School funding inequity affects online learning

Education by ZIP code has taken on a new meaning in this coronavirus pandemic.

Since schools closed in March, learning for most students has continued online. Teachers provide lessons; students work on their home computers, laptops or Chromebooks to complete the coursework.

But access to online devices and the internet depends on where students live and what their household can afford.

In poorer districts, this “digital divide” has prevented some students from participating in their school’s lessons. In neighboring districts with wealthier households, access is not an issue. Most homes have more than one computer and ample internet bandwidth.

In Pottstown in Montgomery County, it took a donation to the Pottstown Education Foundation from an anonymous donor to be able to purchase enough Chromebooks for elementary students. With the distribution of those Chromebooks, all elementary students in the district will begin online learning on Monday, May 4.

The $60,000 donation came after a news article in The Mercury reported that many households in the borough, where the median income is less than $50,000 a year, do not have computers. The district was able to provide Chromebooks to middle and high school students, but lacked the resources to distribute enough devices to cover all elementary students.

The donation to the Foundation came with a note: “For years, Pottstown has held the dubious title of being one of the most underfunded districts in the state and, as a result, the playing field has always been uneven for students,” the donor wrote to Foundation executive director Joe Rusiewicz.

“But it struck me that if Pottstown couldn’t find computers for each household now, the students in Pottstown would not be on an uneven playing field — they wouldn’t be on the playing field at all,” wrote the donor.

The coronavirus crisis — which puts the same challenges to all 500 school districts rich or poor — has put the inequity of Pennsylvania’s school funding methods into sharp relief by highlighting how much harder it is for underfunded districts to meet those challenges, wrote Mercury staff writer Evan Brandt.

The inequity is also evident in Reading School District, perennially at the top of the list of districts most underfunded by the state. Superintendent Khalid N. Mumin recently asked for the school board’s support to lobby elected officials for resources to close the digital divide.

“For a district that is 99% underserved, we are now starting to see a true digital divide between the school districts that have the means and school districts that do not,” Mumin said at a recent board meeting.

He said the district will need to spend about $4.5 million to ensure each of the roughly 18,000 students in the district has a device for online learning. Like Pottstown, many Reading households do not have computers of their own for children to access online instruction.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed education dramatically in these final months of the 2019-20 school year. In most households of our region, computers and internet access are an assumed part of daily living. The pivot to online learning merely required adapting to a new discipline.

In our poorer towns, digital access is not as routine. These are the same towns whose public schools are severely underfunded each year under state funding practices — Reading, Norristown, Pottstown, Upper Darby and Coatesville, to name a few. These are all districts whose neighbors in Wilson, Colonial, Owen J. Roberts and Downingtown schools enjoy ample funding of their technology initiatives.

When the writers of the Pennsylvania Constitution penned a promise that every child have access to education, they didn’t foresee the coronavirus, internet capability and computers getting in the way. Neither ZIP code nor bandwidth should restrict that promise.

“At some point, Harrisburg needs to fix our very broken school funding system so that ZIP code does not determine the level of educational resources for children,” wrote the Pottstown donor who backed up those words with a cash gift.

We applaud the donor’s generosity and agree with his concerns. School funding is not a coronavirus problem, but it is a problem the coronavirus has highlighted. Our state government needs to fix it before the divide widens further.