Education advocates say they have a plan to fix Pa.’s school funding system. It would cost $6.2 billion over 5 years.

Education advocates on Thursday laid out a plan to fix Pennsylvania’s unconstitutional school-funding system, and attached a price tag: $6.2 billion.

A group of activists detailed their plan Thursday in advance of next week’s anticipated release of a state Basic Education Funding Commission report. That report, the product of months of testimony before lawmakers, is expected to issue recommendations for a path forward following last year’s Commonwealth Court ruling that Pennsylvania’s school funding system is unconstitutional.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, which is part of the Pennsylvania Schools Work Coalition that issued the plan, said a “historic opportunity” is in front of Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has said his next budget plan, due in February, will include a broader remedy to the funding system, which a Commonwealth Court judge said shortchanged poorer districts and did not adequately account for student needs.

“We know and hope that he agrees with us that this is the right time this year to right the unconstitutional wrong,” Cooper said of Shapiro at Thursday’s news conference.

The advocates’ plan — sent to Harrisburg in December — could inform the Basic Education Funding Commission report, but lawmakers have been charged with coming up with their own fixes and are under no obligation to adopt any part of the activists’ roadmap.

In addition to regular education funding, the coalition said, the state should create a “constitutional shortfall fund” of the $6.2 billion, a figure calculated this fall by a Penn State professor who served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs during the 2021 trial and analyzed how much school districts need to spend to adequately educate students. That sum would be distributed over five years, with allocations made based on each district’s adequacy shortfall.

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In the next budget cycle, Pennsylvania ought to start with $2 billion in the constitutional shortfall fund. That money would be distributed to districts proportionally based on their constitutional shortfall as determined by the state’s own measures, the advocates said.

Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, a Public Interest Law Center of Pennsylvania lawyer who represented plaintiffs in the education-funding trial, said the state should evaluate all educational needs — basic education funding, special education, facilities, career and technical education, and pre-kindergarten — develop a formula to determine how much each school district needs to come into constitutional compliance, and meet adequacy targets over a period of five years.

Districts must be made whole, Urevick-Ackelsberg said.

“Even if it’s not in one year, it can’t be in 10,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg.

According to the advocates’ suggested formula, the William Penn School District in Delaware County, which was a plaintiff in the funding suit, has a state-funding shortfall of about $20 million, and would receive $6.2 million in additional state money next year. The larger Allentown School District, in Lehigh County, has a $203 million gap, and would get $65 million beyond its regular state funding next year.

While Pennsylvania currently has a funding formula that steers additional money toward needier school districts, it only applies to a portion of what the state spends on education, reducing its impact.

Though Commonwealth Court ordered the legislature to fix Pennsylvania’s funding system, the process figures to be a bumpy path in a divided General Assembly. Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center and a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said she and others will be watching.

“We are prepared to go back to court,” Gordon Klehr said. “We cannot accept a plan that is politically convenient but fails our students.”

The advocates said there is broad support statewide for funneling more money into public schools.

They cited a survey they commissioned, which found that a majority of Pennsylvania voters believe that the quality of public education is uneven across the commonwealth and that a majority of voters — no matter the gender, political affiliation, race or education level of those polled — should be doing more to make sure that schools are “sufficiently and equally funded.”