Uncertainty reigns as schools look ahead to new year
Graduation season is a time of reflection, both on the reaching of a milestone and on what comes next.
But as this strangest of graduation seasons starts to wind down, it’s increasingly clear that when it comes to public education, the answer to what comes next seems to be one giant question mark.
With hybrid graduations, onthe-fly-online classes, budget chaos and ever-shifting health guidelines, education leaders may rightfully feel that just reaching the finish line this year has been an exhausting accomplishment.
But health experts are now preparing the nation for the fact that COVID-19 isn’t going away any time soon, and so far, there is little hope for certainty in the school year to come.
No matter who you ask —
teachers, students, legislators, parents, administrators, school board members — the path forward and what the first day of the 2020-2021 school year looks like remains anybody’s guess.
“We’re feeling our way through a dark room filled with sharp knives,” Pottsgrove School Board member Charles Nippert said at a May 26 school board meeting.
“Our administration has been working feverishly to figure out how we re-open in the fall,” Pottstown School Board member Laura Johnson said during a May 26 Zoom meeting on school funding hosted by the Public Citizens for Children and Youth advocacy group.
“Things are changing daily, we’re trying to hit
a moving target,” SpringFord Superintendent David Goodin told his board during the May 26 meeting. “We hope to have an idea of what opening looks like by mid-July,” he said.
“Our economy has suffered a lot of job loss, a lot of lost revenue for school districts,” Montgomery County Commissioners Vice Chairman Ken Lawrence said during the PCCY webinar. “We still have a long road to go.”
Summer School Lunches?
In the immediate future, the unanswered questions are as basic as feeding children.
“When the schools closed, districts like Norristown and Pottstown not only had to figure out how to provide education to their students, but how to feed them as well,” Lawrence said.
Many districts rallied to
provide packages of meals every week, but many are now wondering how those children get fed over the summer when many of their parents may now be jobless.
In nine weeks, Pottsgrove Schools provided more than 71,500 meals as part of a pick-up program, but Superintendent William Shirk told the school board May 26 that he is still unable to say if those meals can continue through the summer. “There are a lot of moving parts to answering that question,” he said.
“It’s been eye-opening for some people to realize how much we depend on schools,” said Lawrence, noting that he is a graduate of North Penn High School. “Schools are part of the fabric of our society, we need to fund them adequately.”
“Schools do so much more than education,” said Norristown Schools Superintendent Christopher Dormer. “We’re the first place families go for education on
all kinds of things. We were part of the safety net well before COVID-19.”
“When it comes to identifying which children and families qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Program, that is often a conversation that starts in school,” said Dormer.
Social Distancing Next Year?
Meals aside, perhaps the central question schools are trying to plan for is what classes will look like when they resume.
“We’re getting conflicting guidance from all levels of government,” said Souderton Schools Superintendent Frank Gallagher.
If school buildings are to be opened as normal, there is little more planning necessary than what is normally done.
But this is no normal year and attempts to re-open schools in South Korea may highlight the kind of difficulties
that lay ahead.
Despite having coronavirus cases second only to China in February, South Korea was hailed as a model for response by using extensive testing and contact tracing, leading to fewer than 300 deaths.
But just days after some schools in the Asian nation re-opened last week, more than 500 were abruptly closed again after a resurgence of the virus in the capital of Seoul, CNN reported.
Those schools that do remain open there have erected plastic barriers, much like sneeze guards at a smorgasbord, in lunchrooms and classrooms.
In those high schools that are open, only two-thirds of the student body is allowed in school at a time. In the lower grades, only one-third of the student population is admitted at any one time.
If that is the recommendation for re-opening schools here in the fall, schools will look much different, and cost even more money, administrators warned.
“How do you maintain social distancing in the halls when you have 1,000 kids in the high school trying to get from one end of the building to the other in four minutes?” Pottsgrove School Board President Robert Lindgren exclaimed at the May 26 board meeting.
Masks and other personal protective equipment cost money. Plastic barriers cost money. And if students are to be rotated through schools in shifts, that means additional bus trips that will cost more money.
“The money needed to match this model doesn’t exist,” Shirk told the Pottsgrove School Board.
“Opening school is going to cost a lot more money in a COVID-19 environment,” Gallagher warned.
Is Online the Answer?
Similarly, if the answer to how schools re-open is continued online learning, that too comes with a price tag, one many districts were already unable to pay before coronavirus upended the familiar public financing models.
In Norristown, the district was in the second year of a five-year plan to put a computer in the hands of every student when the pandemic hit.
“COVID hit and the digital divide was exacerbated,” said Dormer. “We can’t just snap our fingers and have all our children have devices.”
The district was able to give out 1,300 Chromebooks “so we at least have one for every household, but not for every student,” said Dormer. “Do you know how many phone calls we’ve received from parents because they have three kids trying to share one Chromebook and get their homework done?”
In Pottstown, which faces similar obstacles to online learning, the Foundation for Pottstown Education is in the midst of a $350,000 capital fund drive to put a computer in the hands of each of its students, something wealthier districts can take for granted.
And that’s not even addressing the question of whether online learning is an adequate substitute for face-to-face teaching.
Peggy Lee-Clark is the executive director of PAID, Pottstown’s economic development arm, but before that, she spent decades with Montgomery County Community College.
“Online is not teaching. It’s facilitating,” Lee-Clark told the May 26 PCCY webinar. “It’s not for everyone and it doesn’t get any better.”
For Gallagher, who told the PCCY webinar he “leads with a social justice lens,” the answer also is no.
“Online learning is not meeting the needs of the whole child,” Gallagher said.
Budget Black Box
As with everything, all these considerations and possibilities ultimately come down to money and who will pay for it.
That means the school budgets now being finalized must attempt to prepare for all these eventualities with no idea of where the money is coming from.
One piece of the evershifting puzzle that seemed partially settled in the past few days was the PA House passage of a state budget that will keep school funding at the same level provided in the 20192020 school year.
But even that budget, shortened because officials can’t count on a full year of accurate revenue projections in an economy hobbled by coronavirus pandemic restrictions, is a sea of the uncertainty into which public education now steams without a map.
Building a local school budget is difficult enough, usually because the amount of state funding being provided is often not known until the end of May. But the loss of local revenues due to unemployment and a cratered local economy has only made a difficult task more difficult.
The five-county region around Philadelphia is forecast to lose between $220 million to $260 million in local revenues in the coming year.
“My district is pretty much a bedroom community,” Gallagher said of Souderton.
“If we don’t raise taxes, we will have a $5 million deficit in our budget. If we raise taxes 2.6 percent, we will still have to take $3 million of $4 million out of our reserves,” he said adding, “those property taxes will be on the backs of homeowners.”
The $365,000 Souderton received from the first federal relief bill “was a drop in the bucket,” Gallagher complained.
“When we passed $13.5 billion for states, we knew it wasn’t enough,” U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-4th Dist., said during a May 15 Teen Town Hall webinar set up by PCCY.
Dean said she hopes the next relief bill, called the HEROES Act, will provide as much as $650 billion to local governments to help fill budget gaps.
“We have to get you more money and it has to be flexible, so you can fit it to your needs,” Dean said.
School districts across Southeast Pennsylvania are facing the same challenges, and they are reacting in different ways.
The Owen J. Roberts and Boyertown school boards are raising taxes and Boyertown is furloughing teachers, all to fill holes in their budgets.
The Pottstown and Pottsgrove school boards both chose to dip into reserves and keep taxes stable at the current level.
But even that seeming certainty has been upended by the revelation that a steep drop in state gambling revenues means property tax relief in the form of the homestead exemption will be half what was expected.
As a result, even with a zero tax hike, taxpayers may see a hike in their tax bill when it comes in the mail.
Inequities Only Made Worse
The pandemic has also highlighted the inherent inequities in Pennsylvania’s education funding system.
Pennsylvania ranks third from the bottom on the share of education costs covered by the state.
It is also the nation’s most disparate in how its funding is distributed, largely ignoring its own “fair funding formula” that was meant to students ensure poorer students have the same opportunities as those in wealthier districts, according to Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.
“Even before the pandemic, the budget has been a tremendously difficult thing,” Johnson told the May 26 PCCY conference, “especially when you are underfunded by more than $13 million every year.”
“We can’t let a funding shortfall exacerbate the inequities in our education system,” said Dean.
Students Live the Inequity
But nobody knows the impacts of underfunding quite like the students who live it every day.
During the May 15 PCCY Teen Town Hall, students from all over Montgomery County talked about what underfunding means up close.
“I’ve seen first-hand what lack of funding can do to a school,” said Norristown student Sidney Suber, who said science classes sparked her desire to become a veterinarian.
But she has watched that department run out of equipment and the AP environmental science program get cut.
Perkiomen Valley High School student Maggie Knee said she has been a student musician since fourth grade and that the high school’s marching band “is the most welcoming group. I will be thankful to them for the rest of my life.”
All too often, it is the “extras” at school, art, music, athletics, which are the first on the chopping block despite being, for many students, the thing they cherish most about their school experience, and the teachers who had the most impact.
But at underfunded schools, those kinds of teachers sometimes leave for better pay, said Pottstown High School student Kishan Patel, who is also a student member of the school board.
“Lack of funding results in high teacher turnover and Pottstown has some of the lowest-paid teachers in Montgomery County,” said Patel.
“When I was in middle school, I had three science teachers for a single class,” Patel said. “And we lost the best music teacher I’ve ever had to another district. He had to take the higher pay because it was what was best for his family. I was both heartbroken and outraged.”
He concluded: “while other schools have the problem of what kind of stadium do they build, we have of the problem of how to we pay teachers reasonable salaries?”
Wissahickon student Evan Baroque benefited from speech therapy when he was young and without it, “I would not be where I am today.”
He worried that funding problems will affect special education students disproportionately. “If special education gets cut, those students will struggle to catch up for the rest of their lives.”
Baroque and Souderton student Gianna Quigley both expressed concern about what funding shortfalls could do to early education.
“If we do not have adequate early education funding, it will affect the next generation,” said Baroque.
That’s true of all education funding said LeeClark.
“We have become a society that wants instant gratification, but an investment in education is an investment for the long haul,” said Lee-Clark, adding “the only way out of poverty is through education.”
She warned: “if we don’t invest in education, it’s very scary what the outcome will be for the future.”
State Sen. Vincent Hughes, D-7th Dist., warned the students on the May 15 call that the issue of underfunding of education is not something that will be resolved all at once.
“You will have to fight this fight for the rest of your lives,” Hughes said.
“This is a tragic moment in our history, but it is also a tremendous opportunity to seize the moment to make the wholesale changes that are necessary,” said Hughes, adding “and yours will be the voice makes that happen.”
Of course, whether that can happen before the start of the next school year remains — uncertain.