When the Shenandoah Valley School District supports one group of students, another group goes without. With limited resources and students with great needs, the superintendent worries about creating “collateral damage.”
A state House-approved plan would provide the Schuylkill County district with an additional $10,192 per student yearly. The Senate has not voted on the plan created to address inadequacies and satisfy a court ruling last year that found the current funding system unconstitutional.
As the state approaches a budget impasse, education funding for 2024-25 remains unclear. Both the House and Senate recessed for the weekend and plan to reconvene Monday, the day a new budget should already be in place.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in February proposed increasing education funding by more than $1 billion for next year. Republicans in the divided state Legislature questioned and criticized the amount, raising concerns that the funding would deplete the state’s reserves and be unsustainable. The Shapiro administration has proposed regulating skill games and legalizing marijuana as new revenue sources.
Republican Sen. David Argall, whose district includes Carbon, Schuylkill and part of Luzerne counties, said last week that the parties are moving closer to a budget deal but it was too soon to predict details.
“I think we're going to be able to help our local school districts,” said Argall, chair of the Senate Education Committee. “I just don't have a firm number yet.”
Last year, the Commonwealth Court ruled that the state’s current education funding system is unconstitutional. The governor’s budget proposal began to address fair funding, providing $872 million in first-year adequacy investments and $200 million for the basic education funding formula.
Democrat Kyle Donahue, a representative from Scranton, said caucus leaders are working to make progress over the weekend. For the Democrats, the top priority is to properly fund education, he said.
“It took us decades to get to where we are. It's not going to be fixed in one year,” Donahue said. “The governor's plan is over seven years to get us where we need to be. So it's just making sure that we make that initial down payment this year, so that we're actually providing relief to taxpayers in places where local school boards had to raise taxes because they weren't getting adequate funding from the state.”
The bill passed by the House on June 10 amends school code to include a seven-year funding plan developed by the state’s Basic Education Funding Commission in January 2024 in response to Commonwealth Court’s landmark decision.
The legislation commits the state to raise funding levels for 367 underfunded districts $5.1 billion to fill adequacy gaps over seven years.
Six school districts brought the lawsuit in 2014, including Wilkes-Barre Area in Luzerne County, Panther Valley in Carbon County and Shenandoah Valley. In Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania, some districts are short more than $10,000 per student yearly. Other districts have what is deemed already-adequate funding and would not lose funding under the plan. See your district's gap here.
To reach adequate funding levels, Wilkes-Barre would need $10,441 — or about $83 million more per year. The House bill calls for the district to reach that level over the next seven years.
”There’s no limit to what young people in places like Wilkes-Barre can achieve when we provide the resources they need — and this is a groundbreaking long-term plan to make that happen,” Brian Costello, Wilkes-Barre Area School District superintendent, said in a statement after the House vote. "Invest in our students, and let them show us what they can do.”
In Shenandoah Valley, unconstitutional underfunding means that educators “create collateral damage, shifting scarce resources to some students who need them at the expense of others,” Superintendent Brian Waite said during a press conference this month.
The Scranton School District in Lackawanna County is underfunded by $10,332 per student.
The chronic underfunding helped lead to the state placing the district in financial recovery in 2019. After program cuts, tax increases and with the help of federal pandemic money, the district left recovery and entered monitoring last year.
When school districts do not receive enough state funding, they often turn to local property taxes to make up the difference.
“So $10,000 per student is not just game-changing. It's mind-blowing,” said Scranton school Director Tom Borthwick, chair of the board’s new Fair Funding Committee. “It is all of everything Scranton deserves, and we could be bringing back programs like music, the arts. We could be funding sports, after school activities. We could be expanding our STEM program. We could be fixing our buildings. We could be lowering taxes and stop burdening Scranton for the failures of the state, so the implications are wild.”
The new committee will meet for the first time on Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Scranton High School, 63 Mike Munchak Way.
Reporter Roger DuPuis contributed to this report.
