Fair funding provides small gains in budget
Many area districts remain underfunded in state spending plan
A first look at the impact of Gov. Wolf’s proposed $80 billion budget for the coming fiscal year offers at peek at the effect last year’s adoption of the fair funding formula for education is having on local schools.
The formula was adopted and put into place for the first time last year and is designed to take into account facts in the ground — community wealth, percentage of special education students, number of students enrolled — in determining how much basic and special education funding a district receives from the state.
As a result of these calculations, the Pottstown School District, perhaps the poorest of the nine in The Mercury coverage area, will see significantly more state aid than the other districts.
According to figures provided to the House Republican Caucus by Wolf’s office, Pottstown would receive an increase in basic and special education funding that is nearly double many area districts.
But while more funding is always welcome, the depth of Pottstown’s under-funding for schools — ranked at about $12 million last year — is unlikely to be ameliorated by the additional $490,643 contained in those two funding streams.
There are other state funding paths that will impact final numbers for the districts — Pre-K Counts, pension and Social Security payments as well as block grants — but it is only in the basic and special education funding streams that the fair funding difference appears.
An analysis of those numbers by The Mercury shows that Pottstown will see an overall 3.8 percent increase in combined basic and special education funding.
According to the figures from the governor’s office, neighboring Pottsgrove — which has some of the same economic and educational demographics that seem to have benefitted Pottstown — is seeing a combined increase of only 1.8 percent in those two funds, although its special education funding is going up by 3.4 percent.
Still local budget shortfalls
During a Feb. 16 meeting of the Pottstown School Board’s finance committee, Business Manager Linda Adams said when the basic and special education increase is combined with other fund increases, Pottstown would see an additional $850,000 in total state funding under Wolf’s budget.
But that would still leave a gap of nearly $1 million between proposed revenues and expenditures for the coming school year in Pottstown, said school board member Thomas Hylton, who added, “and that’s assuming the governor’s budget is passed as he proposed it,” which is unlikely.
Noting that Pottstown is now ranked by the Pennsylvania Department of Education as having the third highest “local tax effort” in the state, Hylton said he will not vote for any budget that contains a tax increase.
“We’re strangling the life out of this community,” Hylton said, noting that the district has to “start planning now” for how it can hold the line on taxes for another year.
The district’s two previous budgets have held the line on property taxes.
Backfilling funding gaps
A bill proposed last year, and championed in Pottstown by former state representative Kelly Lewis and Mayor Sharon Thomas, would have sliced off more additional state education money to be funneled to 180 school districts that are underfunded by $937 million every year.
A similar recommendation was made in the report from the Basic Education Funding Commission begun under Gov. Tom Corbett and which created the formula and identified those districts.
“If the new basic education funding formula is used and no additional allocations are made to the 180 underfunded districts,” as the current budget does, “the 180 underfunded districts will remain underfunded for another 25 years or more,” said Lewis during his visit to Pottstown last year.
Pottstown ranks as the 14th most under-funded district in Pennsylvania.
Not just Pottstown is under-funded
Many other area districts are also underfunded according to an analysis by The Public Interest Law Center, a non-profit advocacy organization based in Philadelphia.
By matching last year’s state funding to each of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts with the median basic education costs across the state in 2014-2015, the analysis shows that not only should Pottstown be receiving an additional $12.3 million a year in state funding, an increase of 112.6 percent, but other districts are behind as well.
For example, Daniel Boone School District should see a 79.3 percent increase in state funding to put it on even footing and Pottsgrove, a 72.3 percent hike.
Wealthier districts, like Spring-Ford, would receive little or no increase, 1 percent, or $12 per student in Spring-Ford’s case, indicating the per-student funding level in those districts matches or exceeds the median in the state.
The center calls this its “conservative estimate.”
A second estimate, which compares funding with 188 districts with average or above-average performances on all three PSSA exams, reveals an even larger gap.
Using that standard, Daniel Boone would see a 95 percent increase in state funding, or $2,051 increase per student; while Pottstown would see a state funding increase of 138 percent, $3,632 more per student or an increase of more than $15 million.
Political realities
But last year’s bill, which would have begun to address some of these funding gaps, never reached a vote and seems unlikely to this year.
State Rep. Thomas Quigley, R-146th Dist. said providing new money to financially struggling districts in ways outside the fair funding formula is politically difficult for several reasons — not the least of which are the state’s own budget problems, a structural deficit of roughly $2 billion for one.
Also, many of the districts in the middle of the state fare well under Pennsylvania’s education funding scheme — recognized as the worst in the country for unbalanced funding between wealthy and poor districts — particularly thanks to the “hold harmless” clause which guarantees no district will receive less money than the year before.
Quigley, who sits on the education and finance committees in the House of Representatives, said that gives those representing these districts little incentive to vote to send additional money to southeast Pennsylvania, particularly as it is viewed as sending money in the Philadelphia school system, which many view as a money pit.
“To their mind, the districts are already getting additional money through the fair funding formula,” he said.
There are also Gov. Wolf’s budget priorities.
Of the nearly $1 billion in additional education money he has proposed spending, three-quarters of that is targeted to increased high quality early education programs to allow an additional, 8,400 students into Head Start and Pre-K Counts programs.
Obviously, some of this funding would go to under-funded districts in this area, but there are no exact figures on where or how much immediately available.
Property tax reform
And then there is the property tax — the tax all southeastern Pennsylvanians love to hate.
Many consider 2017 to be the year that the property tax reform bill that was vetoed by Gov. Wolf last year to be viable this year because of Republican gains in the state Senate which make it easier to over-ride a veto.
If passed, property tax reform will up-end any gains made under the fair-funding formula and districts will be back to the drawing board in trying to obtain adequate state funding.
In other words, what will happen with this year’s budget and education funding is anybody’s guess.
In the meantime, the latest Franklin & Marshall College Poll finds a quarter of registered voters in Pennsylvania believe that “government and politicians” are the state’s biggest problem, with “education” coming in second at 16 percent and “unemployment and taxes” at 11 percent.
As a result of these calculations, the Pottstown School District, perhaps the poorest of the nine in The Mercury coverage area, will see significantly more state aid than the other districts.