Senate Republicans want to abandon a school funding plan targeting the poorest districts

As Pennsylvania’s budget impasse drags on, Senate Republicans are threatening to scrap a school funding formula adopted last year that targets money to the state’s poorest districts, saying it shortchanges other communities.

Republican leaders passed a budget bill Tuesday that would hold education funding flat for the coming year — without the next $500 million installment of a $4.5 billion plan meant to bring schools across Pennsylvania up to adequate funding levels. Lawmakers agreed upon the plan last year, after a Commonwealth Court judge found the state had been illegally depriving students in low-wealth districts.

The formula, which calculates how much money each of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts needs based on its local wealth and the demographics of its students, steers additional money to 348 districts. But, Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman said Wednesday, “I’m quite certain that there’s 152 school districts in the state that don’t think the adequacy funding as it stands is fair.”

“Our view is budgets change from year to year, and just because something is in one budget one year doesn’t mean that it’s an absolute guarantee the following year,” Pittman (R., Indiana) said, saying it was “time to look at that formula.”

The Republican budget plan was a nonstarter with House Democrats, who voted it down in committee Wednesday. But Pittman’s remarks signaled that besides SEPTA and mass transit, education funding is also a sticking point in reaching a deal.

Public education advocates said it was too late for Republicans to be proposing a new plan, with schools in limbo ahead of the coming academic year. Without state aid coming in this summer, some districts have been forced to borrow money.

Abandoning the adequacy formula “would wreak havoc across school districts,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, a nonprofit that supports increases in education funding.

If Republicans had presented an alternate proposal in the spring, it could have been debated, Cooper said. But school districts built their budgets based on the plan put forward in February by Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who has supported the formula.

“Now, on Aug. 13, upending the entire projections that 500 school districts have done? It just seems a little late to the party, and a little reckless,” Cooper said.

Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro, did not address Pittman’s remarks Wednesday but pointed to comments from the governor saying that leaders in both caucuses were negotiating the budget and “making progress.”

Republicans have continued to call for an expansion of school choice programs. In an interview last week, Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) said that “I think we should be getting something” in exchange for the adequacy formula, while expressing support for school vouchers, which Shapiro has backed.

Pittman said Tuesday night that school vouchers remain the top Senate GOP education priority, but that he would also have interest in a parental school choice tax credit or expanding existing tax credits for wealthy Pennsylvania residents to pay for scholarships at private schools.

» READ MORE: See how much money your school district has for students

Among the districts benefiting from the adequacy formula are poor, urban districts like Philadelphia — slated to get about a quarter of the proposed funding — and growing districts in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

But rural districts with declining enrollment have seen their funding levels preserved over the years, thanks to a provision underlying Pennsylvania’s school-funding system known as “hold harmless,” Cooper noted. If Pittman wants to revisit the adequacy formula, she said, he should also reconsider the $1.1 billion in hold-harmless money going to those districts.

Lawyers who brought the successful school funding challenge against the state noted that both Democrats and Republicans had voted for the adequacy funding plan last year.

“We need the legislature to allocate at least an additional $500 million in this year’s budget to address the adequacy gap along with increases in special education and basic education to ensure our districts are closer to meeting the needs of the students they serve,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, a Philadelphia-based group that represented plaintiffs in the funding lawsuit.

Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney with the Public Interest Law Center, which also represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he was “confident that a year after responding to an unappealed court decision by enacting legislation that calculated schools were underfunded by $4.5 billion, the commonwealth isn’t going to turn their backs on Pennsylvania’s kids.”

“Given the governor’s repeated assurances, I think repealing the adequacy law is a nonstarter,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg, who added that Pennsylvania is taking too long to phase in the adequacy money; at the current rate, it will take nine years for the state to fund the $4.5 billion.

“Let’s just get this done … and give kids the resources they need instead of holding students hostage every year,” he said.