Fifth grade teacher Mike Faccinetto sees the effects of school underfunding in his Allentown classroom every day.
He said library, for his students, isn’t a a visit to a well-resourced space but a small cart that comes once every eight days; his school, Central Elementary, has one counselor for more than 700 students. Before the pandemic, he said, his students only had access to a few old desktop computers and a shared cart of laptops with broken keyboards.
“Our students do not have to be living in this atrocious reality of underfunding,” Faccinetto, who is also president of Bethlehem Area School Board, said at a news conference Thursday. “We must recognize that many of these districts are doing the best they can with minimal state dollars. They’re cutting and cutting every year to simply keep the lights on and the doors open.”
Allentown and Bethlehem school districts would get big boosts through a supplemental funding proposal led by state Rep. Mike Schlossberg that targets 100 of the neediest districts statewide.
Pennsylvania ranks 44th in the nation for state share of funding for K-12 education and has some of the nation’s widest gaps between wealthy and poor school districts, according to a news release from Level Up, a coalition of education advocacy organizations that launched a campaign Thursday to increase funding to those 100 districts. The state’s wealthiest districts spend, on average, $4,800 more per student than the poorest, according to the release.
Schlossberg, an Allentown Democrat, has filed the bill, which he said would help level school-funding disparities created by a flawed funding system that has triggered lawsuits and perennial political battles in Harrisburg.
Schlossberg, Faccinetto and others spoke in favor of the plan Thursday at a Level Up news conference.
Schlossberg pointed out that his district encompasses both Allentown and Parkland school districts, where the disparities are vast. His wife teaches in Harrison-Morton Middle School, an Allentown building constructed in 1871, he said, while Parkland High School was built in the 1990s.
“There is an inherent unequal system if the kind of facility you go to and the resources that are available for every student depend on which side of Cedar Crest Boulevard you live on,” he said.
In an interview, Schlossberg said Pennsylvania’s situation is unique.
“We are dead last in the nation in terms of the gap between the richest and the poorest of the school districts. That is an embarrassment,” he said.
The legislation creates a mechanism to drive funding to the 100 neediest districts using the state’s funding formula, but doesn’t itself allocate dollars, said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center. She said the group is asking for $100 million this year to go to those 100 districts, a pot of money that could come from the general assembly’s general fund.
The source of the funds was not immediately made clear, but Schlossberg said one strong possibility is the state’s personal income tax.
At the same time, billions of dollars are flowing into the state from federal COVID-19 relief packages. Schlossberg said the Level Up approach to shoring up funding for some districts is in line with some priorities set forth by Gov. Tom Wolf.
Wolf’s approach
A spokesperson for Wolf, Lyndsay Kensinger, said education was a top priority of Wolf’s and he was reviewing the Schlossberg bill.
She said Pennsylvania has one of the most unfair school funding systems in the country, and a fair funding formula created in 2016 applies only to new investments.
That meant that last year, only 11%, or $700 million, of state funding ran through it, while the remaining 89%, or $5.5 billion, was distributed based on student enrollment in 1992, ignoring shifts in student counts or actual current costs borne by school districts.
Kensinger said Wolf’s approach to the problem includes making a $1.3 billion investment in education and expanding a tax forgiveness credit to reduce or eliminate taxes for working class families.
Wolf wants to run all basic education funding, $6.2 billion, plus a $200 million increase this year, through the fair funding formula. Separately, an additional $1.15 billion would ensure that no school sees a decrease in state funding by using that formula.
Level Up
Under the Level Up concept, Allentown and Bethlehem are the only districts in Lehigh and Northampton counties on the list of 100 that would get extra money.
The 100 represent 20% of all districts statewide, but contain 65% of Pennsylvania’s Black students, 58% of Pennsylvania’s Latinx students, 58% of Pennsylvania’s students in poverty, 64% of Pennsylvania’s English learners, 35% of Pennsylvania’s students with disabilities, and 32% of Pennsylvania’s total student population, according to the Level Up news release.
Fourteen districts would receive more than $1 million in a proposed supplemental distribution of $100 million. The top five recipients would be:
Philadelphia, $39.1 million
Reading, $6.6 milion
Allentown, $6.3 million
York, $3.3 million
Erie, $2.9 million
Bethlehem Area School District would get the 13th-largest sum, $1.6 million.
A spokesperson for House Republicans, who control the chamber, reacted coolly to the proposal.
The spokesperson, Jason Gottesman, pointed out that the proportion of state money going to public education has increased over the past decade while student enrollment has decreased. He also said poorer school districts often receive the highest proportion of funding, particularly when viewed on a per-pupil basis.
Morning Call Capitol correspondent Ford Turner can be reached at fturner@mcall.com. Morning Call reporter Michelle Merlin can be reached at 610-820-6533 or at mmerlin@mcall.com.