds, some things might have been overlooked.

“This is another classic example of something we’ve seen throughout COVID, which is those who have the least and need the most get the least,” he said.

His reaction to the report was tempered by the knowledge that

Allentown School District separately received $9.8 million in federal coronavirus aid.

Joe Kelly, chief of staff for state Sen. Lisa Boscola, said she was disappointed the federal funding didn’t go through the school funding formula.

“We think any time you get new money into the system, it should go through the fair funding formula to go to the school districts that need it the most,” he said.