Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Surplus for schools
Advocates back bill to use $1 billion for fair funding formula
PERKIOMEN >> The way state Rep. Joe Ciresi sees it, Pennsylvania will never have a better shot at fair school funding than this year’s budget.
Ciresi, a Democrat representing the 146th District in the House of Representatives, spent 12 years on the Spring-Ford Area School Board before he was elected three years ago, and he has been on the front lines arguing for fairer school funding from the start.
Already the prime sponsor of a bipartisan bill seeking to reform the 20-yearold charter school law’s funding provisions, Ciresi used a fair funding rally at Perkiomen Valley High School Thursday to announce a new bill.
House Bill 1595 would phase in all basic and special education funding through Pennsylvania’s sixyear-old “fair funding formula,” adopted with only three votes in opposition in both houses but which is only used for a tiny fraction of the state’s education funding.
In fact, so little of Pennsylvania’s education money is distributed fairly that it ranks 45th in the nation for state funding of schools — a ranking Ciresi said Thursday “none of us should be proud of.”
“We can’t say we’ve ‘fixed’ education funding just by having a fair funding formula unless we actually use it,” said Ciresi, who serves on the House Education Committee.
As with most things, the thing that has prevented the fair funding formula from being fully used is money — as in there has not been enough of it. Until now, which students get what they need to succeed, which student don’t, is determined not by the formula, but by who is in power in Harrisburg.
But this year, Ciresi and his bill’s supporters argue, the money is there. Pennsylvania will end the current fiscal year with a $3 billion surplus.
Ciresi’s bill would use $1 billion of that money, to “fully fund” schools according to the formula without raising taxes.
The formula is designed to compensate for factors like poverty, tax effort and English language learners. The failure to use it fully results in Pennsylvania having the largest student spending gap between rich and poor school districts.
Harrisburg’s failure means every student in the Pottstown School District gets $3,300 less in resources than they should. In Norristown, the gap is $1,500 per student and in Allentown, $3,500 per student said Karen Beck Pooley, a political science professor at Lehigh University and a member of the Bethlehem School Board.
Put another way, said Beck Pooley, since the fair funding formula was adopted, but not fully utilized, Pottstown School District has lost out on $67 million in state funding, Norristown on $73 million, and Allentown on $420 million.
Those shortfalls were put into sharp relief when the COVID-19 pandemic closed all Pennsylvania schools and the difference in available resources became crystal clear.
“The following week some schools were able to restart new learning. They had the devices, the internet connections, and the online learning platforms,” said Pottstown School Board member Laura Johnson.
“As the first several weeks rolled on, more and more schools were able to ensure that students had what they needed for online learning. It wasn’t until May 4th Pottstown was finally able to ensure that each family had at least one device available and we resumed new learning,” she said.
“Why did it take so long?” Johnson asked. “We had to fundraise for Chromebooks. Fundraise for Chromebooks … in a pandemic.”
Nowhere is Pennsylvania’s school funding gap larger than in the City of Reading, and state Rep. Manny Guzman, D-127th Dist. is “sick of it.”
Guzman is a graduate of Reading High School, a former school board member and represents the city in the House of Representatives. And, as he made clear Thursday, he has lived the impact those funding shortfalls inflict.
When he was in school, Guzman said he recalled a class of 35 sharing 10 math books that were 20 years old.
Should the formula be fully utilized, Reading would receive an additional $97 million in state education funding every year, Guzman said Thursday.
He derided the “hold harmless” provision of the fair funding legislation — which results in districts with shrinking populations continuing to get the same amount of aid while growing districts see their funding dwindle on a per-student basis — as “a political ploy to get votes.”
Johnson drove that point home further Thursday.
“You know, when advocates like me press lawmakers to fix this problem we get all sorts of reasons that it’s just too hard to get it done,” she said. “Most of them boil down to ‘well I wish we could, but it’s just not politically feasible at this point.’ Let that sink in, ‘not politically feasible’ to do what is fair, just, ethically and morally correct.”
As a result of hold harmless, state education aid “for resources is being determined by student populations from 20 years ago,” said Perkiomen Valley Schools Superintendent Barbara Russell.
Ciresi’s bill would eliminate “hold harmless.”
“Hold harmless means a whole generation of Manny Guzmans will fall between the cracks before they get the resources they need, the resources they deserve,” said Guzman.
“When we lose a generation (by denying them a fair education), we don’t lose one, we lose three,” said state Rep. Dan Williams, D-74th Dist., who said he has seen Chester County’s Coatesville School District suffer as a result of Pennsylvania’s unfair school funding.
“We can’t afford not to invest in the next generation,” said Williams.
“Our underfunded and inequitable school system holds back many of our kids from reaching their full potential. We need to make increased, sustained, more equitable investments in our schools so that all our children have the same high-quality educational opportunities to develop themselves and have better lives,” Williams said. “This economic injustice is clear. Currently, two students living just one block apart could have one student go back to school this fall with a MacBook while the other might have to share a math book.”
Deepening the moral failings of Pennsylvania’s education funding system is the fact that it favors white students over minority students, even when the levels of poverty are the same.
The problem was identified as far back as 2017 when research by a faith-based advocacy group called POWER, and the Education Law Center, found that applying the formula to every school district revealed not only were poorer districts getting less than their fair share, the less white a poor district was, the worse the inequity.
“On average, the whitest districts get thousands of dollars more than their fair share for each student, while the least white districts get thousands less for each student than their fair share,” researcher David Mosenkis wrote in 2017.
“I see deep inequity in our education funding system and a lot of it is rooted in systemic racism,” Guzman said Thursday.
So does Christopher Dormer, the superintendent of the Norristown Area School District, where “85 percent of our student body is Black and brown.”
As the inequity has continued, Norristown has had to raise taxes — 30 percent in the last 10 years — and cut resources and programs.
“We have had to cut staff and programs for seven straight years,” said Dormer. “For 8,000 diverse students, the Norristown School District has one social worker.”
He said, “I hear from people every day, ‘why are our taxes so high?’ They complain
that they are paying a whole lot more, to get a whole lot less and they are 100 percent right.”
High school property taxes driven by unfair state funding also affects people who finished their schooling a long time ago, said state Rep. Tracy Pennycuick, R-147th Dist.
“I hear every week from seniors who are moving out of Pennsylvania because they can’t afford the taxes,” she said Thursday.
One reason for those property tax increases is that the Boyertown Area School District’s student enrollment has risen by 20 percent in the last 10 years, but state funding has not kept pace, she said.
That means the burden of funding schools falls, increasingly, on local property taxes said Spring-Ford School Board member Tom DiBello.
In Spring-Ford, fully 82 percent of the $178 million budget the board just adopted comes from local taxpayers, and just 17 percent from the state.
He said Thursday when Ciresi was on the school
board, the two would travel to Harrisburg to meet with legislators and argue for fairer school funding.
Less often talked about, said DiBello, is the shortfall in special education funding, which this year will short Spring-Ford $33.7 million.
Perhaps no area of schooling comes with more rules and mandates than special education, and “every year, we see more and more state mandates, but they never come with the funding to pay for them,” said Sarah Evans-Brockett, president of the Perkiomen Valley School Board.
For all students, and special education students in particular, “we all saw how important it is for kids to be in school during the pandemic,” she said. “It is essential to the health and well-being of our students.”
It is also essential to their outlook, according to state Rep. Joe Webster, D-150th Dist.
“A white Irish-Catholic kid growing up in Philadelphia,” Webster said he cared almost exclusively about baseball. And the
player Webster idolized was Willie Mays, he said Thursday.
Webster came to love one of baseball’s most famous Black superstars because of his school librarian, who urged him to read the biography. “To me, a librarian who can find kids’ interests and provide them the right books to open their minds, that’s worth $1 billion.”
Gov. Tom Wolf is already on board with the plan as it mirrors many aspects of the budget proposal he released in February. He reiterated that support on June 8 at a Harrisburg Rally promoting fair funding.
The harder part will be getting both houses of the General Assembly to go along.
Supporters expressed both optimism and determination during Thursday’s presentation.
“In too many instances, state government settles for the short-term fix without looking further down the road,” Pennycuick said. “Education is an investment with long-term consequences, the potential return being well-educated adults who contribute positively to our society and can solve their generation’s problems. Now is not the time to shortchange our communities.”
Quoting South African activist and President Nelson Mandela, Williams said “education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to make real change.”
Now is the time, said Williams for more than “what I call ‘hashtag activism,’ which doesn’t change lives. We need more than just advocacy. We need more than just talk. We don’t need to make more noise, we need to make a change.”
But there may still be some more noise before there is more change.
On June 21, simultaneous “Days of Action” will be held across the state, including two in the greater Philadelphia metro area.
One will be at Pottstown Middle School at 12:30 p.m. The same day, a “Pilgrimage for Education Funding” will begin at 12 p.m. at Samuel Gompers School and end at Merion Elementary School.”
“There is a lot of inertia in Harrisburg,” said Webster. “To do this, we need everyone to keep pushing.”
“It’s time to act,” said Beck Pooley. “Let’s get this done.”
“I feel confident we can get this done,” said Guzman. “But we need your help. We need you to call your legislator and tell them we must provide education funding for all students.”
“The time for excuses is done,” said Johnson. “The time is here to really treat all Pennsylvania students like they matter because they do.”