Times Chronicle & Public Spirit
Trial phase concludes in case challenging Pa. school funding
Case showed system of 'haves and have nots'
“Students capable of learning, caught in a system that fails to meet their needs, cannot be considered ‘thorough and efficient.’ One system for one people. It’s time to keep that promise.”
Those concluding remarks were spoken by Katrina Robson, the attorney representing six school districts, four parents, the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools and the statewide Pennsylvania chapter of the NAACP. All filed a joint lawsuit in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court against Pennsylvania’s legislative leaders, education officials, and the governor charging the state’s unfair school funding system violates the education clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
The defendants are the Pennsylvania Department of Education; state Sen. Jake Corman, R-34th Dist., in his official capacity as President Pro-Tempore of the Pennsylvania Senate; state Rep. Bryan Cutler, R100th Dist., in his official capacity as the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives; Gov. Tom Wolf; the Pennsylvania State Board of Education, and Noe Ortega, in his official capacity as the Secretary of Education.
Thursday, March 10, was the day for closing arguments in the case.
Since proceedings began before Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer in November, the long-awaited and much-debated trial took 48 days, heard 41 witnesses, accepted 1,100 exhibits and generated 14,600 pages of testimony, Cohn Jubelirer said just before eight hours of closing arguments began Thursday morning.
But even despite all that, its far from over.
Legal briefs and replies will be filed until July 6 and Cohn Jubelirer’s decision will follow at an unknown date.
Still, the closing of the main phase of the trial represents an important milestone in a case that has been winding its way through the courts since 2014.
At its core, the case revolves around one sentence in the state Constitution: “The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”
With one of the most unequal school funding systems in the nation — one which relies heavily on local property taxes thus skewing resources in favor of wealthy, white school districts — Pennsylvania’s system for funding public schools is “a system of haves and have nots,” said Robson, and the case may well decide what is to be done about it.
Roughly 52 percent of Pennsylvania’s students get their education in underfunded school districts.
Tom DeCesar, who represents Corman, made the argument that “thorough and efficient are imprecise terms” and the phrase that matters in the education clause is “to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”
Determining and serving those needs, he argued, is the responsibility of the General Assembly, not the courts. And if the people of the Commonwealth disagree with how the General Assembly is serving those needs, the solution is to vote them out of office.
The defense for the legislators did not deny that Pennsylvania’s school funding system is unfair, only that it meets the Constitutional minimum to “serve the needs of the Commonwealth,” and the burden of proving otherwise, falls upon those bringing the suit.
DeCesar argued that despite the mountain of evidence presented, no particular or specific law is being challenged. Instead, the suit charges “the system” with failing to meet its Constitutional responsibility. But the court was presented with just a tiny fraction of the entire system, which also includes technical schools, intermediate units and charter schools, to name a few.
There was no testimony, he said, to show that those aspects of “the system” violate the Constitution’s education clause.
The superintendents of all six school districts that filed the case — William Penn in Delaware County, Panther Valley in Carbon and Schuylkill Counties, School District of Lancaster, Greater Johnstown in Cambria County, Wilkes-Barre Area in Luzerne County and Shenandoah Valley in Schuylkill County — all offered testimony over the course of the trial. Multiple witnesses highlighted