Deadline looming for fair funding for schools

This is the best shot for the state to address the issue with funding from the American Rescue Plan.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one: It’s June and the clock is ticking toward a Pennsylvania budget deadline while lawmakers fiddle with political moves that do little or nothing to advance the process.

Meanwhile, local school districts play the perennial game of “guess the subsidy” as they finalize their own local budgets due June 30 without the leeway Harrisburg gives itself to push back the deadline.

Lawmakers returned to Harrisburg last week for the sprint to the finish line that occurs every year.

This year, the distractions along that course have piled on. The Republican-controlled Legislature has less than a month to act, while confronted with impending votes on hot-button social issues.

In just the past week, protesters have visited the state Capitol to urge lawmakers to stop taking bribes and to show some love to the poor. Fair funding rallies are taking place throughout the region, including one at Perkiomen Valley High School last Thursday, to urge the legislature to fully fund schools under a fair funding formula adopted six years ago but never fully implemented.

In contrast, highlights of legislative actions last week were a rebuke of the governor’s emergency powers, a bill on gun control that Gov. Tom Wolf has vowed to veto, and a 149-page Republican-proposed election reform bill that is certain to encounter severe pushback from Democrats and take up an undue amount of time in the session’s remaining weeks.

To be clear, gun control, election reform, and division of power during an emergency are important to all Pennsylvanians, but none of them fall on the critical budget timeline that local schools need.

Wolf and fair funding advocates want to use more than $1 billion of a state $3 billion budget surplus to fund schools under the formula designed to level the playing field for poorer school districts. Currently, only about 10 percent of state funding to schools is distributed by the formula

“We can’t say we’ve ‘fixed’ education funding just by having a fair funding formula unless we actually use it,” said state Rep. Joe Ciresi, D146th Dist., who serves on the House Education Committee.

The gaps force districts across urban, suburban and rural communities to make up for underfunding from the state by raising property taxes, increasing the burden on homeowners and businesses, according to speakers at the Perkiomen Valley rally.

Norristown Area School District Superintendent Christopher Dormer noted that in his district, where “85 percent of our student body is Black and brown,” the district has had to raise taxes — 30 percent in the last 10 years — and cut resources and programs. “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,” he said at the rally.

High school property taxes driven by unfair state funding also affect 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.

Ciresi said House Bill 1595 would phase in all basic and special education funding through the funding formula, He said this year is different because the money is there.

This is Pennsylvania’s best shot at fair school funding, according to Ciresi and others. And the drumbeat to get it done is intensifying.

On June 21, simultaneous “Days of Action” will be held across the state, including two in the greater Philadelphia metro area — Pottstown Middle School at 12:30 p.m. and a “pilgrimage’ from Samuel Gompers School at noon, ending at Merion Elementary School.

This message by no means a new one, and that repetition makes it ever more pressing, Call your legislators; join a rally. School funding affects every citizen of our region in resources for children, in equity across income and race divisions and in local property taxes, Time is running short to do the right thing for Pennsylvania.