Defense attorneys who fought and won a historic court ruling declaring Pennsylvania’s education funding system unconstitutional said Thursday they are prepared to return to court if state lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro do not put down a significant down payment on a solution.
The Pennsylvania Schools Work campaign, a coalition fighting for adequate and equitable school funding, said it had asked Shapiro to allocate $2 billion to enable the state’s 412 underfunded school districts to begin making improvements to instruction and student services.
Coalition officials said that initial investment would need to be followed by an additional $1 billion per year for four years until the gap between what school districts currently receive from the state and what is required to provide a constitutionally appropriate education is closed.
The proposal’s introduction comes a week before the deadline set by the Elementary Education Funding Commission to produce a report on inequality in Pennsylvania’s public schools after three months of hearings last year.
Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, said members of the commission, which includes members from every legislative group and the administration, are at a crucial juncture where they can present a crystal clear and evidence-based plan for a recent funding system.
If they fail to respond to the Commonwealth Court order from almost a year ago, “state officials will have to go back to a court that has already ruled that the system is fundamentally flawed,” Klehr said.
“As attorneys for the school districts, families and organizations that brought this case, we are prepared to return to court to defend the rights of these communities,” Klehr said. “We cannot accept a plan that is politically convenient but fails our students.”
On February 7, 2023 opinion In a decision that ended a decade of litigation, Chief Commonwealth Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer ruled that the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund education meant that students from poorer communities had fewer opportunities in school. That violated the state Constitution’s requirement that the Legislature pay for a “coherent and efficient public education system,” Jubelirer said.
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Testimony given at hearings before the Committee on Funding Basic Education largely confirmed that four-month trial period before Jubelirer in 2022. In cities and towns across the state, members heard from educators, advocates, students and an economist who laid bare the depth and breadth of the crisis.
Matthew Kelly, a Penn State professor who has studied the state’s school funding system, testified that the shortfall is about $6.2 billion, or about 20% of what the state currently spends each year.
Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center, said the number was determined by analyzing schools that perform based on state goals and objectives, as well as actual spending.
“From that, you can set a baseline that every school district in the state should have if they want to be as successful, and that number is $6.2 billion,” Urevick-Ackelsberg said.
Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, noted that 2024 will be a politically volatile year with presidential and Pennsylvania legislative elections. Those negotiating Pennsylvania’s budget this year will face an additional challenge as federal pandemic aid that was used to supplement education funding expires.
Cooper noted that Shapiro acknowledged that reaching a compromise on spending would be a challenge for him.
“I’m very aware of the Commonwealth Court decision and that we need to have more equality in our system. I’m also very aware that someone has to pay for it,” Shapiro told The Associated Press in a recent interview. interview.
Cooper quoted questionnaire by the Pennsylvania Policy Center, which shows voters are aware of the inequity in education funding and support spending increases to fix it. Of 1,274 likely voters, 69% said they think public schools need more money. And about two-thirds said they think the state should do more to provide adequate and fair funding for schools, the poll shows.
“So this isn’t just something esoteric that happened in the state courts. This is the actual experience of Pennsylvania voters,” Cooper said. She noted that while the economic impact is more pronounced in urban districts, most respondents agree that schools need better funding, regardless of whether they are in urban, suburban or rural areas, and regardless of whether they live in a Republican or Democratic district.
“Voters are very aware of what’s going on at high levels,” Cooper said.
