Guest Column by William Adolph
Recently various media outlets have written about school funding and how the state’s contribution to PreK-12 education was distributed to Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts in the 2011-12 state budget. Many of these articles focus on the poorest 150 school districts and report about the impact state funding will have on their ability to educate students by comparing poorer school districts to wealthier school districts.
Unfortunately, these articles are far from constructive, and in fact are misleading because most often they only discuss dollars lost. Invariably, the focus is on the impact the state budget had on poorer school districts and suggests poor school districts are overlooked in the difficult process of crafting a state budget. It is important to dispel these suggestions and present the facts that are routinely left out of the stories on this topic.
First and foremost, very few articles appreciate or even mention the huge impact the loss of federal stimulus dollars had on the education budget. Of the total 2010-11 amount spent on education, 10 percent came from federal stimulus funds, which are no longer available in this current fiscal year. The total amount of education dollars lost was over $1 billion.
Losing 10 percent of the budget for education spending created a huge hole in the state budget that required a critical assessment of what was essential to the core mission of educating children. This analysis identified redundant funding streams that needed to be changed.
The most significant example of this was the elimination of the $224 million charter school reimbursement funding. School districts were receiving two reimbursements for students that were attending charter schools and not even being educated in their school. Unfortunately, poorer school districts had a larger number of charter school students, but that does not justify keeping the flawed charter school reimbursement funding distribution method.
Pennsylvania goes to great lengths to ensure poorer school districts have additional resources. A total of $5.5 billion in state aid will go to all 500 school districts in 2011-12. The 150 poorest school districts will receive $2.73 billion or 50 percent of all available state funding, which amounts to an average of $5,600 per student and is $3,900 more per student compared to the 150 wealthiest school districts.
Comparatively, the 150 wealthiest school districts will receive $1.05 billion or 19 percent of all available state funding, which averages out to approximately $1,679 per student. Any insinuation that the poorest districts do not receive a fair portion of state funding is misleading.
The impact on poorer districts is structural because they rely on disproportionately larger amount of state subsidies for their total spending. The bottom line is that those who received the most lost the most.
What we must also understand is that our economy is in transition and the boom years of the last decade are no longer a reality. Slower growth is forecast for the next two years and governments need to rebalance spending to match lower revenue collections and also address outstanding debt issues. This means there will be continued pressure on revenue and the increases of the past decade will be harder to come by.
The commonwealth has and will continue to work with poorer school districts to make sure they have additional resources to fulfill their mission, but only looking at what districts are losing without looking at the big picture is not productive for anyone.
Rep. William F. Adolph Jr., R-165, of Springfield is Chairman of the state House Appropriations Committee.
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