UNFAIR FUNDING
Report: PA policy harms underfunded schools
Five regional school districts, all with high minority populations living closer to the poverty line, are most harmed by Pennsylvania’s famously unfair education funding structure, according to a new analysis by a good schools advocacy group.
Those districts are Pottstown and Norristown in Montgomery County, Reading and Antietam in Berks County, and Southeast Delco in Delaware County.
The 24-page study, recently released by Public Citizens for Children and Youth, places much of the blame on an aspect of Pennsylvania’s school funding architecture called “hold harmless.”
Contrary to its name, the practice — by which no school
“That is just an eye-popping amount of property tax increase in the poorest districts.” — Donna Cooper, PCCY Executive Director
district receives less funding than it did the previous year — has harmed thousands of Pennsylvania school children, the majority of them black and brown, the study asserts.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that the school population is shifting.
“The school districts with declining enrollment have benefitted from the funding distortions caused by hold harmless,” the report found.
“These districts have lost a total of 167,000 students since 1991-92 — a fifth of their student body — but they haven’t lost any money, instead they are receiving increased funding each year. They now have $590 million tied to students they no longer educate.”
Growing districts, by contrast, “have 204,000 more students today than in 1991-92, but they have largely been denied the additional funding needed to compensate for the increase in students,” PCCY found.
“We can’t shortchange some schools to allow other schools to have more opportunities,” Donna Cooper, executive director of PCCY, said during a Jan. 27 online press conference that accompanied the release of the report.
The report found that those schools that are the most consistently shortchanged are poor districts with high minority populations. “The most impoverished of these growing districts are the hardest hit by Pennsylvania’s hold harmless policy. The state gives $925 million less to high poverty growing districts than it would if funding was distributed based on current enrollment levels and student and district need factors,” according to the study.
This funding shortfall leaves poor districts little choice but to raise property taxes to fill the gap. In fact, 16 of these most underfunded districts are ranked in the top 20 on tax effort statewide.
With 89 percent of state funding being affected by “hold harmless,” it means “low wealth districts are seeing skyrocketing property taxes” as they try to make up for state funding shortfalls, Cooper said.
Since “hold harmless” was instituted, poorer districts have had to raise local property taxes by $100 million to make up for the state funding imbalance. “That is just an eye-popping amount of property tax increase in the poorest districts,” said Cooper. “This is a direct result of the hold harmless funding system.
“The high-poverty districts bear the brunt of the fact that the state funding system is skewed against them,” said David Loeb, who researched and wrote the report for PCCY.
That’s a message a former Pottstown Schools official believes the state legislature needs to hear.
Myra Forrest is the former assistant superintendent for Pottstown School District and retired in 2009 as the superintendent of the wealthier Owen J. Roberts School District just across the Schuylkill River from Pottstown.
As a result, she has seen the disparities caused by unfair funding.
While Pottstown High School can only offer six AP classes, which offer college credit to students who score high enough, Owen J. Roberts had 30 to 40 AP classes when she was superintendent.
Due to underfunding, Pottstown has no counselors in its elementary schools, despite the fact that low-income students are more likely to have experienced various forms of trauma.
Pottstown Middle School has no language programs and field trips are only possible when funded by a foundation that seeks to fill the resource gaps in Pottstown’s budget, Forrest told the school board during the Jan. 21 meeting.
Worse yet, “most under-funded districts have a higher population of students of color and the most over-funded districts have the highest white populations,” Forrest said.
“It’s grim,” Pottstown School Board President Amy Francis said. “It’s not a pleasant thing to hear.”
“Pottstown is the place I want to help the most because Pottstown needs the most help,” Forrest told the school board.
The racial bias in Pennsylvania’s public school funding was also highlighted in the Public Citizens for Children and Youth report.
“Black and Hispanic students bear the brunt of the systemic underfunding. More than 80 percent of the state’s Black and Hispanic students attend growing school districts” that are chronically underfunded.
Students of color comprise 44 percent of the student populations of growing districts. By contrast, the shrinking districts have student populations that are 81 percent white, the report found.
“This policy, which is a choice the legislators have made every year since 1991, has undermined the ability of most Black and Hispanic students to get a quality education,” said Cooper.
You don’t need to tell that to Khaleed Mumin, Pennsylvania’s “Superintendent of the Year,” and the man who heads the Reading School District.
Reading is one of the poorest school districts in Pennsylvania and has a minority population of 95 percent.
“Our school district population has grown by almost 50 percent since the (hold harmless) policy began,” Mumin said.
With about 30 percent of the student population being English language learners, “the Reading School District is the most underserved school district in the state based on hold harmless dollars,” Mumin said.
As a result, “the City of Reading is one of the highest tax-burdened cities in the state of Pennsylvania,” he said.
But even districts with a more affluent tax base can be shortchanged by the system.
Consider Montgomery County’s Souderton School District, which has seen its population grow by 35 percent since hold harmless was enacted in 1991.
Its state funding level is at $1,140 per student, a state funding growth of 42 percent.
The report compares Souderton to Western Beaver County School District, which has seen a 36 percent decrease in student population over the same period. Its state funding level is at $7,550 per student, a state funding growth of 200 percent to educate fewer students.
None of which is to say that districts with shrinking student populations have it easy.
In fact, said Cooper, advocating for the abrupt removal of the hold harmless policy would simply exchange one type of underfunded district for another.
“Using hold harmless as a punching bag is too superficial an argument,” said Cooper. “Fundamentally, we need to get a little more sophisticated in our analysis.
“The Reading School District is the most underserved school district in the state based on hold harmless dollars.” — Khaleed Mumin, Reading Schools Superintendent
“Instead, she said, “we need to shift our fight over hold harmless to a fight about an adequacy target and a supplement.”
By “adequacy target,” Cooper is referring to a methodology used in Pennsylvania from 2006 to 2011 by which the state determined “how much does it cost to educate a child?” Different figures were established for high-need, low-income students.
Once that number is determined, supplemental funding is provided by the state to those districts to hit that target and ensure each child in each district is getting equal access to the resources needed to be successful.
Supplement funds are already on the radar of fair funding advocates in the Pottstown School District, who helped found a group called Pennsylvanians for Fair Funding. In January, the group sent a letter with about 400 signatures to Gov. Tom Wolf asking him to include a $500 million “equity supplement” in his 2021 budget.
“During this past year the results of this unjust underfunding were made crystal clear as underfunded students suffered numerous disadvantages when they tried to continue their education during the pandemic. From the lack of access to technology to facilities that couldn’t accommodate proper distancing and air quality, underfunded students were repeatedly shortchanged,” Pottstown School Board member Laura Johnson said about the effort.
“These students can’t wait any longer for fair and equitable funding. We are calling on our elected leaders to fund a permanent equity supplement that would target the most significantly underfunded districts,” she said.” Some of them may be listening.
Recently, state Sen. Bob Mensch, R-24th Dist., released a letter in response to the PCCY report.
Making sure to note that hold harmless was established “before I was a member of the legislature,” Mensch wrote: “In a reasonable world where public funds are spent only where there is need, a system that gives more money to educate fewer students each year would make no sense.”
“The vast majority of school districts in southeastern Pennsylvania are growing, including in my legislative district, and the state’s funding system puts taxpayers in a bind, causing property taxes to rise year after year just so schools can stay afloat,” Mensch wrote.
“Working families, seniors and businesses in these communities are footing the bill for the state’s irrational funding approach,” wrote Mensch.
He also acknowledged that Pottstown is the unwilling poster child for the unfairness of the state’s funding system.
“Pottstown School District is Exhibit A for the damage that the hold harmless funding approach has done to districts on the losing end. Their pension, charter school and special education costs alone have grown by $3,800 per student since 2002, while state funding grew by just $1,460 per student — just 38 percent of what’s needed to cover the costs,” wrote Mensch.
“They also have one of the highest poverty rates in the state, so they struggle to make up the gap locally, despite their best efforts. Pottstown now has the fifth highest tax burden in the state,” he wrote. “Residents are strained and so are businesses, and these trends do not bode well for the need to regenerate this gem of a community.”
But rather than take PCCY up on its suggestion of an “equity supplement,” Mensch wrote that he has co-sponsored a bill to route more of Pennsylvania’s regular education funding through the fair funding formula adopted in 2016.
The budget released earlier this month by Gov. Tom Wolf takes the same approach and would provide a massive infusion of state dollars to underfunded districts like Pottstown and Norristown and Reading.
But since Wolf has proposed raising the personal income tax on high-income residents to pay for it, Mensch has taken a position against it.