It’s been two years since a state court deemed the state's school funding model unconstitutional, and education advocates want Pennsylvania lawmakers to double down on their efforts to fix the problem.
On Tuesday, attorneys and educators gathered in Harrisburg to say the legislature should provide an additional $1 billion in education funding for this year’s budget – twice the $500 million in additional funds allocated in last year's spending plan.
“It is very important that for the 8.5 hours that those children are in those schools, those parents can rely on their state legislature covering their share of the burden of education. There's a constitutional obligation,” said Donna Cooper, executive director Children First PA and member of the PA Schools Work coalition. “It is one the lawmakers are failing to live up to.”
Nine out of 10 students in Pennsylvania attend public schools, but out of the state’s roughly 500 school districts, a commission on education funding found 371 districts suffered from “adequacy gaps” in terms of resources. The commission recommended spending more than $5 billion to fix the problem.
Speakers at the Capitol rotunda Tuesday said that made the math easy: They launched a campaign — “Fill It In 4” — that would close the divide in just four years, or half the time it would take at the rate the state was currently increasing funding.
Lawyers have been arguing in court over education funding for more than a decade. Among them was Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, a senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. On Tuesday he said the system “discriminates against children because of where they live and because of how much money students’ parents have.”
But while the state’s Commonwealth Court agreed in a 2023 ruling, Urevick-Ackelsberg said that every delay since then in addressing the need hurts students through underfunded libraries, lack of guidance counselors, and missing arts and music programs.
“The children who were in kindergarten when this case was filed are now in 10th grade,” he said. “They've been in those underfunded schools this entire time. We need to get this done now.”
Allegheny County state Sen. Lindsey Williams is the top Democrat on the Senate Education committee. She said she’s “absolutely supportive of $4 billion over four years [but] it's not the only thing that is necessary to get us to our constitutional obligation.”
Funds to upgrade facilities and to invest in early childhood education are also needed, Williams said, but that will require the support of Senate Republicans, who control the chamber.
Some Senate GOP colleagues, she added, said they’d like to review how districts spent the money from last year’s allocation. “I always want to make sure that every cent of taxpayer dollars is properly spent,” Williams said. But she said there was “hypocrisy in trying to say, ‘You have to prove how you're spending money that you are constitutionally owed.”
She noted too that the state supported educational tax credit programs that benefited non-public schools while “they have no accountability for billions of dollars … flowing to private schools.”.
Sen. Lynda Schlegel Culver (R-Snyder), chair of the Senate Education committee, defended charter and private schools as alternatives to public school — and as a means to address the resource gap.
“Our Senate Pro Tempore Kim Ward [R-Westmoreland] is committed to making sure every child gets a good education, that they're safe when they're in their school settings,” Culver said. “I think she's still committed to giving those children in the lowest-performing schools an option to get to a school that may better meet their needs or give them the education that they need.”
Education advocates did not indicate Tuesday where they thought lawmakers should find the funds they say should be fast-tracked for schools. But they named Shapiro and Democratic House Speaker Joanna McClinton as necessary allies in the push for an accelerated funding timeline.
Shapiro is expected to make his budget address early next month. Last year, he sought $872 million for schools considered inadequately funded. But neither his office nor McClinton’s commented directly on the “Fill It In 4” campaign.
A spokesperson for Shapiro said the governor faces a divided legislature where Republicans control the Senate and where proposals will require bipartisan support. But he also pointed to last year’s budget investments totaling $1.1 billion in new education funds, including $100 million each for environmental and sustainability building repairs, cyber charter reimbursements, special education and mental health professionals.
A McClinton spokesperson said the Speaker “looks forward to working with her colleagues and education advocates to keep Pennsylvania on track to ensure the Commonwealth meets its commitment to fair school funding.”
House Education chair Rep. Peter Schweyer (D-Allentown) told WESA that education advocates like PA Schools Work have been “invaluable partners” throughout school funding debates and supports them in their push. Still, he cautioned that four years could be too fast, given the infrastructure and staffing problems schools face.
As a member of the commission, Schweyer said legislators previously settled on a “phased in” funding approach in the Basic Education Funding report, in part because they “didn’t want to set unrealistic expectations.” The commission recommended seven years to roll out funding, he said.
“If we were to turn all that money on on day one, there still weren’t enough teachers for us to hire,” he said. “There was going to be a lag time to train the professionals, identify the programs that work, the organizations that could help… and new facilities. We just knew that there was going to be a process.”
