Chalkbeat

Record-setting increase in public school funding proposed by Pennsylvania governor

2024-02-06T19:26:10+00:00

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Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed a 2024-25 budget Tuesday that increases basic education funding by $1.1 billion, which would be the largest single-year increase ever.

Most of that money, $900 million, would be funneled through a so-called adequacy formula that calculates what every district actually requires to educate all their children to high standards, based on students’ needs.

Shapiro’s proposal comes almost exactly one year after Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer’s ruling that Pennsylvania’s school funding system is unconstitutional – meaning it is neither fair nor adequate and depriving many children of their right to a “thorough and efficient” education. Currently, districts that educate high numbers of students in poverty, English language learners, and others with special needs generally spend less than wealthier districts, even though their students require more in order to be prepared for college and careers.

Shapiro said in his Tuesday address that his spending blueprint “will deliver real results for the Commonwealth” by “making historic investments in public education.”

Shapiro’s proposal also hews closely to the recommendation of the Basic Education Funding Commission, which spent a year traveling the state to question educators, advocates, experts, and others about education in their communities. By “acting on the work” of the commission, the budget is “delivering a comprehensive solution on K-12 education in Pennsylvania,” he said.

In a report released last month, the commission determined that the state should spend $5.4 billion more annually to bring all districts to adequate funding, with $5.1 billion of that coming from state as opposed to local coffers. It set out a plan to reach that goal by 2029.

The remaining $200 million in Shapiro’s proposed $1.1 billion increase would be funneled through the formula established by the funding commission, which also takes into account student needs in devising a per-pupil rate for state aid. This would assure that wealthier districts like Lower Merion and Radnor still get a share of state aid to help with inflation and other cost drivers.

Under the proposal, Philadelphia would receive an increase of $203 in adequacy funding, plus $40 million additional through the standard formula.

It would also get a share of the $50 million increase Shapiro is proposing for special education funding, and a share of a $300 million increase in facilities funding.

Shapiro also proposes to cap cyber charter tuition at $8,000 per student, which could provide significant savings for Philadelphia public schools. Philadelphia now pays $11,502 per cyber charter student.

The budget does not include vouchers, which are backed strongly by Republicans who control the Senate and share power in an almost equally divided General Assembly. The state already has two programs that offer tax credits to corporations that donate to scholarship programs, but Shapiro does not recommend any funding increases for them.

Last year, Shapiro publicly stated his support for creating vouchers in Pennsylvania. But he ultimately vetoed a provision to establish vouchers when he signed the state budget. On Tuesday, Shapiro reiterated his support for vouchers and said he considered them “unfinished business.”

‘The transformation of Pennsylvania’s school funding system’

Advocates who brought the 2014 lawsuit that ultimately led to Jubelirer’s ruling, William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, hailed the budget proposal, which is just a starting point in negotiations before a final budget is adopted by the end of June. They said it meets the mandate of Jubelirer’s ruling.

“If carried out to completion, this would mean the transformation of Pennsylvania’s school funding system,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, executive director of the Public Interest Law Center. “It would mean thousands of more teachers, counselors, librarians – it would truly be historic.”

Deborah Gordon-Klehr, director of the Education Law Center, hailed the governor’s proposal as “critical,” adding that “it’s the start of what needs to be a long term commitment.”

She said her group would be seeking legislation to guarantee future increases to reach the target set by the commission “so districts can plan, leaders can be held accountable, and students can see the benefits.”

The adequacy formula devised by the funding commission looks at what the most successful districts spend per student and determines what every district needs to get all their students to that level, using a weighted formula that takes into account poverty, English language status, and other circumstances. Philadelphia’s “adequacy gap” was determined to be in the range of $1.4 billion, on a current budget of about $4.5 billion, or about $7,100 per student.

Philadelphia has the 35th highest adequacy gap in the state; Reading’s shortfall of $14,000 between what it has and what it needs is the widest.

Shapiro’s proposal “targets the funding specifically for the districts that are farthest from adequacy,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg.

Of the 500 districts in Pennsylvania, about 400 do not meet their adequacy targets as defined by the commission.

The governor’s proposal to reform cyber charter funding is likely to run into political headwinds.

Pennsylvania has one of the largest cyber charter enrollments in the country, and districts pay cyber charters their own per-pupil costs, even though cyber education costs far less to deliver than brick-and-mortar schools.

“Currently, cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania charge school districts between $8,639 and $26,564 per student per year,” Shapiro said. This, he said, “no longer makes sense. The 2024-25 budget establishes a statewide cyber tuition rate of $8,000 per student per year and will better align tuition with the actual costs of providing an online education.”

He said this reform will save school districts an estimated $262 million annually.

Other education highlights of Shapiro’s budget include:

$50 million for school safety and security.
$300 million in “sustainable funding for environmental repair projects” in school buildings.
$10 million for teacher recruitment.
$15 million, an increase of $5 million, for student-teacher stipends.
$100 million for mental health funding in K-12 schools.
$3 million to provide free breakfast for all students year-round.
$96,000 to help free up $62 million in federal child care reimbursements for providers.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia tax break program fails to deliver hoped-for benefits to students

2024-02-01T11:00:00+00:00

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Every so often, Philadelphia’s school board members have to decide whether to grant huge tax breaks to property developers through a program that, on the whole, siphons money away from the city and the district they govern.

These tax breaks are a lynchpin of Keystone Opportunity Zones, a 25-year-old state program that officials say spurs development on abandoned or underutilized land by waiving nearly all state and local taxes, including business and property taxes, in the zones for up to 10 years. Pennsylvania says the program is a strong economic development strategy.

But by the district’s own estimate, the zones have cost Philadelphia public schools $59.9 million since 2017. The district lost out on $7.7 million in 2022, an amount that could have funded 61 librarians for one year, based on the district’s average salary and benefits equaling $126,000 for the 2021-22 school year, for example. Since 2017, developers receiving new zones or extensions for previously approved zones are required to provide alternative revenue to the district to help offset that impact. Yet nearly three-quarters of the zones still don’t even generate that revenue stream, according to city records.

And when the board had the chance to halt five of the zones last year, it approved them instead.

The program highlights the school system’s place in the city’s political and financial ecosystem. And its trade-offs have become the subject of intense debate. The Philadelphia school district relies heavily on city property tax revenue for its $3.9 billion budget. It has no independent taxing power and is getting just over $1 billion in city property taxes this fiscal year. The district’s projected $407 million budget deficit next year only underscores disputes about the zones.

But criticism of the zones goes beyond their tax impact. Keystone Opportunity Zone (KOZ) developers are now “strongly encouraged” (according to a statement from the city’s Department of Commerce) to offer work and related opportunities for students enrolled in the district’s career and technical education programs. Yet only three developers have actually provided these opportunities, and information about them is not easily accessible. More developers could be offering life-changing opportunities to hundreds if not thousands of students, but aren’t.

Overall, records provided about the program appear to leave out critical details, and it’s not clear which businesses are or should be making required payments designed to serve as an alternative to regular tax burdens. Critics have alleged the overall program lacks transparency and accountability, and that it’s expanded unnecessarily to already rapidly developing neighborhoods like Fishtown and University City.

“Can they afford the tax break? I don’t think they can. I think there’s no way this school district should be writing off anybody’s taxes,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Children First, referring to the board. “They don’t have the money.” She added that the district should be more focused on whether the setup is benefitting students.

This is the Pennsylvania tax break that keeps causing controversy on Philadelphia’s school board

The tension surrounding Keystone Opportunity Zones was on display during an August school board meeting, when board members voted on whether to grant 10-year extensions of the tax abatements to five developers.

Some board members said they didn’t understand why the tax breaks were still needed — and why, in some cases, properties remained undeveloped even after developers had held onto the land for more than a decade.

“I’m trying to reconcile that in my brain,” Board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez said.

The five developers in question were Enterprise Center, Stateside Vodka, Longfellow Real Estate Partners, Wexford Development, and Arsenal. Arsenal has had a Keystone Opportunity Zone in Tacony since 2004, yet is still trying to develop 12 buildings.

Arsenal has had a Keystone Opportunity Zone in Tacony since 2004, yet is still trying to develop 12 buildings.

Present at the meeting and answering the board’s many questions were not the developers, but Philadelphia Department of Commerce leaders. When Fix-Lopez asked for data about the career-related learning opportunities developers have said they’ll provide for students, the officials responded with details from one developer, Hilco, which was not requesting an extension. The officials did not provide comprehensive information about the others.

Board member Cecilia Thompson said she wanted more time to review the developers’ letters of intent, “because it’s almost as if we are voting blind.”

Despite these and other questions and concerns, the board voted to approve four of the five extensions at the August meeting. Only Arsenal’s extension didn’t get the thumbs-up. Then, in September, the board pivoted and voted to extend the tax break for Arsenal after all.

In an interview with Chalkbeat, board member Lisa Salley said she changed her vote in support of Arsenal after visiting the construction site.

“What we were able to see is the level of complication and the layers of government at the federal level and at the city level, the level of relationships involved with making any decision to develop it,” Salley said.

Salley would not comment on her other votes in favor of the KOZ extensions. Board Vice President Fix-Lopez declined to comment on her decision. No other board members responded to Chalkbeat’s repeated requests for comment about their votes.

The City Council unanimously approved four of the five KOZ extensions last June, a few months before the school board did so.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said she supported Enterprise’s tax abatements because of the developer’s mission (Enterprise is a nonprofit).

“We just have to be very clear before we give up revenue that the city needs, that there’s a concurrent benefit that’s going to come, particularly for Black and brown working class people who are at risk of displacement in our communities,” Gauthier said.

But Jeff Hornstein, executive director of the Economy League, who worked on a 2014 report on Keystone Opportunity Zones’ tax impact for the city controller’s office, said that between the city and the school district, “The school district is the biggest loser, at least in the short run.”

Workaround for school district revenue falls short

A state law enacted in 2008 allows the city to require developers using Keystone Opportunity Zones to make payments in lieu of taxes, sometimes known as PILOTs.

The school district receives 55% of these payments. The total payment amount is 10% more than what the real estate taxes would have originally been for each property, and are based on the city’s most recent property assessment.

But even with the PILOT payments, the zones ultimately lead to less funding for the district than regular taxes.

Property owners now sign a contract with the city to pay PILOTs when they are granted the tax abatements. The district received $1.2 million in such payments from developers and property owners in 2023, markedly less (for example) than the $7.7 million the district didn’t collect in revenue due to KOZ tax breaks from the previous year.

And crucially, not all developers who benefit from Keystone Opportunity Zones actually generate those payments. That’s partly because only developers approved for them since 2017, or developers who have been granted extensions by the district since then, are required by the commerce department to make those payments.

Out of 287 properties with KOZ tax abatements in 2023, businesses made payments in lieu of taxes on just 81 of them, according to district records provided to Chalkbeat.

For instance, Urban Outfitters doesn’t make such payments for its three properties on Kittyhawk Avenue, or its property on Flagship Drive. Brandywine Realty Trust doesn’t make these payments on FMC Tower, a prominent development on Walnut Street.

And not all property owners with established PILOT agreements — according to city records — made those payments in 2023. East Capital Partners (which is developing Stateside Vodka’s new warehouse), and Commercial Development Co., the developer of a contested UPS warehouse in the Northeast, did not make their payments to the district in 2023, according to the district.

Neither company responded to Chalkbeat’s multiple requests for comment.

In an interview with Chalkbeat, City Councilmember Kendra Brooks said there needs to be better “collective planning” related to the Keystone Opportunity Zones.

“We can’t continue to create systems that aren’t monitored and we don’t have accountability,” Brooks said. “And the outcome is that our school district is suffering.”

From left: 3800-14 Market St. and 3400 Market St. Both properties are receiving Keystone Opportunity Zone tax abatements.

Information on developers’ help for students is sparse

Perhaps the most direct connection between these opportunity zones and Philadelphia’s students is the chance for students to learn career and technical skills that are provided by some developers — at least in theory.

In December 2018, the City Council passed a bill requiring Keystone Opportunity Zone applicants to include plans to offer apprenticeships, internships, and other work opportunities for students enrolled in the district’s career and technical education programs. These plans are known as Opportunity Plans or — as the district calls them — Career Connected Learning Plans.

But the commerce department said that bill isn’t enforceable because it’s a state-run program, and it’s not a state requirement for developers to offer students such opportunities.

The city is “pretty limited” in how it can change Keystone Opportunity Zone rules for developers “unless there’s a provision in the state law that allows for it,” said Marc Stier, executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center. (The 2008 amendment to state law allowing the city to require PILOT payments is one such change.)

Since 2020, 50 developers, according to the commerce department, have been granted zones or extensions on their zones. Yet just three of those developers have devised and implemented these Career Connected Learning Plans, according to the district: Hilco ReDevelopment Partners, Brandywine Realty Trusts, and Cescaphe of Battery Park. And even those three developers have not fulfilled these plans to the extent they’ve said they will.

The commerce department says the plans have “engaged thousands of students” since 2020, yet neither the school district nor the commerce department shared detailed information about the plans. They are not available online or easily accessible to the public.

The district said Hilco and Brandywine have enacted 95% of their promises, while Cescaphe has 50% of its plans in place. When asked for further details, the district directed Chalkbeat to the commerce department. The city did not share what the percentages mean.

In 2020, Hilco, which bought the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, revealed ambitious plans for providing career pathways to students. The commerce department said Hilco “engaged over 1,300 students” in the 2022-23 school year. But when Chalkbeat asked for details about what the developer provided, the city only cited general information, listing “career fairs, job shadowing, internships, informational interviews and site tours.”

According to the commerce department, Brandywine created a six-week program for Dobbins High School BioTech students to meet with industry professionals, receive mentoring, and go on site tours. Cescaphe donated food to school district events and has been working with Ben Franklin High School’s culinary program to give site tours and develop ongoing programming.

At the August school board meeting, the commerce department presented five new career learning plans with developers’ Keystone Opportunity Zone extension requests. But in December, the district said none of those plans had been implemented yet.

Fix-Lopez, the board’s vice president, zeroed in on the Enterprise Center’s estimate that it would engage with 30 students annually, including 20 who’d get access to career fairs. “That’s one kindergarten classroom, for example,” she said. “In a city of 1.5 million with 200,000 students, how did we come up with 20?”

Cooper, of Children’s First, criticized the commerce department’s failure to truly define what it means for developers to have “engaged” with students.

“Let’s say they do internships — what does that mean? How many hours? What are they learning?”

The office wants to make “quality experiences for students, versus quantity,” said Gianna Grossman, the commerce department’s senior director of workforce development.

The city cannot revoke a Keystone Opportunity Zone designation if a developer doesn’t follow through on plans for students or PILOT payments.

“We are completely within our right to recommend to the state that they not renew,” Commerce Department Director Anne Nadol said in December (Nadol has since left that position).

But the city has not made such a recommendation in the last 10 years, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the agency that runs Keystone Opportunity Zones. Not paying PILOTs or following through on pledges to provide career opportunities to students is also not grounds for denying applications for the zones, the department said.

A Pennsylvania law allows the city to require developers using Keystone Opportunity Zones to make payments in lieu of taxes. But even with those payments, the zones ultimately lead to less funding for the district than regular taxes.

Advocates ask for more on transparency, student promises

Nelida Sepulveda, an advocate for effective workforce and public education reform policies and staffer with Children First, said wants to see public reporting on the effectiveness of the Career Connected Learning Plans.

“If they have a data collection process and reporting structure, they should make it known so that the public can access it and use it as a tool to either promote these types of initiatives or hold stakeholders accountable for poor performance or lack of follow through — since after all, these are public resources that are being utilized,” Sepulveda said.

Then there are concerns about a lack of transparency for decisions like the board’s August and September votes.

“When you post an item that nobody can understand and then you flip your vote and give either no explanation or an incoherent explanation, you’re not telling people what your priorities are and why you’re doing what you’re doing,” said Lisa Haver, cofounder of the education advocacy group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

Children First’s Cooper described the developers’ plans as overall “extremely modest” in relation to the benefit of the tax abatement. More questions should be asked about whether they are providing a sufficient return for students, she said.

“People really underdeveloped those plans. They didn’t demonstrate any significant commitment ... that’s a tragedy,” Cooper said.

Correction, Feb. 1, 2024: Due to inaccurate records from the city commerce department, this article has been updated to reflect that since 2020, 50 developers have been granted zones or extensions on their zones. A previous version of the article said at least 17 developers had been granted zones or extensions based on city records.

Advocates praise school funding report, promise statewide campaign to back more spending

2024-01-12T22:50:52+00:00

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Education advocates said Friday they were encouraged by the report from the Basic Education Funding Commission, calling it a potential “game changer” for student opportunity in Pennsylvania if the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro implement its recommendations.

The report, approved on Thursday, recommends increasing school spending, drawing up a plan for what it means to fund students “adequately,” and overhauling charter school funding, among other proposals. The commission’s suggestions act as the first step in the state’s response to a 2023 Commonwealth Court ruling that the way Pennsylvania funds its schools is unconstitutional.

In a call with reporters, the advocates played down the divided vote on the commission, which approved the report by an 8-7 vote largely along party lines. All but one Democrat voted in favor and all Republicans opposed. And the Democratic dissent was from a legislator who felt it didn’t go far enough.

“This provides almost everything we need for a roadmap for success,” said Sharon Ward, senior policy adviser to the Education Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs in Commonwealth Court along with the Public Interest Law Center and the private law firm O’Melveny and Myers LLP.

But she and others also said that they would continue lobbying around the state to build political support for the larger state education investment that the commission is calling for.

Last February, after a four-month trial, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer ordered the state’s school funding system to be revised, responding to a lawsuit brought by six districts, several parents, and some advocacy groups. She ruled that the system deprived many students of a “thorough and efficient” education required by the state constitution and violated the federal right to equal protection.

After months of hearings all over the Commonwealth, the commission said Pennsylvania should increase its spending on K-12 education by $5.4 billion over the next seven years to meet the constitutional mandate, with most of that money, $5.1 billion, coming from the state rather than local districts. It also set a method for determining the amount each of the state’s 500 districts — which vary widely in demographics and poverty levels — would need to reach adequacy for their students.

“While not every (commission) member supported this, the minority accepted the court ruling,” said Marc Stier, executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center, a Harrisburg think tank, noting that Republican legislators who argued in court to keep the funding status quo did not appeal Jubelirer’s ruling. He noted that the Republicans’ 92-page minority report laid out a series of ways schools could be improved, “which cannot be put into place without new funding.” That report got six yes votes on the commission, six no votes, and three abstentions.

Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Children First, said “Republicans did not refute that there was an adequacy gap, and they were very clear to say that the solution to that needed to be found in the General Assembly.” She said the advocates “are looking forward to working with members on both sides of the aisle” to come up with a plan and to “rally parents, teachers, concerned citizens in every district, Republican and Democrat, to stand behind (legislators) as they do that.”

“ZIP code should never dictate the level of education students receive,” said Melissa Robbins, of the local Urban League chapter. David Heayn-Menendez, of the Latino advocacy group ACLAMO, described how so many Latino students in the city attend schools without basic amenities like a functioning library and a school nurse.

The commission report “lays a path to invest in our children, support our educators, and be a Commonwealth that genuinely supports the common good for all,” he said. “It is a commitment to bridging the gaps that have hindered our education system for generations.” No family, he said, should be “choosing between the future of their children and where they can afford to live.”

Pennsylvania is currently more reliant on local rather than state funding for its schools, with wide disparities in education spending depending on a district’s wealth. The national average for the state contribution is about 55%, while in Pennsylvania it is just 45%, which means that residents of the poorest districts are often overtaxed locally.

The commission’s recommendations included earmarking nearly $1 billion to ease the burden on high-tax districts.

Philadelphia is one of the districts with a high proportion of students from low-income families and has long argued that it has been shortchanged by the state. Its per-pupil expenditures fall below most of the surrounding suburbs, even though it serves a student population with greater overall needs.

Under the commission’s proposal, it would stand to see its annual state aid, now around $2 billion, increase by some $1.4 billion, or 70%, in seven years.

David Lapp of Research for Action said that such a boost would allow Philadelphia and other historically underfunded districts to give students more access to certified teachers, counselors, rigorous curricula, healthy facilities, and smaller class sizes — benefits that are taken for granted in wealthier areas.

“We believe the Commission’s report is a crucial first step forward ending the systemic underfunding of the School District of Philadelphia,” said Superintendent Tony Watlington in a statement. “We look forward to working with Governor Shapiro and the General Assembly to make its recommendation a reality in the coming months.”

In their own report, Republicans took issue with the commission setting adequacy targets at all, while also disputing the method it used.

“Unfortunately, the Commission could not reach a consensus on a model for measuring adequacy to recommend to the General Assembly. … It is up to the General Assembly to determine the appropriate adequacy model,” the Republican report said.

It added that any additional funding sent to districts “must include an accountability component to ensure those districts invest in programs that focus on high-quality academics.”

In court and in general, Republicans have long disputed the correlation between the amount of spending and education quality. House Republican leader Bryan Cutler issued a statement saying the report “continues the false choice that providing only more state funding will improve Pennsylvania’s public schools.”

He and other Republicans favor more choice for parents, including the creation of more charter schools and vouchers for private schools. They also cautioned that any big increases in education spending could result in higher taxes, especially when federal pandemic aid runs out.

The advocacy groups have said that if the state does not adopt a funding system that meets the constitutional mandate of adequacy and fairness, they will go back to court.

“What’s really going to be important is the acknowledgement that this is not just going to be a report on paper, but a report that informs the governor’s budget proposal,” said Ward. “It is and will be a game changer.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Bipartisan Pennsylvania school funding commission proposes eight changes

2024-01-11T23:21:44+00:00

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The long-awaited report from the state’s Basic Education Funding Commission recommends steady, annual increases in school spending, an overhaul to charter school funding, and a plan to calculate what it means to fund students “adequately.”

But even without any earth-shattering proposals, the report released Thursday did not receive unanimous support from the bipartisan but politically divided commission. And school funding experts are already raising questions about it.

The commission’s report follows months of hearings and hours of testimony from school leaders, education advocates, and others regarding how Pennsylvania should remake its school funding formula. A Commonwealth Court judge ruled the state’s funding formula unconstitutional in 2023 and ordered the state to revamp it. If lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro enact the commission’s recommendations, Philadelphia students could receive significantly more funding — nearly $243 million more in the fiscal 2025 budget, for example, and $1.4 billion more over seven years.

In an 8-7 vote largely along party lines, the commission (which is made of Democratic and GOP legislators, as well as members of Shapiro’s administration) approved a 114-page report that includes eight recommendations. All votes in favor were Democratic lawmakers or from Shapiro’s team, while the Republicans were united in opposition. Sen. Lindsey Williams, a Democrat, voted no because in her view the report’s recommendations don’t go far enough.

Primary among those recommendations is to update estimates of what each district needs so all their students can succeed — the so-called “adequacy” target — by recalculating key aspects of the funding formula to make its annual allocations to districts more fair and predictable.

The commission also calls for making teacher salaries more competitive; adding funding for student supports, including mental health; and examining how the state can bolster support for access to prekindergarten, career and technical education, and funding for libraries.

To make sure that school spending in the state continues to be fair and adequate, it also wants the commission to be reconstituted in 2029 to provide continued monitoring of the funding system.

But overall, the commission’s recommendations regarding state funding fall well below the $6.2 billion over five years of increased education spending that some advocacy groups are calling for. Those groups want a $2.2 billion hike in fiscal 2025, followed by $1 billion increases in each of the following four years.

Instead, the commission determined that there’s a $5.4 billion funding adequacy gap, of which $291 million is “the local responsibility of low tax effort school districts.” The remaining $5.1 billion “rests upon the state” which Pennsylvania would close through a seven-year ramp-up in funding.

For 2023-24, Pennsylvania’s share of K-12 total spending in the Commonwealth is $10 billion.

The commission also acknowledged the widely disparate tax burdens for individual districts. To address this, it proposed an additional $955 million in state money, in the form of “tax equity supplements,” for districts that have been taxing themselves at high rates.

“I believe the report not only meets our obligation as a commission … but also meets constitutional muster as directed by the Commonwealth Court,” said state Rep. Mike Sturla, a Democrat and a majority chair of the commission.

But he cautioned, “really, this is the end of the beginning. There’s still a whole lot of work to do.”

Shapiro said in a Thursday statement he “look[s] forward to addressing these points when I deliver my budget to the Legislature in a few weeks, and to continue working with leaders in both parties in order to deliver a thorough and efficient public education for students across our Commonwealth.”

In a Thursday press conference after the report’s release, advocates who were among plaintiffs in the 2014 school funding lawsuit that was the subject of the Commonwealth Court judge’s ruling last year said it represented a step in the right direction. In particular, they highlighted the commission’s proposed adequacy targets that take into account the actual needs of Pennsylvania students, district by district.

“This is a big first step … the timeline is long, it’s not perfect, and there are unaddressed issues. But the vision it lays out is a transformative one,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of the Public Interest Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs along with the Education Law Center.

Recommendations focus on teacher workforce, poverty data, charters

The commission’s recommendations won’t go into effect without corresponding legislation approved by the state’s General Assembly and the governor. Its recommendations are:

Simplify and “reduce the volatility” in the state’s basic education funding formula by using three-year averages of U.S. Census Bureau data on poverty and median household income. The state should then add at least an additional $200 million to this updated formula each year.
Calculate adequacy targets — or how much each district should be spending on their student population, based on their needs. The commission recommended using Pennsylvania’s state performance standards to determine which districts are “successful” and then use those districts’ spending level as a target for all school districts.
Invest more state money in school facilities, especially in districts like Philadelphia.
Reexamine the way charter schools are funded in the state and “modernize” the calculation of cyber charter school tuition.
Invest in the teacher workforce.
Invest in student supports like mental health services and the “community schools” model.
Bring back the Basic Education Funding Commission in 2029.
“Consider other important education issues,” including access to pre-K, transportation, school safety, and “explore dedicated funding for every school district to have at least one school librarian.”

While saying that the state “should be investing in competitive teacher salaries across the Commonwealth,” the report cites a few actions already taken, including a teacher pipeline program and provides stipends and other incentives. But it doesn’t lay out a blueprint or funding source for helping high-poverty, low-spending districts raise their salaries, which generally fall below those offered by high-wealth districts.

The charter school recommendations are likely to be politically controversial. The commission wants to restore a charter school reimbursement line item in the state budget to help districts cope with the “stranded costs” of charters. When Gov. Tom Corbett ended the practice in 2011, Philadelphia, which has half that charters in the state, was receiving $110 million through that provision.

The commission also wants to change the charter school funding formula so that it uses the same three tiers of supplemental funding for students with disabilities that traditional districts receive, depending on the severity of their disability. Right now, charters receive the highest tier of funding for all students under current law.

‘You have to use good empirical evidence’

Though the final report reflects a compromise, experts and education advocates are already raising eyebrows at some of the commission’s suggestions.

Bruce Baker, a school finance professor and national school funding expert at The University of Miami, took issue with the assigned weights the commission recommends using to calculate how much it would cost to educate each student.

Research has found students with disabilities, English language learners, and students from impoverished backgrounds all require more funding than their peers to help them achieve a desired level of performance.

Baker said the commission should have required that those weights be updated because the current ones are part of a formula that has been deemed unconstitutional.

“You can’t correct the constitutional deprivation without specific consideration to the additional costs of providing children of all backgrounds, in all settings, equal opportunity to achieve the outcomes,” Baker said. “You have to use good empirical evidence in order to correctly calibrate the weights.”

Meanwhile, Nathan Benefield, senior vice president of the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, called the report “deeply disappointing” in a statement Thursday.

Benefield previously told Chalkbeat the state could find more money by phasing out so-called “hold harmless” aid rather than injecting billions of dollars that may not be sustainable if the state’s budget surplus runs out. “Hold harmless” was a policy enacted to guarantee that no school district in the state would receive less funding than it had the previous year, even if it lost students.

But in its report, the commission said abandoning “hold harmless” would be “counterproductive.”

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, called the report “a critical step in the right direction” primarily because it recommends additional state spending on facilities improvements and because of the significant increases it brings to the city’s schools.

Clarification: This story has been updated to better explain Pennsylvania’s share of total K-12 spending in 2023-24.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania should hike education spending by at least $2 billion, groups say

2024-01-04T23:05:48+00:00

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Education advocates want the state to hike education spending by $2 billion in the upcoming budget, saying that is the minimum necessary to start fixing a funding system that a Commonwealth Court judge ruled last year is unconstitutional.

In addition, Pennsylvania needs to invest additional capital funds to help districts update school facilities and expand access to preschool, according to a statement from the Education Law Center and the Public Interest Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs at the four-month trial. The proposal is also supported by PA Schools Work, a statewide coalition of groups that advocate for fair school funding.

The demands come a week before the Basic Education Funding Commission — a bipartisan group of legislators and state officials — is scheduled to release its report based on hearings it held across the state in response to Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s ruling, and as the state’s annual budget process gears up.

The groups held a press conference Thursday to outline their desires for education spending. If Gov. Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers fall short, “we are prepared to go back to court to uphold the rights of those communities,” said Deborah Gordon-Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center.

After a $2 billion education funding increase in the 2024-25 budget, the groups say an additional $1 billion should be added in each of the next four years, which they said will allow the state to close a $6.2 billion “adequacy gap” by 2028-29. Taking decisive action now is necessary “so that children currently in school will see the benefits,” they said.

When lawmakers approved the current state budget, they enacted an increase in basic education spending of $567 million, which combined with other aid increases brought total K-12 spending to $10 billion.

In February 2023, in her ruling on a lawsuit that several plaintiff districts and others filed in 2014, Jubelirer said the state contribution to school funding — meant to offset wealth disparities among districts — is both inadequate in the overall amount of money allocated and inequitable in how it is distributed. She concluded that as a result many students are deprived of their constitutional right to a “thorough and efficient” system of education.

At the trial, educators, experts and students described the impact of inadequate funding: large classes, insufficient counselors, outdated equipment, a lack of libraries, and teacher shortages due in part to inadequate pay. The defendants — the governor and legislature — eventually decided not to appeal Jubelirer’s ruling, and instead set up the commission to explore how to comply.

In a November letter to the funding commission, the group said that the General Assembly must determine “how much funding is needed to provide each child a constitutionally adequate, comprehensive, contemporary and effective education,” as well as determine the needs of each of the state’s 500 districts.

Experts testified during the trial that Philadelphia’s shortfall is in excess of $7,000 per student. According to the groups’ data, Philadelphia has a total “adequacy shortfall” of nearly $1.6 billion. Under their plan, the district would get an increase in state funding for 2024-25 of $500 million, as well as $250 million the next year. That additional money could go a long way toward helping new Mayor Cherelle Parker’s ambitions to implement year-round school and a longer school day.

They also noted that Shapiro, when he was attorney general, filed an amicus brief for the funding lawsuit that supported the plaintiffs’ claim of inadequate funding.

“Every child in our Commonwealth should have access to a high-quality education and safe learning environment regardless of their zip code,” he wrote in the 2022 brief. “Many Pennsylvania schools are not able to provide the level of education required by the Constitution—not for lack of trying, but for lack of funding … It is past time for the General Assembly to step up, comply with its constitutional obligations, and give our public schools the funding they need to educate our children.”

The advocates also released polling data from last year showing that most people think the current system is unfair, and that people did not oppose raising more state revenue to fund state school aid increases, as long as the burden fell on wealthier taxpayers.

In Pennsylvania, however, the state income tax, which raises most of the money that helps underwrite schools, is a flat tax — the same rate regardless of income. Courts have ruled that imposing a graduated tax, which would have higher rates for those making higher incomes, violates the state’s “uniformity” clause.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, said during the press conference that according to the polling, citizens “know what is going on, they know about inequity,” and say officials “should do more to ensure the state is sufficiently funding schools.”

Noting that this is an election year and Pennsylvania is a swing state, she said while that sentiment is strongest among self-described Democrats, polling showed that 52% of Republicans also agreed with that statement.

“There is really a large amount of consensus on what is broken about this system,” said Public Interest Law Center attorney Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, who argued the case before Jubelirer, adding that state officials need to change their mindset about education funding.

“It’s no longer a matter of political convenience,” he said at the press conference, “but a matter of what students are constitutionally entitled to.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Aspira to repay Philadelphia district roughly $3.5 million to settle charter enrollment dispute

2023-09-22T14:26:52+00:00

A leading community development organization that runs two charter schools will repay the Philadelphia school district more than $3.5 million, according to a settlement approved Thursday by the Board of Education

The payment from Aspira, Inc., ends a yearslong legal dispute between the district and Aspira over whether the district can be required to pay charters for students that exceed their agreed-upon enrollment caps. Antonio Pantoja Charter School and Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School both enrolled more students than they had been authorized to for several years between 2016 and 2021 — when they did not have active charter agreements with the district.

In addition, Aspira has agreed to withdraw its application to open two new charter schools in the city, one a K-8 and one a high school. It also agreed not to file a new application to open a K-8 school for five years, but can reapply as early next year to open a new high school.

This is the latest chapter in Aspira’s turbulent history of running charters in the district. Several years ago, the organization had to relinquish charters for two formerly district schools it ran. The schools, Olney High and Stetson Middle School, are now back under district control.

De Hostos and Pantoja, both K-8 schools, have separate boards of trustees, but both are operated by Aspira. The resolution says that de Hostos, which is on North Second Street and enrolls 510 students, will repay the school district $3,163,986 in installments over five years. Pantoja, which is in Kensington and enrolls 700 students, will repay $371,537, also over a five-year period.

It is unclear whether these repayments represent the full amount under dispute or a compromise.

As part of the agreement, both schools have new charters through 2028, with predetermined enrollment ceilings that they signed last week, Peng Chao, head of the district’s charter school office, said in an interview.

The board’s vote on the settlement was 8-1, with Lisa Salley voting no. Calls to Aspira’s office asking for comment were not returned. Aspira Executive Director Alfredo Calderon could not be reached for comment.

Chao did not make a presentation at the meeting explaining the resolution that included the settlement. No board members asked questions or commented on the resolution before voting on it. And no one from Aspira came to speak during the meeting’s public comment period. Board members didn’t respond when Lisa Haver, co-founder of the advocacy group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, asked for a fuller explanation of the resolution.

According to an explanation provided by the Board of Education in its meeting materials, the disagreement centers on the 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years “regarding the number of students permitted to be enrolled under the Hostos Charter and the Pantoja Charter, respectively.”

De Hostos has been in operation since 1998 and its charter was renewed in 2003, 2008 and 2013. Pantoja opened in 2008 and its charter was renewed in 2013. Both their charters expired, and they refused to sign charter renewal agreements in 2018. Under Pennsylvania’s charter school law, schools can continue operating without an active charter.

During the dispute over enrollment, Aspira and the boards of both schools appealed to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, arguing that the district should give them additional funds for the students above their caps. The agency initially sided with the charters, even though the district “filed multiple objections” and demands for hearings, which led to the negotiations that resulted in this settlement.

As part of the settlement, Pantoja and de Hostos have also agreed to withdraw from a lawsuit now in Commonwealth Court brought by several charter schools over whether the district is paying them the proper amount. The district disputes the way charters account for federal aid, some grant funds, and prekindergarten expenses, saying these practices result in overpayments to them.

Other Philadelphia charter schools still involved in that lawsuit include Esperanza Charter High School and two cyber charters.

Aspira is also withdrawing its applications to open two new charter schools: Aspira Bilingual College and Career Preparatory Academy and Aspira Dr. Ricardo E. Alegria Preparatory Charter School. It will also end any legal appeals related to enrollment at de Hostos and Pantoja that are still pending.

Aspira proposed Alegria as another K-8 school — which the group said would eventually enroll 1,000 students — and the Bilingual College and Career Preparatory Academy as a 1,200-student high school. Aspira agreed not to file another K-8 charter application for five years, but could propose another high school as early as next year.

According to their academic evaluations, based on test scores and other factors, Pantoja and de Hostos perform comparably to — if not slightly better than — district schools.

In 2017, Aspira was forced to surrender the charters for Olney High School and Stetson Middle School. These were formerly district schools ceded to charter organizations in 2011 under the Renaissance school turnaround initiative.

But the School Reform Commission, which then governed the district, cited myriad financial and organizational flaws with how the schools were run. It also determined that Aspira had used state and local per-pupil subsidies to guarantee a $15 million loan to Aspira Community Enterprises, Inc., which had acquired the former Cardinal Dougherty High School building.

At Thursday’s meeting, the board also voted to extend the charters for five years of two schools run by KIPP — KIPP DuBois and KIPP North Philadelphia.

The vote was 8-1, with Salley again the lone vote in opposition. Board member Chau Wing Lam, who voted in favor of extending the two KIPP charters, said that while the academic performance at the schools are “disappointing,” she noted that the decision is based on incomplete information, namely the absence of testing during 2020 and 2021.

The last new charter school approved to operate in the city was Hebrew Public in 2018, when the state controlled the district. Since resuming control of the district that same year, the school board has not approved any new charter schools.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania’s school funding commission starts work on a new funding formula

2023-09-14T22:27:42+00:00

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On the heat-soaked steps of the Philadelphia School District building Thursday, education advocates, teachers, and elected officials sought help for city students forced to learn in underfunded schools.

“Children are in crisis,” said Maritza Guridy, deputy director of parent power and outreach at the National Parents Union. They’re “struggling to survive.”

Behind those speaking, 12 legislators and staff entered the front doors preparing to sit for a three-hour hearing of the state’s Basic Education Funding Commission. The newly formed group is tasked with overhauling one of the most inequitable education funding systems in the nation after a court ruled the current system is unconstitutional.

The 15-member commission launched a series of hearings across the state this week to get feedback on how much to invest in education and how to distribute the aid.

“We need to listen to everyone and we may like what we hear, we may not like what we hear,” Sen. Kristin Philipps-Hill, a Republican from York, said in her opening remarks, adding that lawmakers must work in a bipartisan fashion to make sure student needs are met.

Pennsylvania is embarking on this long overdue — and constitutionally mandated — effort to overhaul the school funding formula because the current one is “shortchanging” students across the state, including those in Philadelphia, school board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez said to the group rallying outside the hearing.

Generations of underfunding means students in the city — who are predominantly Black, brown, and from low-income families — have had larger class sizes, less qualified and experienced teachers, older and often unsafe buildings, and fewer extracurricular opportunities compared to students in wealthier Pennsylvania districts.

Outside on Thursday, Philadelphians decried how long it’s taken to get here and the toll it’s exacted on students.

“Aren’t we tired of just talking about it?” Fix-Lopez asked. “I’m ready for change.”

The commission will deliver a report to Gov. Josh Shapiro by the end of November and produce a new formula in time for next spring’s budget negotiations. If lawmakers’ proposed formula doesn’t measure up, the state could find itself back in court, said Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs in the funding lawsuit.

Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington, now in his second year in office, has crafted an ambitious five-year strategic plan for the district but has said he lacks the funding to carry it out.

“The Pennsylvania public school funding system has inadequately and inequitably funded low-wealth school districts for decades,” Watlington told the commission. “The funding system systematically harmed the very districts that need the most resources … those districts who serve students with the greatest needs.”

What the commission will do

Beyond trying to create a formula that is more fair, the commission must deal with the question of adequacy, or how much the state should be contributing to education so all students get a quality education. Pennsylvania now ranks 45th among states in the proportion of state versus local funding, providing only 38% of the total, compared to a national average of 47%.

A new formula and more money for Philadelphia schools will mean the difference between cutting programs and expanding access to things like high-dosage tutoring, algebra courses, and extracurriculars.

But it’s going to be costly. Penn State professor Matthew Kelly told the commission during an earlier hearing on Tuesday the state needs to spend an extra $6.2 billion each year to adequately fund education for all students. Philadelphia falls short by nearly $8,000 per student, Kelly found.

And that estimate doesn’t include facilities costs to manage environmental hazards like asbestos and broken or inadequate air conditioning. Watlington told the commission that the district was forced to close more than 80 buildings early each day during the first week of school because they lack no air conditioning. To fully modernize and repair the district’s infrastructure would cost $7.9 billion, he said, citing a 2017 study.

The Basic Education Funding Commission is tasked with overhauling one of the most inequitable education funding systems in the nation.

How Philly measures up

Philadelphia is not the lowest funded among Pennsylvania’s 500 districts. In fact, it is in the top half, ranking 232nd in per student revenue.

Other districts, large and small, have even larger “adequacy” gaps, including Allentown, Reading, Panther Valley, and Shenandoah. Kelly found that 412 of the state’s 500 districts fall short of what’s necessary to provide all students with a quality education.

“There is a cross section of districts that are dramatically underfunded,” Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney with the Public Interest Law Center, said in an interview.

And while, statewide, there are more white students in underfunded districts, “kids of color are dramatically concentrated in them,” he said.

At the hearing, Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and Ashley Cocca, a counselor at Bache-Martin elementary school, talked about the trauma that many students face.

“Gun violence, drug presence, poverty levels, housing inadequacies, domestic violence, underemployment, tragic loss….inconsistent continuity of care,” Cocca said, choking up. Jordan said Philadelphia students need as much, if not more, than counterparts in wealthier areas.

A bipartisan solution will be needed

Many of the state’s poorest districts are rural, and largely white, and educate the constituents of many Republican lawmakers who have resisted the plea for billions more in state money for education. In some of these districts, tax rates are sky high, but they can’t raise enough funds because property values are low and taxable industries are scant.

Over the years, Republicans have protested that there is no correlation between money and achievement, and argued at their funding trial that the state’s obligation ended with assuring that the most basic needs were met – essentially, providing buildings, classrooms, and teachers.

Sen. David Argall, at the commission’s hearing on Tuesday, said the state legislature has voted for “significant spending increases” in the past, but said “we haven’t seen the results that many had hoped for.”

Kelly told Argall, “the research is clear and unambiguous” on this front: “Increased spending does increase outcomes” for students.

In resisting the lawsuit, Republicans also argued that legislators, not judges, are charged with determining fair and adequate funding levels for schools.

But, in a February ruling that followed four months of testimony, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer firmly rejected that reasoning, saying in a 786-page opinion that the current system so severely shortchanges many students that she was compelled to intervene.

Republican legislative leaders decided not to appeal her decision, instead initiating a process to overhaul the funding system.

How school funding currently works

The biggest component of state school aid comes through the basic education line item in the budget, which is now $7.8 billion. In an effort to direct a higher proportion to the neediest districts in lieu of a formula overhaul, the legislature set aside millions in so-called “level up” funding directed toward the 100 poorest districts; this year, the amount is $100 million. That funding is still held up in a lingering legislative standoff.

The current formula — most recently reworked in 2016 — weights such factors as the number of students in low-income households, poverty concentration, the prevalence of students with disabilities and English learners, and a district’s local wealth and taxing capacity.

But the formula has not significantly reduced disparities in spending among districts because legislators at the time also introduced a “hold harmless” clause that guarantees that no district gets less than it did before, even if its enrollment drops. Lawmakers decided to apply the new formula only to a new aid, not to all aid.

This meant most of the funding is distributed based on student demographics from many years ago

While Jubelirer ruled the current formula to be unconstitutional, she did not prescribe a solution.

This is where the new education funding commission comes in.

After the listening tour, the commission will present a series of recommendations to Shapiro, who will then work to reach a deal with lawmakers on a new formula, likely to be enacted through the state budget process.

But that will take months, and some say Philadelphia students can’t wait much longer.

“We must fix it immediately,” State Sen. Vincent Hughes, a Democrat representing Philadelphia, said. “We have waited too long, generations have suffered.”

Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect the status of the distribution of “level up” funding and Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg’s role with the Public Interest Law Center.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania budget inches forward, but lawmakers still split on stalled education funding

2023-09-01T18:57:56+00:00

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HARRISBURG — Lawmakers have moved a step closer to finalizing the state budget and freeing up at least some of the stalled $1.1 billion in spending for everything from hospitals to public defense to home repairs, but the Pennsylvania House and Senate remain stubbornly at odds over education and other key costs.

While Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the commonwealth’s budget in early August, the legislation that directs that spending — known as code bills — has remained unfinished after talks deteriorated over a school voucher program that Republicans considered a priority.

On Wednesday, the GOP-controlled state Senate reconvened in Harrisburg for a day to pass some — but not all — of that missing language. These measures will still have to pass the Democratic-controlled state House, and leaders in the lower chamber have indicated they won’t do so without at least some changes.

The first of two bills was designed to include primarily “the uncontroversial things we all agree on,” as state Senate Leader Scott Martin (R-Lancaster) said on the chamber floor. It wasn’t without controversy, though — Democratic lawmakers criticized that the bill didn’t address the bulk of the stalled spending.

It would release funding for three programs, including increased reimbursements for first responders, which EMS providers argue is a bare-minimum requirement in an underfunded industry.

The bill also includes codes for regular allocations to hospitals and for judicial fees that courts rely on, and for which state authorization had expired at the end of July.

It also formalizes approval of a suite of other programs that had already been moving ahead with their budget spending, and for which the state budget secretary had not said new codes were necessary. These include funding for community colleges, aid to public libraries, and reimbursements for schools to provide universal free breakfast.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D-Allegheny) said that after speaking to his caucus he decided to vote against the bill because it does not fund programs that Democrats consider priorities, like the popular Whole-Home Repairs Program and a stipend for student teachers. Earlier that day, state Senate Democrats tried to amend the bill to add funding for those programs but the amendments were tabled.

“More work needs to be done on the other side of the aisle,” Costa said on the state Senate floor. The bill passed 29-18, with state Sen. Lisa Boscola (D-Lehigh) crossing party lines to vote with Republicans.

The more controversial bill passed by the Pennsylvania Senate on Wednesday included Republicans’ more partisan priorities, such as a reintroduction of the school voucher program that Shapiro already axed from the main budget — and which state House Democrats have summarily rejected.

It also includes additional funding for the Educational Improvement Tax Credit program, a tax break that businesses can receive in exchange for funding private school scholarships. It passed, 29-19 in a party-line vote.

Not included in either bill was code language for five programs Democrats have championed. Along with home repair and student-teacher stipends, these include funding for the commonwealth’s roughly 100 poorest school districts, allocation of new federal money for school mental health services, and Pennsylvania’s first-ever state funding for public defense.

An email obtained by Spotlight PA that was sent from state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D-Montgomery) to state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R-Indiana) on Monday indicated that the divide between the chambers still runs deep.

In the email, Bradford noted that the two parties had, as of Monday, exchanged no code language, and wrote that Pittman was “needlessly extending this and by creating an intentionally bifurcated structure.”

Bradford recommended instead that “the most constructive use of time would be to pass what’s absolutely necessary,” pointing to components the state Senate ended up including in their first code package, like extending the expiration dates on judicial fees and reauthorizing the hospital spending.

In a statement after the Senate’s Wednesday session, House Democratic leaders wrote that a fiscal code “is not an opportunity to renegotiate the budget.”

“Since House Democrats passed the Senate’s budget in July, we have repeatedly tried to work to arrive at an agreement,” they said. “Unfortunately, the Senate Republicans’ actions today do not advance the conversation toward finalizing the state’s budget in its entirety.”

A spokesperson for Shapiro said that today’s votes indicated that “conversations have not yet happened.” The statement added that, “legislative leaders have more work to do to stop talking past each other and instead find common ground on the unfinished business before them.”

In a statement released by her office following the upper chamber’s floor vote, Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward pinned the ongoing conflicts on Democrats.

“The Senate has done their best to give Gov. Shapiro and his counterparts in the House the necessary time to work through their party challenges, but the time has come that we must move beyond the broken deals and words and complete our work to ensure the fiscal solvency of our state,” Ward said, adding that House members should return quickly to complete the code process, even if they prefer to “provide a counteroffer to what has been passed.”

In the state Senate’s Wednesday session, lawmakers also advanced a bipartisan bill that would move up the date of Pennsylvania’s 2024 general election primary, which is currently scheduled for April 23, during Passover. That change is considered time-sensitive, and is broadly supported by Democrats and Republicans in both chambers — though they differ on precisely which date the primary should fall on.

As of Wednesday, the House is still scheduled to come back to order in late September. But a spokesperson for Bradford said they “are not foreclosing on the possibility that we may return sooner if an agreement is reached.”

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GOP officials won’t appeal big Pennsylvania school funding ruling as education advocates rejoice

2023-07-25T21:36:42+00:00

The deadline to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the landmark school funding lawsuit has expired. Now, those fighting for equitable school funding are one step closer to making their goals a reality.

The lawsuit was filed by six Pennsylvania school districts, the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, the NAACP PA State Conference, and a small group of parents with children who attend public schools.

The suit claimed state legislative leaders, education officials, and the governor failed to uphold constitutional obligations to provide fair and adequate education for students in less wealthy Pennsylvania school districts.

The case began in 2014 but didn’t go to trial until November 2021. In March 2022, the court heard closing arguments.

On Feb. 7, 2023, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the Commonwealth Court declared the Pennsylvania school funding system unconstitutional.

Senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, who was part of the legal team that sued the state, explained that state leaders objected to their argument that the state constitution guarantees every child a fundamental right to an education. But the reality that lawmakers failed to appeal is a message in itself.

“State leaders objected to that, and this is a big day where the court has said this is what right is and they have not appealed,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg.

House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler (R-Lancaster) issued this statement after lawmakers’ decision to not continue with an appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Now that the education funding lawsuit is disposed of, it is important that schools completely focus their attention on their primary and most important task — educating students,” said Cutler. “The endless litigation has invited people to believe that money alone will solve the challenges of our public education system. To be clear, it will not, and Judge Jubelirer’s opinion clearly recognizes this very simple and powerful truth. To believe otherwise will only perpetuate what has become a government-driven education system that supplants the needs of students and their families in favor or special interests and adults.”

Attorneys representing the district say the funding will go toward programs such as special education, English as a second language, and other curriculum improvements. The funds will also be used to improve school facilities.

The Commonwealth Court has directed the General Assembly to ensure that public schools have sufficient funding to provide all students with access to a comprehensive, effective, and contemporary public education. Until now the question was not only how much, but how soon.

Legal director at the Education Law Center-PA Maura McInerney echoed that sentiment, saying this decision will change how we view education for years to come.

“There has been school funding throughout the country. We know that the funding will go to our most under-resourced schools because that’s where the greatest need is,” said McInerney.

McInerney says the landmark decision is the first of its kind in the state. Legislative leaders had until midnight on July 21 to appeal the court’s decision and continue the fight that schools did not need additional funding and were adequate, a case they lost in court.

“It shouldn’t have come to this. But this is a momentous occasion, the decision is now final. This is a giant day for the children of the commonwealth. This is the first time a court said educational rights for every kid,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg.

State Rep. Jordan Harris serves the 186th Legislative District and has fought for education reform. Harris says the decision not to appeal not only solidifies the need for a better education but says lawmakers are working to ensure all students get the funding they need and deserve. Lawmakers plan to unveil how they will do that soon, he said, but for now, Harris says the future looks bright.

“The byproduct of the lawsuit is now we have a ruling. We have a once in a generation [opportunity] in my mind to properly address what education should look like in this commonwealth, and what tools should be in our toolbox to ensure our children receive a high-quality education regardless of what ZIP codes,” says Harris.

Philadelphia Board of Education President Reginald L. Streater also voiced support for the decision not to appeal.

“Historic underfunding has had a harmful effect on generations of Philadelphians and citizens across the Commonwealth, for that matter, who have not received the public education that I would argue is not only our collective civil right, but also a human right.” said Streater. “Although an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, any additional funding that seeks to bridge the gap of funding will be welcomed as a down payment on that cure and will positively impact the educational lives of our amazing Learners going forward.”

The Basic Education Funding Commission will now work to determine how much money is needed and where.

“It is our hope that instead of seeking redress through costly and endless litigation,” House Leader Cutler said, the “school district and advocates will join us, instead of opposing us, in this important mission.”

Philadelphia school board approval of contracts worth $183 million prompts transparency debate

2023-04-21T19:31:43+00:00

Long after people had left the school district auditorium, Philadelphia’s school board voted Thursday night to approve roughly $183 million for vendor contracts, including $336,000 for a consulting group to improve the board’s communication with the public.

Those contracts covered school building repairs, IT and technology equipment, office supplies, preschool programs, and water and sewer systems.

For years, outspoken members of the public and some education advocates have demanded more transparency from the board when it comes to their appointments and deliberations. Now, with multiple schools closing due to damaged asbestos, and gun violence claiming the lives of 23 students and wounding another 84, the board’s public approach to these and other crucial issues could help determine whether Philadelphia’s next mayor reappoints some, all, or none of the board’s current members.

Not long after he took over the district last year, Superintendent Tony Watlington drew public ire when the board (at his request) hired a consulting firm for $450,000 to help with his transition and guide the creation of a long-term strategic plan for Philadelphia schools.

While the 54-item consent agenda ultimately passed with little debate, board members Lisa Salley and Cecelia Thompson raised concerns about the process behind the $336,000 communications contract with Public Consulting Group in particular.

Thompson said she “wasn’t even aware” that the board was going through a selection process for communications vendors.

“We dont keep minutes, there’s no written documentation on what occurs … there’s no accountability,” Thompson said. “That should be a public conversation, not this secret stuff.”

Salley noted that the district has often been accused of “lack of transparency.”

“Strategic communication in general is very poor for the board and the district as a whole,” Salley said.

Public Consulting Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez said the contracts went through the usual request for proposal process. Several people from the board and district reviewed multiple vendor contracts, and ultimately decided to move forward with the ones that appeared on the consent agenda.

“The process is not over, we are in this final step of work, collectively making a decision,” Fix-Lopez said before the vote. “That is what happens when we vote for an action item.”

Funding for the contracts approved Thursday night came from a variety of sources including operating and capital funding from last year and next year’s budget as well as federal and state grants.

Board President Reginald Streater said the board followed the district’s procurement process “to the tee.”

Board member Leticia Egea-Hinton defended the Public Consulting Group contract and said the board needs urgent “help” connecting to the school community. “I don’t think we can wait much longer,” she said.

But those comments came too late to mollify Lisa Haver, founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools and a frequent critic of the board’s transparency efforts. Speaking at Thursday’s board meeting during the public comment period, she blasted the communications spending, which included $881,500 for “customer service” with a group called K12 Insight, as well as the $336,000 contract.

She questioned why the district was spending such money “to assist professionals and board members to do what they were hired or appointed” to do.

The full list of contracts can be found on the board’s website. Among the approved items on the consent agenda were:

$8 million for technology equipment through the state’s COSTARS cooperative purchasing program.
$11 million for replacing roofs at several schools
$32 million for “office supplies.”
$3.5 million to amend a contract with The Home Depot for “cleaning and custodial supplies.”
$9.3 million in contracts with the city water department and Vicinity Energy for water services and steam heat.
$79 million in federal and state grants for prekindergarten programs at community-based partner sites.
$6 million for boiler repairs.
$12 million to extend contracts with vendors doing HVAC repairs.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Where Philadelphia mayoral candidates stand on education issues: an election guide

2023-04-13T18:05:33+00:00

Update: View the 2023 Philadelphia primary election results

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free twice-weekly newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

There are 10 candidates running for mayor of Philadelphia — a city with aging, asbestos-laden school buildings, serious budgetary needs, stubbornly low test scores, and a gun violence epidemic that has already cost the lives of 20 students and injured 100 this school year.

The mayor has no direct control over the schools, but does have the power to appoint the nine school board members. The current board members’ terms will expire when Mayor Jim Kenney leaves office, meaning that whoever takes office in January can remake the board from scratch, or can keep some or all of the current members.

While education has not been a major issue in the race, public safety, with a focus on youth and their families, has been high on voters’ minds.

Some differences have emerged among the candidates on key education issues, including charter school expansion, whether the district should get a larger share of city property taxes, and to what degree the mayor will seek to shake up the board and impact school policy.

The degree of mayoral control over the education in the city has fluctuated over the past decades and is now at its highest point.

From the 1950s to the 1990s, the terms of mayoral appointees to the nine-member board were staggered to minimize the power of any one mayor. In 2001, the state took over Philadelphia schools, citing fiscal and academic disarray, and installed a five-member School Reform Commission, with three members appointed by the governor and two by the mayor. In 2018, the commission disbanded and the Philadelphia Board of Education resumed control over city schools.

To better understand each candidate’s views on key issues, Chalkbeat Philadelphia asked them 10 questions about education, including several questions submitted by Chalkbeat readers. Six of the candidates responded.

Here’s what they said, in their own words.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

This article is a part of Every Voice, Every Vote, a collaborative project managed by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Lead support is provided by the William Penn Foundation with additional funding from The Lenfest Institute, Peter and Judy Leone, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Harriet and Larry Weiss, and the Wyncote Foundation, among others. To learn more about the project and view a full list of supporters, visit www.everyvoice-everyvote.org. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.

As students and teachers slam the district, Philadelphia school board passes $4.5 billion budget

2023-03-24T17:33:08+00:00

The Philadelphia Board of Education approved a nearly $4.5 billion preliminary budget on Thursday that officials said isn’t enough to properly fund the district. They also got an earful from frustrated students and teachers.

At a board meeting that lasted more than six hours, members reviewed district presentations and heard from more than two dozen student and community speakers about a variety of problems and concerns. These include over 3,000 student dropouts, rapidly decaying facilities, an inadequate funding formula, and — perhaps most damning of all — a growing number of students who say they don’t feel heard or cared for by district leaders.

“Will you continue to be the detriment of Philadelphia’s students? Or will this be the wake-up call where you pay attention to their wants and needs, their thoughts, feelings, and emotions?” Jeron Williams II, a Central High School student, asked board members.

Amid the challenges outlined at Thursday’s meeting, Superintendent Tony Watlington and Chief Financial Officer Michael Herbstman presented a $4.45 billion preliminary budget and accompanying five-year outlook. The board approved the proposed budget 9-0.

That budget doesn’t include capital costs for renovating or rebuilding school facilities, Herbstman cautioned, and a more detailed final budget is scheduled for a vote on May 25.

Still, Watlington and several board members noted more money is needed to address the district’s most pressing concerns. The Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center estimate “fair funding” in Philadelphia would require an additional $4,976 per student. That would mean an additional $1.1 billion and $318 million annually from the state and city, respectively.

With that kind of money, Watlington said, the district could “update aging facilities” and address asbestos and lead concerns, raise teacher salaries and provide “comprehensive professional learning” opportunities, among other changes.

Watlington and Board of Education President Reginald Streater said the next step will be to aggressively lobby city and state government officials for more funding. They said the school district only controls some 10% of their budget. The remaining 90%, including salary and benefit costs, is in the hands of negotiated contracts and city and state leaders.

Streater said the board and Watlington are having to “rebuild a district that was pulled apart piece by piece,” following decades of funding cuts.

“That’s important for the public to understand the scope,” Streater said. “We’re doing the best we can with what we have.”

Herbstman’s financial outlook for the district in fiscal 2024, which begins July 1, projects a 6.1% increase in revenue, but expenses are projected to increase 6.9%. And after September 2024, Herbstman said, federal COVID relief aid for schools will run out and the district will be facing “a significant deficit.”

“Absent major changes each subsequent year the annual deficit will continue to worsen,” Herbstman said.

Another long-term issue is the state of school infrastructure, which has been the subject of clashes between the district and city officials recently. Oz Hill, the district’s deputy chief operating officer, said that while the district has received 91 nominations for needed facility renovations, “the truth of the matter is we probably can only fund … a fraction of those projects.”

That kind of backlog did not sit well with board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez.

“I will be long gone from this earth and our students will still not have libraries, they still will have asbestos in their schools, teachers will still be working in 100 year old buildings … if we don’t get our young people the $1.1 billion they’re constitutionally owed from this state and $318 million from the city level,” she said.

Though the centerpiece of the board’s Thursday agenda was the budget, board members altered the schedule to accommodate a frustrated and rancorous crowd. They demanded board action on issues with the lottery admission system, charter school reform, asbestos in buildings, and what they called poor communication from district leadership.

“You’re killing us,” Kristin Luebbert, a teacher at The U School, told the board Thursday, referring to the unsafe physical condition of schools. “Our building issues have been decades in the making, but now is the time to make a plan to fix them.”

According to a district presentation Thursday, 3,373 students have dropped out of the public school system as of February — on par with last year’s count. The most recent district data shows there are about 197,300 students enrolled in Philadelphia public schools.

That prompted Sophia Roach, the school board’s sitting student representative, to ask what — if anything — the district is doing to bring the dropout rate down.

In response, Watlington did not offer details, but said “we are putting in place supports and processes to better address this issue.” He said he would have to do “a deeper dive” to look into what individual schools are doing to retain and support students.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Schools need more money, Philadelphia school board tells mayoral candidates

2023-03-20T22:04:27+00:00

The Philadelphia Board of Education Monday is asking the next mayor to commit to a big increase in the school district’s annual funding, and to provide additional help in upgrading and repairing school facilities.

In an open letter released Monday, the board also asks for the city to devote more of its resources to addressing gun violence and helping the district to recruit and retain staff.

The letter is unusual in that the board members, who are appointed by the mayor, are publicly addressing political candidates to air their concerns about the district budget and other matters so close to an election. Generally, they make their budget case during a city council hearing in May.

The new mayor will have the ability to remake the nine-member board from scratch after taking office. City officials and others recently publicly accused Superintendent Tony Watlington of not being transparent about problems with school building safety, and threatened to withhold district funding.

Philadelphia is “the only school district in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that cannot raise its own taxes, and the district is completely dependent on our local and state elected officials to provide the resources necessary to ensure that every student in the city has access to a quality public education,” said the letter, which was signed by board President Reginald Streater.

In the letter, Streater said the board wants the city’s future leaders to commit to increasing the district’s annual local funding by $318 million within the next four years. Streater said this increase would help the district meet an estimate from the Public Interest Law Center and the Education Law Center that it needs to increase total spending by more than $1.1 billion annually “to meet the educational needs of our learners.”

The city contributes about $1.7 billion to the district’s roughly $4 billion current operating budget. Most of the city’s contribution comes from property and other taxes earmarked for the district, and some is through a special grant which this fiscal year amounts to nearly $270 million.

Philadelphia school officials used the $1.1 billion figure when testifying for the plaintiffs in a historic lawsuit challenging the state’s current funding system, which results in wide spending disparities among districts. Last month, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer ruled the system unconstitutional and ordered an overhaul.

There are just under 200,000 students in Philadelphia’s 329 district-run, charter, and alternative schools.

“We are calling on city officials to balance the needs of our students with the needs of residents,” Streater said in the letter.

The party primaries in this year’s mayoral and city council races take place May 16.

The board’s letter comes shortly after the district was forced to close two high schools — Building 21 and Simon Gratz — within the past month due to the discovery of flaking asbestos.

While the letter doesn’t include a specific ask for facilities help, Streater cited a 2017 study estimating that the district has $4.5 billion in deferred maintenance costs and that “85 of our buildings should be considered for renovation, and 21 buildings should be considered for closure and replacement.”

On gun violence and student safety, Streater asked the city to increase safe corridors around schools, beef up libraries and recreation centers, enforce gun laws (especially as they relate to firearms possession by minors), and expand mental health services.

To recruit and retain more teachers, Streated suggested creating street parking around schools for staff, underwriting SEPTA passes for public transit commuters, and measures including loan forgiveness, housing vouchers, and other incentives for city residents who work in schools.

Two mayoral forums on education are scheduled for this week, one at the Free Library Tuesday evening, and another sponsored by the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators on Wednesday.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia’s early childhood education workers ‘on the brink of a breakdown’ advocates say

2023-03-16T18:17:30+00:00

Citing “inadequate” wages and warning of an impending mass exodus from the field, early childhood education advocates in Philadelphia and statewide say their sector is “on the brink of a breakdown.”

Those advocates are urging state lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro to add more funding for childcare and early childhood education in the state budget this year. Without more money, they say employees will leave, programs will close, and children, families, and businesses in Pennsylvania will face “devastating consequences.”

Shapiro’s proposed budget includes $66.7 million in early childhood education funding. But advocates said that’s far from enough. They are calling for $430 million for increasing wages and expanding programs across Pennsylvania.

Roughly 50% of early childhood educators surveyed across the commonwealth said they were “unsure” or “intending to not be working in their jobs in five years,” Start Strong PA, a statewide early education advocacy group, said in a new report.

(The report was funded through a grant from the William Penn Foundation. Chalkbeat receives funding from the William Penn Foundation.)

Losing those workers would mean smaller programs with fewer teachers. That would leave more families in need of child care without an option, and keep more parents — especially women — out of the workforce, advocates say.

Sheila Moses, a former early childhood teacher, said Thursday at the Northeast Philadelphia YMCA, she had to leave her job as an educator because of the low wages.

“The tension I experienced as a single parent was overwhelming,” said Moses, who spoke at an event to promote the report hosted by the Start Strong and Children First advocacy groups. “I worked full-time and still needed welfare to support my family.”

The Start Strong report said that the child care sector in Philadelphia “is in crisis.” Its analysis found that 83% of Philadelphia-area programs have a staffing shortage, with 616 open positions across the city and 2,831 children on waitlists.

Using 2021 earnings data, the most recent available, the report also found that in all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, early childhood teachers’ earnings “failed to meet the cost-of-living” and were not sufficient to cover “basic necessities like housing, transportation and food.”

Wages varied across the state. The highest earners were in Union County, who make up to $31,320 annually, while teachers in Elk County earned as little as $15,408 per year.

In Philadelphia County, the estimated full-time hourly rate for these teachers was $14.37 for annual earnings of $29,884.

The report’s authors said early childhood workers earned less annually than housekeepers, hair stylists, landscapers, and retail workers.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, said at the event Thursday that early childhood programs are losing teachers to businesses like Amazon that can pay higher wages and offer more immediate healthcare benefits.

Milagros Battiti, an early educator at KinderAcademy in Philadelphia, said at the event she’s been “struggling to provide basic necessities for myself” on her current earnings of $30,000 a year.

When her mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2022, those struggles multiplied and she fell under the federal poverty line.

“I am not the dream I envisioned or worked hard towards,” Battiti said. “I’m just surviving day by day.”

Chalkbeat Philadelphia Senior Writer Dale Mezzacappa contributed to this story.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Shapiro’s first budget boosts school spending but fails to direct more to districts like Philadelphia

2023-03-08T00:52:53+00:00

Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed increasing funding for K-12 schools in Pennsylvania by more than $1 billion on Tuesday, including a net $567 million hike in Basic Education Funding, the biggest single source of state money for districts.

At the same time, Shapiro would end a special funding category introduced by Gov. Tom Wolf that directs a higher share of Basic Education funding to the 100 districts (out of 500 in the state) with the lowest spending per pupil, including Philadelphia.

That move has upset some education and children advocacy groups, who said abandoning the “Level Up” initiative for the 100 districts would hurt children who need significant help from schools.

Shapiro’s first budget comes as the state has a record surplus, and looks to respond to last month’s ruling from Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer that the state’s system of funding education is unconstitutional because it denies students in poorer districts a “thorough and efficient” education.

“That ruling was a call to action. Literally,” Shapiro said in his first budget address. “Her remedy was for us to get around the table and come up with a solution.”

Last year, $225 million in “Level Up” funding went to those 100 districts with the lowest per-pupil spending figures, and that amount was added to the overall basic education line item. This year, Shapiro increased the Basic Education Funding line by $796 million, but with the elimination of Level Up, the total increase comes to $567 million or 7.8 percent.

The governor’s communication office confirmed Wednesday that there was no additional funding added to Level Up in his proposed 23-24 budget. But the Pennsylvania school code now requires $225 million to be set aside to the 100 districts with the lowest per pupil spending.

But children’s and education advocates said that Shapiro’s new investments are not enough, and expressed pointed criticisms at his Level Up plans.

Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters PA, said she was puzzled because Level Up had “earned strong bipartisan support during the past two legislative sessions.”

“This well-recognized supplement helps to close the funding gaps that hurt our most vulnerable students and are at the heart of Pennsylvania’s unconstitutional school funding system,” Spicka said.

And the Education Law Center, Public Interest Law Center, and the private law firm O’Melveny & Myers, which are representing the plaintiffs in the school funding case that led to Jubelirer’s February ruling, noted in a statement that Shapiro’s proposed increases “are only pegged to keep school funding on pace with inflation” and don’t meet schools’ present needs.

Along with a rare budget surplus, the need to respond to the ruling presents him and the General Assembly with “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to do right by our kids, to fund our schools, and to empower parents to put their kids in the best position for them to succeed,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro said he was determined to repay the voters’ trust in him by showing them that “government can be a positive, productive force for good.”

Shapiro also sent a message Tuesday to Republican legislative leaders who were on the losing end of Jubelirer’s decision that he hoped they would not appeal her ruling.

GOP lawmakers had argued during the four-month trial that the current system met constitutional requirements despite the spending disparities, citing the preeminence of local control in matters around education.

“While theoretically there’s still time left to file an appeal, all indications are that Judge Jubelirer’s ruling will stand,” Shapiro said. “And that means we are all acknowledging that the court has ordered us to come to the table and come up with a better system, one that passes constitutional muster.”

Shapiro, a Democrat, said he had already held meetings with Republican leaders about education funding. The GOP controls the Senate, while Democrats control the House.

“I think it’s fair to report that we’re all prepared to work together to find a comprehensive solution,” he said.

He acknowledged that “this is not a simple task,” and that the funding system “cannot be fixed overnight.”

Last week, Democratic Sen. Vincent Hughes proposed an increase in education spending of nearly $3.2 billion.

Early education, nutrition, and special education get increases

In addition to his plans for Basic Education and Level Up funding, Shapiro also proposed a $66.7 million additional investment in Child Care Works, and $33 million more in Pre-K Counts. Both programs are targeted toward early childhood education. These programs help families maintain employment and give children “a ladder up,” he said.

But Mai Miksic, the early childhood coordinator for the advocacy group Children First, said that Child Care Works alone needs $430 million to raise wages, broaden access, and increase the rate of reimbursement for providers. For Pre-K Counts, Miksic said advocates sought a $100 million increase, and noted that 60% of eligible families don’t have access.

Shapiro’s proposals “are just a step forward,” she said.

The governor called for a $500 million investment over five years for additional mental health counselors and other on-site services for students.

“Our kids need help,” he said. “I’ve been to their schools.I’ve asked these students what they need and they’re very clear. Students want someone who can help them. They want people to talk to.”

The governor’s budget also earmarks $100 million more to give free breakfast to every child in public schools.

“It shouldn’t be okay to anybody here … that people are going to bed without a meal. We need to have that conversation. We need to feed our kids,” Shapiro said.

In addition, Shapiro wants to add $100 million for special education, $100 million for a matching grant program for school building repair and construction, and $100 million for a school safety program that was started under Wolf.

He also wants to beef up career and technical education, and expand apprenticeships, saying that the state “can create a pipeline from the classroom to the workforce.”

The state teachers’ unions offered cautious support for Shapiro’s budget.

Pennsylvania State Education Association President Rich Askey said in a statement the union “would need time to review the details of Shapiro’s plan,” but that the governor was “right to say that we need to be thoughtful and deliberative” about rebuilding the school funding system, “but aggressive at the same time.”

“We’ve been grappling with problems related to Pennsylvania’s school funding system for a generation,” Askey said. “We’re not going to solve this problem overnight, but we must solve it. We need to do it soon, but we also need to do it right.”

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, called it “a thoughtful budget address that outlines a host of investments in critical resources.”

Correction: This story has been corrected to include the accurate Basic Education Funding increase in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget. The correct figure is $567 million. The headline was also updated.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Evoking civil rights, Philadelphia-area senator proposes $3.15 billion hike in state school funding

2023-03-03T19:05:01+00:00

A Democratic senator who oversees state spending proposed a $3.15 billion increase in education spending Thursday, saying that it is time to inaugurate “a new era” in how schools are funded.

The proposal unveiled Thursday by Sen. Vincent Hughes, the minority chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, would mark the largest hike in state education funding ever for a single budget. In addition to a $700 million increase in basic education funding, his blueprint calls for $400 million for the 100 highest-need districts in the state, as well as targeted spending for special education, school staffing needs, student mental health, and more.

The state’s basic education funding is $7.3 billion in the current budget, while its “level up” funding for the highest-need districts is $225 million. Total general fund spending in fiscal 2023 on education is $15.4 billion; increasing that by $2.15 billion through Hughes’ plan would amount to a nearly 14% hike. The remaining $1 billion in Hughes’ proposal would be one-time funding for building repairs.

Republicans control the Pennsylvania Senate, so it remains to be seen just how much impact Hughes’ spending plan will have; Democrats control the Pennsylvania House. But his proposal, which would result in a major windfall for Philadelphia schools, comes at a potential turning point for how the state funds education. Last month, a Commonwealth Court judge ruled in a nearly decade-old school funding case that the state’s system of education funding violates the Pennsylvania Constitution, and ordered state leaders to overhaul it.

Hughes’ proposal also comes shortly before Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is due to unveil his own budget proposal on Tuesday. As the state attorney general, Shapiro filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs in the suit, and as a candidate for governor last year said he wanted to increase K-12 spending.

Hughes, who represents Philadelphia, called his proposal a “remedy” to Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s decision last month in a landmark school funding case brought by six school districts, several parents, and two civil rights groups.

This is a moment, he said, to make “historic investments in the context of a state budget that has historic surpluses … the question is whether we have the political will and the moral capability to get this done.”

In her ruling after a four-month trial, Jubelirer — a Republican — said that the wide spending gaps between wealthy and low-income school districts “is not justified by any compelling government interest nor is it rationally related to any legitimate government objective.” The resource gaps between districts in Pennsylvania rank with the widest in the country.

Hughes said the gaps can amount to more than $5,000 per student. He called the disparities a civil rights issue, since Black and brown students disproportionately reside in low-wealth districts.

The method for funding education in Pennsylvania, he said, “harkens back to the days of Jim Crow, to slavery, back to the days when it was illegal … to educate Black and brown children. Now we have the opportunity to change that.”

While the governor, Department of Education and the General Assembly were named as defendants in the case — William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al. — only Republican legislative leaders put up a defense in Jubelirer’s court. They argued that the current system is adequate and constitutional and that the courts should not intervene.

They have not indicated whether they intend to appeal her ruling. But they have filed a post-trial motion challenging parts of Jubelirer’s decision, a procedural step that preserves that option. The original deadline for an appeal was March 7, but due to the post-trial activity, they now will have 30 days after the judge rules on their motion.

At the event announcing his proposal, Hughes appeared alongside Philadelphia Board of Education President Reginald Streater, Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President President Jerry Jordan, and other state legislators.

Philadelphia was not among the plaintiffs, but Watlington said he was “incredibly pleased” with Jubilerer’s decision. “Our students deserve those resources, we need those resources, and we know exactly what to do with those resources,” he said.

And Streater said that worthwhile reforms “never had a chance to take off due to a lack of resources … it’s clear we have an educational system in Pennsylvania that is separate and indeed unequal.”

Here are other notable elements of Hughes’ proposal:

$275 million for the long-dormant charter school reimbursement program for districts. Such a provision would be a boon to Philadelphia, where half the state’s charter schools are located and 70,000 students attend charters.
$250 million in additional special education aid.
$150 million for early childhood education.
$125 million for targeted academic supports, like summer reading programs, tutoring, and adult literacy.
$100 million for student mental health initiatives
$100 million for staffing needs to help schools recruit teachers and others.

Hughes also wants $1 billion for a “toxic schools remediation program.” Philadelphia’s school buildings have an average age of 70 years, with many having hazardous conditions including asbestos and lead pipes.

On Tuesday, the Philadelphia district announced that Building 21, a high school located in a former elementary school built in 1916, would close for two days this week so the district could clean up loose asbestos discovered in an auditorium and two stairwells. On Friday, officials said students and staff would relocate to Strawberry Mansion High School next week while the abatement work continues.

In addition to the money Hughes is proposing, Democratic Sen. Tim Kearney of Swarthmore, has introduced legislation that would fund PlanCon, a state program designed to build, repair and modernize school buildings. PlanCon has not been funded since 2015.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

GOP accuses judge of overreach in Pennsylvania school funding case

2023-02-09T00:01:59+00:00

In the wake of Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s order to overhaul Pennsylvania’s system of funding education, Republican legislative leaders accused her of judicial overreach while stressing the need for local control and for monitoring school district spending.

House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler issued a statement Wednesday calling the ruling “disappointing, but not surprising from a state judiciary that consistently identifies itself as a legislature to reach policy gains political allies cannot achieve in the General Assembly.”

Cutler highlighted the GOP position that school choice is the best way to provide equal educational opportunity to all students.

However, Cutler’s statement did not address whether he and fellow Republican policymakers will appeal the ruling, which could delay changes to the funding system. GOP state lawmakers defended the current system in Jubelirer’s courtroom last year, but the Pennsylvania Department of the Education and the governor, who were also defendants in the case, declined to do so.

In her Tuesday ruling in a case that started in 2014, Jubelirer declared Pennsylvania’s funding system to be in violation of the state constitution’s mandate to provide a “thorough and efficient system of education” for all students because it results in wide disparities in spending between low-wealth and high-wealth districts.

She said that the inequities demanded not just a redistribution of state aid, but more funds overall, as well as other reforms, and she ordered the General Assembly to fix the problem. But Cutler explicitly rejected that reasoning.

“Our declining test scores during periods of record state funding have consistently demonstrated that money alone cannot educate students,” Cutler said in his statement. He added that “while supporting public schools, it is imperative that we also provide Pennsylvania families the choice to find educational options that meet the demands of a rapidly changing future.”

Rep. Seth Grove, the Republican chair of the influential House Appropriations Committee, went so far as to characterize the ruling as a victory for school choice on Twitter.

With the House now very narrowly controlled by Democrats and the Senate still in Republican hands, it is unclear how — and how quickly — the legislature might move to address the funding system.

Under court rules, the defendants in the case have to appeal by March 9. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, will give his budget address on March 7.

Lawmakers in Harrisburg must finalize next year’s budget by July 1, when the new fiscal year begins.

Shapiro, who as attorney general filed an amicus brief in the case supporting the plaintiffs, said in a statement that his administration is reviewing the opinion and “determining next steps.”

Attorneys for the plaintiffs reiterated Wednesday the point that Jubelirer ordered the legislature, and the governor, to take action.

“The court said this must be remedied,” said Maura McInerney, legal director at the Education Law Center, which along with the Public Interest Law Center and the law firm O’Melveny & Myers represented the six school districts, parents, and advocacy groups that brought the case.

As for what specific remedies might be, first of all “there needs to be more funding,” said Katrina Robson of O’Melveny & Myers. “But obviously that funding exists because … money matters, and it matters because it provides specific types of resources.”

As examples of additional resources that would help, Robson highlighted tutors, social workers, psychologists, sociologists, better textbooks, and improved facilities.

“We expect to see that those things will start to change in school districts throughout the state quickly,” Robson said.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First who served as a chief policy aide to former Democratic governor Ed Rendell, said in an interview that Jubelirer was specific enough in her ruling that there are no factual grounds for appeal.

Cooper also said an appeal could drag out the process of revamping state school funding for two years. “How tragic is that? For two years the system is left to continue to deprive students of their constitutional rights,” Cooper said of that possibility.

Attorneys for Cutler and former Senate Republican leader Jake Corman argued during the 49-day trial last year that more funds for schools do not correlate to better student achievement But Jubelirer, a Republican, rejected that argument in her nearly 800-page ruling.

“Educators credibly testified to lacking the very resources state officials have identified as essential to student achievement, some of which are as basic as safe and temperate facilities in which children can learn,” she wrote. “Educators also testified about being forced to choose which few students would benefit from the limited resources they could afford to provide, despite knowing more students needed those same resources.”

She went on to cite evidence presented at the trial “demonstrating wide achievement gaps on the state assessments between students who attend schools in a low-wealth district and their peers who attend schools in a more affluent district.”

The case is William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania’s school funding system violates state constitution, judge rules

2023-02-08T00:42:52+00:00

This story has been updated.

A Commonwealth Court judge has declared Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional and ordered the General Assembly to overhaul it.

Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s ruling, which the court issued Tuesday, could have a profound long-term impact on the state’s approach to education spending, although an appeal of her ruling is likely and the case could end up before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Pennsylvania’s system, which relies heavily on property taxes with a relatively low state contribution, has some of the widest disparities in spending between wealthy and low-income districts in the nation. Jubelirer highlighted such disparities in her ruling.

“Students who reside in school districts with low property values and incomes are deprived of the same opportunities and resources as students who reside in school districts with high property values and incomes,” Jubelirer wrote in a 786-page opinion. “The disparity among school districts with high property values and incomes and school districts with low property values and incomes is not justified by any compelling government interest nor is it rationally related to any legitimate government objective.”

As a result of these disparities, she said, “Petitioners and students attending low-wealth districts are being deprived of equal protection of law.”

Jubelirer ordered the General Assembly to begin work immediately on a remedy to bring the state’s funding system into constitutional compliance.

The ruling marks a victory for school districts and advocacy groups that have worked for decades to achieve adequacy and equity in Pennsylvania’s school funding system.

The lawsuit, brought by six school districts, two civil rights groups, and several parents, was filed in 2014 and was the latest in a series of such cases. State courts had dismissed all the previous ones, saying that such disputes were ultimately a matter for the legislature and the executive branch, not the courts.

Jubelirer heard four months of testimony from teachers, students, and school officials from a variety of school districts. They described conditions in which children are forced to learn in closets and hallways and 75 small children are forced to share one bathroom.

Philadelphia is not a plaintiff in the case, but former Superintendent Wiliam Hite and the district’s then-budget director, Uri Monson, testified for the plaintiffs. Monson is now the budget secretary for Gov. Josh Shapiro, who during last year’s gubernatorial campaign spoke out in favor of fair and equitable school funding.

While the governor and the Pennsylvania Department of Education were defendants in the case, only the Republican-led legislature defended the current system before Jubelirer. By contrast, Shapiro wrote a brief in support of the plaintiffs while he was serving as attorney general.

Shapiro, a Democrat who took office last month, will make his budget address on March 7.

“The Education Clause, article III, section 14 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, requires that every student receive a meaningful opportunity to succeed academically, socially, and civically, which requires that all students have access to a comprehensive, effective, and contemporary system of public education,” Jubelirer wrote. “Respondents have not fulfilled their obligations to all children under the Education Clause in violation of the rights of Petitioners.”

She also said that the current system violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The case is William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al.

Philadelphia school leaders hail funding ruling

Jubilant attorneys who represented the plaintiffs called the ruling “an earthquake” that will impact all schools in Pennsylvania for years to come.

“This is an extraordinary day for the Commonwealth,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of the Public Interest Law Center at a Tuesday press conference. And Maura McInerney of the Education Law Center called it a “decisive, clear and unequivocal victory for public school children in Pennsylvania.”

If the Republican legislative leadership appeals Jubelirer’s ruling, Urevick-Ackelsberg said, the plaintiffs will try to prevent a stay of the ruling pending a final resolution. While Republicans still control the Pennsylvania Senate, control of the Pennsylvania House hinges on special elections also taking place Tuesday.

In the meantime, he said, the attorneys will work with the governor and legislature to bring the state into constitutional compliance. And he said he expects Shapiro’s first budget after the ruling to be “a significant down payment” toward that effort.

One of the things Jubelirer emphasized “is that every witness in this trial agreed that every child can learn, and that looking at the evidence presented she found that what was required under the constitution had not been provided in a way that makes that possible,” said Katrina Robson of the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, which worked on the case pro bono, providing research and other resources. Robson made the opening and closing arguments in the case and questioned many of the witnesses.

The state now has a budget surplus, which could make it easier for Shapiro to propose a big hike in state education aid. He could also propose to distribute all the state’s education aid money through a “fair funding formula” weighted for student needs that was adopted (but not fully utilized) around the time plaintiffs filed the lawsuit. Such a shift could mean nearly a billion dollars more in state aid for Philadelphia next year.

Studies presented to Jubelirer by plaintiffs during the trial estimated that the state would need an additional investment of $4.6 billion annually to provide all students with a “comprehensive, effective and contemporary education.”

Meanwhile, Reginald Streater, president of the Philadelphia Board of Education, issued a statement Tuesday that the board is “ecstatic” about the outcome, and that “for too long, students in Philadelphia have been shortchanged by a funding system that ignored their needs.”

Philadelphia was not a plaintiff in the case because at the time it was filed in 2014, the district was under state control through the School Reform Commission. But several of the individual parent plaintiffs are from the city.

“We look forward to Governor Shapiro and the General Assembly acting so that students here in Philadelphia and across the Commonwealth have access to an education that prepares them for success,” Streater said.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said he was “beyond elated” by the ruling.

“Today’s victory is years in the making, and in many ways a culmination of our fight for equitably funded public education – and in many ways just a beginning,” he said in a statement.

Pennsylvania, like several other states, has a clause in its constitution saying that the state must maintain a “thorough and efficient system of public education.” Courts in other states, including New Jersey, have interpreted this to mean that the funding system must direct more money to districts with students who have more needs.

In Abbott v. Burke, for example, the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1990 ruled that the legislature must guarantee that 31 of the state’s poorest districts, including Newark and Camden, had as much money to spend per student as surrounding suburbs and adequate funds “necessary to address the needs of urban schoolchildren.” Subsequent legal battles over that prominent ruling went on for more than two decades.

While there had been previous lawsuits in Pennsylvania on this issue, none came to trial before this one. During months of testimony, Republican legislative leaders argued that there is a weak correlation between money spent on schools and student achievement. They also said education could be improved in the state by expanding school choice in various ways.

Additionally, they said ordering more state spending on education would erode local control, a key value of education in the state, lawmakers said.

“This Court should not enter into the political fray by choosing one set of policy viewpoints over another,” then-Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman wrote in a brief.

But Jubelier firmly rejected that premise, writing that “students in low-wealth districts do not have access to the educational resources needed to prepare them to succeed academically, socially, or civically.”

She cited graduation rate differences, college graduation rates, overall postsecondary attainment, and other outcomes as evidence of this.

Correction, Feb. 8, 2023: This story has been corrected to accurately reflect comments made by Katrina Robson. This story has also been updated to reflect the role of Robson and the O’Melveny & Myers law firm in the case.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Even with a budget surplus, Josh Shapiro faces big education challenges in Pennsylvania

2023-01-13T20:34:24+00:00

When governor-elect Josh Shapiro takes office next week, he will have a $5.4 billion budget surplus, which could bode well for arguments in favor of additional state funding for education.

But he will also face significant challenges in directing that money where it is most needed, along with a teacher shortage of historic proportions. Shapiro will also have to work with a divided General Assembly, although Democrats gained seats in last year’s elections. And GOP lawmakers have already demonstrated that they have their own education policy priorities.

A high-profile lawsuit could also influence Shapiro’s strategy. Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Jubelirer could issue a ruling at any time in a long-running school funding case, William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al., in which plaintiffs have claimed that the state’s current K-12 funding system is unconstitutional and deprives many students of their right to a “thorough and efficient” education.

The case has lasted eight years so far. Over that period, Pennsylvania’s school funding system has consistently ranked as one of the most inequitable in the nation, according to a report by the Education Trust, with some districts spending three times as much as others and students from low-income backgrounds — for the most part — receiving fewer resources than those in wealthier districts.

Still, the case most likely will head to the state Supreme Court regardless of how Jubelirer rules, making a resolution unlikely for some time. And some advocates think that Shapiro will not need court prodding to propose more spending on education.

Last year, as the state attorney general, Shapiro filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs in which he praised “tireless teachers and administrators who have struggled for years to do the most for our children with the least amount of resources.” During the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, Shapiro said school funding reform would be one of his priorities.

“Absolutely, he talked about fully funded public schools,” said Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters of PA, an advocacy group.

Sharon Ward, senior policy advisor for the Education Law Center, which is representing plaintiffs in the funding lawsuit, said Shapiro’s brief as state attorney general demonstrates “a deep understanding of the problems with the school funding system.”

“He said districts don’t have the funds they need to educate students,” Ward said.

School choice, teacher pipeline already top issues

Politically, though, Shapiro’s path forward regarding the issue will have plenty of obstacles. Shapiro, a Democrat, will take office Jan. 17 with a closely divided and tumultuous House, and a Senate that is still firmly in Republican hands.

In the court case before Jubelirer, Republican legislative leadership rejected the idea that increasing school funding is the answer. They said the current funding system, which is heavily reliant on local property taxes, nevertheless passes constitutional muster.

They also argued that having a “thorough and efficient” system of public schools, as the state constitution mandates, requires only a basic standard of functional schools staffed with certified teachers.

As Shapiro prepares to take office, Senate Republicans have already introduced legislation that would increase the allocation for their favored strategy of expanding school choice programs that underwrite student attendance at private and parochial schools.

They want to expand two programs: the Education Improvement Tax Credits (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) available to low and middle income families. Created as an alternative to providing money for vouchers directly to parents, these programs give tax breaks to corporations for donating to organizations that provide private school scholarships.

The OSTC program, the smaller of the two, is specifically targeted to students attending the lowest performing 15% of schools in the state, many of which are in Philadelphia.

During the term of Shapiro’s predecessor, Gov. Tom Wolf, Republican legislators made expanding these programs a key demand during budget negotiations. This year, they got a $125 million increase as part of the $45.2 billion state budget, even though a recent report by the state’s Independent Fiscal Office found that it could not determine whether “state funds have been used effectively due to lack of general and specific outcome data.” (That state budget for 2022-23 increased education spending by $850 million.)

The legislation creating the program also banned data collection that would allow an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. The two programs now amount to about $340 million annually, but not all of that money goes to scholarships.

Perhaps in a nod to their popularity, Shapiro said during his gubernatorial campaign against Republican Sen. Doug Mastriano that he was “open to the concept” of “lifeline scholarships” for students who attend low-performing schools. (Mastriano will be vice-chair of the Senate Education Committee.)

Shapiro said later in his campaign that some school choice “is what I believe,”adding, however, that no program would come at the expense of increased basic school aid.

Along with the funding challenges, Shapiro will also face a historically unprecedented shortage of teachers. This shortage is especially acute in urban and rural districts, as the teacher pipeline shrinks and more teachers retire or resign.

Ten years ago, about 20,000 people graduated from state colleges with teaching degrees; now, that number is about 6,000.

In July, the state issued an education workforce strategy report with the goal of streamlining preparation, diversifying the candidate pool, and providing more access to “professional growth and leadership opportunities” for educators.

The issue is already getting attention from legislative leaders. Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat and the new Speaker of the House, has introduced legislation that will provide $7,000 scholarships to students preparing to be teachers in the state college system.

In introducing his legislation, Rozzi noted that 50 years ago, 21% of students in the system were pursuing education degrees; now, that figure is 4%. Rozzi’s co-sponsorship memo also noted the impact of the pandemic on schools and teacher attrition.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that former Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano is vice-chair of the Senate Education Committee.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia district seeking another consultant to help with restructuring

2022-12-09T22:03:58+00:00

Less than six months after hiring an outside firm for $450,000 to advise him on ways to improve the school district, Superintendent Tony Watlington is seeking to find another consultant to position Philadelphia “to be the fastest improving urban school district in the country,” according to a request for proposal obtained by Chalkbeat.

The document says the district seeks a consultant to review Philadelphia’s organizational structure to see how it compares to “the 25 largest urban school districts and the five urban school district[s] that are improving the fastest on The Nation’s Report Card.”

That refers to the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress. Results released in October showed Philadelphia performing near the bottom among large urban school districts in 2022 in fourth grade math, eighth grade math, fourth grade reading, and eighth grade reading.

The district issued the request Dec. 6 and set a Jan. 17 deadline. The consultant would begin in April and work through April 2024.

Last April, Watlington and the board of education came under scrutiny for hiring the consulting firm Joseph and Associates to help with the leadership transition and aid in developing a five-year strategic plan. Joseph started work in June and will work through the end of this school year. The strategic plan is due next spring.

Watlington is conducting what he called a comprehensive, three-phase transition with committees charged with developing a five-year strategic plan by next spring. His transition team has made 91 recommendations for improving the district.

Some critics of the Board of Education and district policies wondered why yet another consultant is necessary.

“Why do we need more consultants and management companies and these out-of-town companies when we have a staff,” asked Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, who regularly questions board and district policies.

But Michael Casserly, who retired after heading the Council of the Great City Schools for nearly three decades, said hiring consultants is common practice.

“My experience is that superintendents hire a variety of consulting firms for all kinds of things,” he said. They do it because they have a lean central office or are looking for an “outside more independent or objective review” in an effort to build public trust, or both, he said in an interview. “It’s really not that unusual.”

Watlington, who became Philadelphia’s school superintendent in June, has never run a district this large. He came from the Rowan-Salisbury school district in North Carolina, which had an enrollment of 18,000, a fraction of Philadelphia’s 119,000 students in district schools and 70,000 in charter schools. Before that he rose from custodian to history teacher to chief of schools in the 72,000-student Guilford County school system in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org

Shapiro’s election as Pennsylvania governor strengthens Democrats’ push for more school spending

2022-11-09T23:55:25+00:00

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s election as governor — along with the distinct possibility that his fellow Democrats will take control of the state’s House of Representatives away from Republicans — could ultimately mean that the state will invest more money in education.

A change in House leadership could also affect the state’s ongoing school funding case that involves a challenge from plaintiffs that the state’s system of school spending is inequitable, inadequate, and deprives students of a high quality education.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Shapiro said that with his election “real freedom won, the kind of real freedom that sees possibility in all God’s children, which forces us to then step up for those kids and invest in their public school and give them a shot.”

During a press conference in Philadelphia featuring several area lawmakers who spoke confidently about the election results that are still being tallied, Democratic Rep. Matthew D. Bradford, who represents part of Montgomery County, said that in elections and legislative sessions, Democrats have consistently called for the state to spend more money on schools.

“Everyone knows that our schools are chronically underfunded,” he said, and that funding is unfairly distributed.

Those discrepancies, he stressed, hurt children of color the most.

“No one with a clean conscience can tell you that Pennsylvania’s doing right by public education,” Bradford said. He added that while the $850 million increase for schools in the current state budget represented progress, “We need to do more, we need to be strategic, we need to work with our new governor, and we plan on doing that as a Democratic majority.”

An increase in K-12 spending and a change in the state’s school funding formula would likely be a particularly big windfall for Philadelphia schools, which have proportionally fewer resources for a student population facing greater socioeconomic challenges compared to surrounding suburban districts.

Republicans have controlled the House since the 2010 elections. The 50-member Senate is on track to remain in Republican hands, but the dynamics have changed, said Democratic Sen. Vincent Hughes of Philadelphia.

“We’re in a time of opportunity in education policy,” he said, with conditions ripe for major new investments, including a sizable budget surplus and a $5.3 billion state rainy day fund. Not since Ed Rendell and Tom Ridge served as governors did the state have that kind of financial cushion, he said.

“We have an environment where we can dramatically advance the kind of educational proposal required to create 21st century schools for every student regardless of their ZIP code or economic status,” Hughes said.

Meanwhile, closing arguments in the state’s landmark school funding case, William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al., wrapped up in Commonwealth Court in July. Judge Renee Jubelirer is expected to issue a ruling in the case before the end of the year.

Among state officials, only Republican legislative leaders, including the current House Speaker Bryan Cutler, have mounted a defense of the current system in the case. Now, Shapiro (as well as Democratic Rep. Joanna McClinton of Philadelphia, who is in line to be the state’s first female House speaker if her party takes control of the chamber) could nominally become defendants by capacity of their office. Both have said they want to increase education aid and would almost certainly decline to actively defend the system in court.

As the state’s attorney general, Shapiro filed a “friend of the court” brief backing the plaintiffs.

During the campaign, Shapiro had expressed support for “lifeline scholarships” that would redirect some state education aid for the bottom 15% of schools in terms of performance — many of which are in Philadelphia — and give the money directly to parents instead.

But Hughes said Wednesday he did not expect Shapiro to actually push such a proposal, and said the governor-elect’s focus was ultimately on getting low-performing schools more resources.

The teachers’ unions for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania were quick to congratulate Shapiro.

“Shapiro has a long track record of supporting public education and Pennsylvania students,” said Pennsylvania State Education Association president Rich Askey in a statement. The governor-elect’s “strong showing,” Askey added, “makes it clear that Pennsylvanians aren’t interested in proposals to cut billions in public school funding and redirect it to voucher schemes.”

Shapiro’s opponent, GOP state Sen. Doug Mastriano, made school choice programs a key part of his education platform during his campaign.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Two sides in Pennsylvania school funding trial set to face off again in court

2022-07-22T21:49:20+00:00

Post-trial briefs filed in Pennsylvania’s landmark school funding case express sharply different views over the definition of a quality education, the state’s role in providing it, and what equity means in the context of the state constitution.

The six school districts, several families, and advocates who sued the state’s legislative and executive branches argue that Pennsylvania is failing to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to educate all its students to high standards, citing the widely disparate resources available to school districts in the state. Pennsylvania has the largest spending gaps between rich and poor districts of any state in the country.

But Republican legislative leaders — the only state government officials actively contesting the suit — say the case is not about what is desirable or ideal, but about what satisfies the state constitutional mandate to provide a “thorough and efficient system” of public education. And they define that system in minimal terms: functional schools with properly credentialed teachers.

The case, William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al., is entering a key phase. The two sides will draw on their post-trial briefs during oral arguments slated to start Tuesday before Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer. The trial in Jubelirer’s court took place over four months from November until March.

During the trial, plaintiffs referred to the system as a “catastrophic failure,” while GOP officials argued that Jubelirer should include alternatives to local school districts, like cyber charters, when “assessing whether the system is unconstitutional.”

This is the first case in a long line of legal attempts by educators and advocates to overhaul how the state funds schools to actually reach the trial stage, going back to the 1970s. Before this case, Pennsylvania courts have consistently ruled that school spending is a matter for legislators, not the courts, to decide.

In their brief, the plaintiffs recap some of the most dramatic testimony of the trial, in which educators detailed children learning in closets and hallways, one toilet for 75 small children, closed libraries, and teachers who teach two or three classes at the same time.

“When school leaders attempt to help children close learning gaps, their inadequate resources force them to choose which children will receive vital assistance, and which will not,” they state in their brief. “In other words, rather than providing children what everyone agrees they need, school districts do something else entirely: triage them.”

In his brief, Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman says that education is fundamentally a political issue in which the courts should have no role.

“Many individuals have deeply-rooted, but often differing, beliefs regarding the societal roles and responsibilities of schools, families, communities, and the individual in educating our youth,” Corman says in the brief. “This case is replete with these social issues. This Court should not enter into the political fray by choosing one set of policy viewpoints over another.”

The plaintiffs argue that in addition to not meeting the constitutional mandate to provide a “thorough and efficient” education to all students, the current system also violates the state constitution’s equal protection clause. They are asking Jubelirer to evaluate whether a “system that discriminates against low-wealth districts” and the disparities that result “are necessary to advance a compelling state interest.”

In addition to the funding gaps between districts, Pennsylvania has some of the largest gaps in academic achievement among different demographic groups. The plaintiffs say “opportunity and achievement gaps” in the state differ significantly by location, race, and family income. “It is not supposed to work this way,” they state in their brief.

But Assembly Speaker Bryan Cutler’s brief says that the legislature’s constitutional obligations “must be viewed through the lens of opportunity, rather than outcomes. Public schools alone cannot overcome every economic, social or personal disadvantage that students bring with them to school, and which may hinder the academic achievement of those students, nor are they constitutionally required to do so.”

Jubelirer is expected to issue her ruling in the coming months. The losing side will likely appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in the city. She is a former president of the Education Writers Association. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philly schools forecasted to go from budget surplus to deficit in 5 years

2022-07-15T22:06:05+00:00

Although Philadelphia schools have a budget surplus that tops half a billion dollars, that rosy picture could turn very dark over the next several years, the district’s top financial official told board of education members Thursday.

The district is slated to have a $515 million fund balance in its nearly $4 billion budget at the end of this fiscal year, Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said. But he added that, based on current conditions, he forecasts that the district will be in the red by fiscal 2027 and have a shortfall of $484 million that year.

The growth in the district’s costs are projected to outpace revenue growth over the next several years, Monson said, due to the end of federal pandemic aid coupled with current state and local tax policies and funding mechanisms.

If that sort of shortfall occurs, the district will ultimately face tough choices and may have to cut a variety of staff positions and programs, including those focused on countering COVID’s effects. That could mean reductions in mental health services, after-school activities, bilingual counseling assistants, and support for students who have been traumatized by gun violence. And while Philadelphia is putting federal pandemic education funding to a variety of uses, the district will eventually use up that money.

“If we want to keep those things, we have to identify additional sources of revenue,” he said. “If they are left in, we’ll be showing massive deficits very quickly.”

Monson noted that the district has no power to alter parts of its budget like payments to charter schools, which are dictated by the state, and debt service. He acknowledged that the district can’t claim desperation given its current surplus, but stressed that it will still “need help” down the road.

Philadelphia’s school board is the only one in Pennsylvania that cannot raise its own taxes, and is entirely dependent on the city and state for its revenue.

Earlier this month, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a state budget for the upcoming year that increased state school aid for districts for basic and special education by $850 million. About $177 million of that increase will come to Philadelphia next year, Monson said.

Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson expressed appreciation Thursday for that additional funding, although Wolf had asked the General Assembly for an increase of $1.8 billion in education spending. Previously, Monson projected that Wolf’s budget request would have provided $204 million more to the city’s public schools than the enacted budget.

District officials are especially concerned about the long-term impact of charter funding on the district’s fiscal health. Wolf had asked state lawmakers for significant changes in how charter and cyber charter schools are funded in ways that would have benefited school districts’ budgets. But the legislature approved none of Wolf’s proposed charter revisions.

Monson said that Philadelphia’s charter payments for special education students “have grown exponentially and unrelated to the actual services provided.” Monson’s new five-year plan shows that charter costs for the district are projected to increase by 10.4% from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2027, while expenditures in district-run schools are projected to decrease by 1.9%.

“I don’t believe any other state awards dollars to charter schools the way Pennsylvania does, and I don’t think the current formula creates a sustainable environment for districts like Philadelphia with such a large charter sector,” said board member Chau Wing Lam, who has a background in government finance and whose daughter goes to a city charter school.

Despite the current surplus, some board members were very blunt Thursday about where things stand. Funding policies need “systemic change,” said board member Mallory Fix Lopez. Another board member, Reginald Streater, said the district is in a “perpetual state of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Pennsylvania budget deal hikes school spending by $850 million

2022-07-08T21:26:56+00:00

Pennsylvania’s General Assembly has approved a $45.8 billion budget that will increase spending on education by $850 million, a historic school funding increase.

In the budget deal passed by lawmakers Friday, basic education funding for school districts — the major source of state K-12 aid — will increase by $525 million. “Level Up” funding, which is for the 100 poorest school districts in the state including Philadelphia, will go up by $225 million, and there will be a $100 million increase for special education. Combined funding for basic education and Level Up districts will increase from $7.1 billion to $7.8 billion, or about 8%.

Legislative leaders hailed the 2022-23 budget as a major commitment to schools, and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s signed it Friday evening. Wolf had initially proposed increasing education aid by nearly twice as much as what was finally adopted.

“This is a comprehensive budget that puts the needs of people before the needs of government,” said Republican Rep. Stan Saylor, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

But advocates said that while the deal will help many districts and students, the aid increase will do little to correct the state’s systemic inequity in education funding, now the subject of a landmark lawsuit. Some observers also pointed out that the 8% increase for education will barely keep pace with record inflation.

As the state’s largest district, Philadelphia will receive about $93 million of the additional basic education funding, $84 million of the Level Up increase, and $12.6 million of the special education hike.

New Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. praised Wolf and lawmakers, and called the budget “a step in the right direction.” But even though the boost in state funding for city schools (roughly $200 million in total) will be substantial, the district’s chief financial officer, Uri Monson, said it will be a smaller increase than what district officials anticipated.

That gap between expectations and the budget deal won’t have a huge effect on the fiscal 2023 budget, but will require adjustments in the district’s five-year plan, he said, primarily because the district will eventually use up federal COVID relief. Monson said he was especially disappointed that lawmakers have chosen to put more than $2 billion into the state’s rainy day fund for budget emergencies.

“It may not be raining in the fiscal sense, but it’s raining now because of all that districts are doing to help students recover from the pandemic,” he said. “It’s disappointing that they put three times as much money into the future as they did for the current needs of students.”

For Philadelphia, that may mean cutting back on extra counselors and other staff brought on in the wake of the pandemic, he said.

From a statewide perspective, the deal highlights but does not resolve the fundamental unfairness of the current K-12 funding system, said Maura McInerney, legal director at the Education Law Center, which is helping to represent the plaintiff districts in an ongoing court case where the legality of that system is being challenged.

“The significant education funding increase in this budget agreement shows that many in Harrisburg recognize the depth of the hole our legislative leaders have dug for our students,” McInerney said. “But it is not sufficient to meet the state legislature’s constitutional responsibility to fix our inadequate, two-tiered school funding system.”

Superintendents and other educators detailed vast, unmet needs in low-income districts during a four-month trial about the state funding system in Commonwealth Court that ended in March. However, it could be some time before Judge Renée Jubelirer issues a ruling, which the losing side will likely appeal.

In that case, Monson testified that as the state’s largest district, Philadelphia receives a huge chunk of overall aid, but still receives a relatively low amount from the state on a per-student basis.

The city ranked near the bottom among the state’s 500 school districts in the amount it spends per “weighted” student, a formula that accounts for not just overall enrollment but the concentration of low-income and high-needs students, Monson said.

Philadelphia, with a poverty rate of 24%, is the poorest big city in America.

Friday’s budget deal also includes a $125 million or 45% increase to the cap for a state program that provides tax breaks to corporations that underwrite scholarships for students to attend private schools. State Republican lawmakers are key backers of these Educational Improvement Tax Credit scholarships, but critics call them vouchers in disguise.

The budget does not include a provision sponsored by two Democratic legislators from Philadelphia, Sen. Vince Hughes and Rep. Liz Fiedler, that would have earmarked $800 million for upgrading outdated school facilities.

Legislators also rejected changes in the charter school reimbursement formula that would have saved the Philadelphia district more than $145 million.

This story has been updated.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philly schools lose out on property tax revenue after city council vote

2022-06-24T20:14:17+00:00

At his first Board of Education meeting Thursday, new Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. reiterated his goal to make Philadelphia one of the fastest improving urban districts in the nation. But to achieve that goal, he and district officials will have to make do without tens of millions of dollars they might have been counting on, due to recent decisions by city leaders and the courts.

The same day as Watlington’s first board meeting, the City Council passed a fiscal 2023 budget that gives the school district $25 million less in property tax revenue than the district planned for, based on Mayor Jim Kenney’s original proposal. And a state Supreme Court ruling earlier this month about commercial properties means the district will have to repay $35 million to taxpayers, all of it coming out of the 2023 budget.

The combined $60 million hit to anticipated district revenue will impact some budget projections for both fiscal 2023 and the district’s five-year plan, district finance director Uri Monson told the board.

The Board of Education cannot raise tax revenue on its own. It is entirely dependent on the city and state for the funds it needs to operate. The $60 million represents roughly 1.5 percent of the district’s proposed fiscal 2023 budget of $3.9 billion. The school district gets 55% of the city’s property taxes, which account for just over $1 billion of the district’s budget.

Board member Mallory Fix-Lopez said that the city’s decision “will absolutely lead to cuts of staffing” at some point. Monson said in an interview that layoffs are not imminent, but said the decision will make it “challenging if not impossible to maintain an array of investments” made with federal COVID relief funds, and that the cut’s impact would grow over time..

The $25 million gap between the district’s revenue assumption and what Philadelphia is providing stems from the City Council’s decision to increase the property tax homestead exemption from $45,000 to $80,000, and to make adjustments to a program capping taxes for longtime homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods, all to ease the impact of the city’s first property tax reassessment in three years. That reassessment led to property values rising by an average of 31%.

Joe Grace, a spokesman for City Council President Darrell C. Clarke, said in a statement that the council “heard from homeowners loudly and clearly” regarding the impact of the reassessment on them. “This decision wasn’t made lightly, and Council understands the importance of property taxes in funding our schools,” Grace said.

Donna Cooper, executive director of the state education advocacy group Children First, expressed disappointment that the council made tax changes in a way that puts the brunt of the consequences to the school district.

Kenney and the council could have softened the effect on the district by allocating more money for schools out of the city’s general fund, but didn’t, she said.

Some of the investments made with federal COVID aid that may not be sustainable in the long term include additional counselors, accelerated building repair, more discretionary positions for schools, and enhanced before- and after-school programming,

Separately, the district must repay $35 million to taxpayers due to an adverse court ruling on June 8. In that case, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied the city’s right to appeal a 2019 lower court decision that the city violated the state constitution’s “uniformity clause” by reassessing only commercial properties in 2018, not residential properties.

A state funding picture in flux

Grace said that it was time for the state “to more equitably and fairly fund public education.” But such a change, coming from the state legislature or the courts, is far from certain.

Gov. Tom Wolf, who’s in his final year in office, has proposed a $1.7 billion increase in K-12 education spending for fiscal 2023 to more than $15 billion overall. Most of that would come through a hike in basic education aid to school districts from $7 billion to $8.6 billion. He also wants a new funding formula that would redistribute revenue in a way that would likely benefit Philadelphia public schools.

But statehouse Republicans — who support more charter schools in struggling districts like Philadelphia — are proposing a smaller increase, less than half what Wolf wants and more in line with past increases, according to Cooper and other advocates who are monitoring the negotiations, despite a state budget surplus close to $14 billion.

Wolf has also proposed changes to the charter school reimbursement formula that would save the Philadelphia district $145 million by, among other things, tying payments for special education students more closely to their actual needs. Under the current formula, the district must pay charters about three times per student for special education students than for regular education students, regardless of the severity of the child’s disability.

Philadelphia has half the charter schools in the state, and its charters educate close to 80,000 city students.

But Republican lawmakers, who control the legislature, are likely to reject such changes to the formula. And they are also proposing a big increase in the state program that provides tax breaks to corporations that subsidize scholarships for students who attend private and parochial schools.

The deadline for a final state budget is the end of June.

Meanwhile, an ongoing lawsuit (which Grace highlighted) seeks to overhaul Pennsylvania’s funding system so that low-wealth, high-needs districts including Philadelphia would get more aid.

Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Jubelirer is expected to rule in that case in the fall. But the ultimate resolution, after likely appeals, isn’t expected for well beyond that.

Target areas for Philly’s latest round of COVID aid? Staffing, learning loss, and asbestos

2022-06-08T19:56:11+00:00

Editor’s note: This article was updated to reword material that appeared verbatim in a Philadelphia school district press release.

One of Principal Joanne Beaver’s biggest concerns during the pandemic is having enough money to cover personnel.

“I have difficult decisions to make every year around positions,” said Beaver, who’s head of the High School for Creative and Performing Arts in South Philadelphia. “There are two things that lead my thinking in terms of budget — the well-being of students’ safety and equity.”

Beaver’s experience is a microcosm of what educators in the city’s public schools have gone through during COVID. Yet they’re getting some support through the third and latest round of federal COVID relief money for K-12.

When deciding how to use that $1.1 billion, which comes from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund, the Philadelphia district is prioritizing academic recovery, social and emotional support, building upgrades and repairs, and curriculum development. Of this third round of ESSER, the district is dedicating $350 million to academic recovery and learning acceleration, the single-largest amount for any category of spending, according to a breakdown of the funding provided by the district.

The money could provide a crucial boost for the district at a very difficult time for city schools; last year, Superintendent William Hite called the money “unprecedented.” Yet the aid hasn’t totally assuaged long-term worries about the district linked to the pandemic and other issues.

Mary Sanchez, principal at Warren G. Harding Middle School in the Northeast, told Chalkbeat the money has been a relief for her.

The school has used the money on different after-school programs like tutoring for English language arts and math. “We had a chess club, a Scrabble club, a drama club, LGBTQ club, a step dance club and a girl support club, so we had at least 10 to 15 different extracurricular programs after school for our students to participate in,” Sanchez said.

Beaver is using her school’s share of the money, $119,000, to address staffing needs such as the hiring of a new assistant principal, as well as social and emotional learning for students who’ve endured prolonged school closures, various trauma, and disruptions to their classwork since March 2020.

Districts must use or obligate the money over a three-year time span. In two previous rounds of federal COVID aid, the Philadelphia district received a combined $512 million.

Breaking down what will be spent and where

The first round of the district’s ESSER funding from early 2020, about $112 million, was intended to help schools confront the early stages of the pandemic by preventing staff layoffs, among other things. And $400 million for Philadelphia schools in the second round of ESSER from late 2020 paid for everything from cleaning and protective equipment to technology.

The district must spend or otherwise commit funding from the third round of ESSER by the end of September 2024.

Of the $1.1 billion, Philadelphia schools will use $350 million to support educational recovery and accelerate learning. Parents and educators have been concerned about learning loss throughout COVID; students made the transition back to in-person learning last August, after 18 months of virtual learning. Many students have also been absent, making teaching and learning a challenge.

According to Uri Monson, the district’s chief financial officer, this pot of money will pay for summer learning programs to help students get back on track, and it will also support after-school programs, before-school programs, tutoring, and academic clubs. Some funding will also go towards retaining staff, like teachers as well as administrators, who will in turn help students recover academically.

“There’s no way the students are going to recover [without more help], so we have to have the staff there,” Monson said.

Another $325 million is dedicated for improving facilities conditions across the district to address well-documented problems with ventilation and asbestos. Teachers last year threatened to boycott work over these and other building safety concerns.

The district plans to use some of this money on ventilation and HVAC projects, and will also replace three of its school buildings: Lewis C. Cassidy Academics Plus School, Thomas Holme Elementary School, and AMY (Alternative Middle Years) at James Martin School.

“We have identified three buildings that will primarily be funded through this, which are either being completely rebuilt or either brand new buildings, basically completely rehabbed. This was just approved by the board a few months ago,” Monson said. “So that’s three essentially new schools.”

Part of the $325 million for facilities will pay for 800 new hydration stations that provide chilled, filtered water. The district has a goal of one filtered hydration station per floor for every 100 students in its 269 school buildings.

According to Monson, some of this money is going for some asbestos-mitigation projects and to strengthen an asbestos response team, as well as a lead paint response team with the goal of getting all buildings certified as lead-paint free in the next two years.

In addition, $150 million is to support social and emotional needs of district students. Gun violence has created an urgent crisis for many Philadelphia students, and social-emotional services have in turn become critical to support students experiencing related trauma. The district plans to increase its level of climate support services, including peer mentoring and social workers.

“Improving the [counselor-to-student] ratio is a big one … you have more counselors in the system, more climate managers in the system who are dealing with day to day issues,” Monson said.

The district also aims to use a slice of the $150 million for social and emotional priorities to hire staffers to improve school climate. They would work a few hours a day and hail from the school’s surrounding neighborhood, and would provide community support for students when other adults are not around.

“If we’re seeing a school that is showing signs of poor attendance, behavioral issues, climate issues, we can send those teams in to address the issues, provide support to the staff that’s there and help the school deal with whatever the relevant issue is,” Monson said.

A portion of this money will go toward technical support for families and helping to provide internet service for households that can’t afford it and increase the number of psychologists and therapists.

Finally, the district will use a portion of the relief money for curriculum development and to create new K-8 math and literacy frameworks, in order to support student learning. The cost will be around $100 million.

‘I never want to make promises I can’t keep’

Monson said that while ESSER relief money has helped prevent the district from shuffling teachers between schools to prevent staffing shortfalls, he still expects a budget shortfall of over $100 million in the district in fiscal 2026.

Some of the district’s response to staffing issues, such as a spike in midyear teacher resignations, led to responses that also included the use of federal COVID aid. These included signing and retention bonuses for teachers and other staff, as well as payments for people to get their commercial driver’s licenses so they could work as school bus drivers.

School officials also want to align the district’s use of ESSER money with the Board of Education’s broader “goals and guardrails.” Equity is a major component of the board’s goals and guardrails as well as rules for spending ESSER money — both aim to prioritize students in “high poverty” areas.

Just over a year ago, the district solicited feedback from the community about how it should use the $1.1 billion infusion from the federal government. Some of the top priorities that emerged from the public’s 11,700 responses, such as improved ventilation and air conditioning systems in schools and additional mental health services, correspond with how the district has decided to use the aid.

Even when it comes to staffing, the COVID relief doesn’t cure all ills or meet everyone’s demands. For example, this school year, principals have been advocating, so far unsuccessfully, for the addition of at least four permanent positions at their schools — including an assistant principal, full time reading and math coaches and a special education monitor.

Despite the additional aid her school is getting, Beaver, the principal of the creative and performing arts school, is not making grandiose pledges about what it will mean down the road.

“I’ve been doing this for 16 years in three different school communities and it has always been a year to year decision,” Beaver said. “I don’t project into the future, because I never want to make promises I can’t keep.”

Bureau Chief Johann Calhoun covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. He oversees Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s education coverage. Contact Johann at jcalhoun@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia Parking Authority, school district end dispute over $11 million

2022-05-03T16:42:03+00:00

The Philadelphia Parking Authority is no longer seeking a repayment of nearly $11 million from the school district.

Philadelphia and its parking authority said Monday that they had resolved a dispute with the district, and said they will no longer demand repayment of that money.

In February 2021, the parking authority said that its auditors had determined its $14 million payment to the district in 2020 was a miscalculation, and sought the return of $10.8 million. But in its statement, authority officials said that they had made adjustments to satisfy auditors that the 2020 payment was legal. That included forgoing contributions to its Retiree Health Care Trust Fund and “correcting a pension liability adjustment.”

Tension and controversy between the parking authority and the school district stretches back years. In 2004, Republican lawmakers in Harrisburg engineered a takeover of the parking authority, with promises that it would funnel as much as $45 million annually to the district through tickets issued to motorists for expired meters. But that money never materialized. In some years, there were no payments at all.

In 2017, then-Auditor General Eugene DiPasquale said an audit had determined corruption and mismanagement at the authority cheated the district out of $78 million over the prior five years.

The City Council has been holding hearings on the parking authority’s finances. The authority’s executive director, Scott Petri, abruptly left in March.

The authority’s demand last year for return of the funds prompted an immediate protest from City Council member Helen Gym, who accused the authority of mismanagement and bad faith. On Monday, she said the council will continue investigating the authority in the wake of this latest development.

“Year after year, our District has consistently been short-changed by the Parking Authority. And year after year, we see new instances of financial mismanagement, surprising budgetary allocations, and forced leadership changes,” Gym said in a statement. “The need for independent oversight has never been more evident, and today’s announcement does not change that fact.”

City Council President Darrell Clarke said he hopes the settlement “signals a new era of accountability to Philadelphia residents and their schoolchildren.”

Parking authority chair Beth Grossman called the agreement “a legal and responsible resolution for all parties that benefits the school children of Philadelphia.”

The authority said Monday that, under the formula mandated by the legislature when the state took over the authority, it has contributed more than $53 million to the district and $158 million to the city between April 2015 and March 2020.

The authority, in addition to parking enforcement, runs the Philadelphia International Airport, regulates taxis and limousines, and operates red light cameras.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philly school board adopts preliminary 2023 budget despite opposition

2022-03-25T22:26:20+00:00

The Philadelphia Board of Education approved a preliminary $3.9 billion 2023 budget on Thursday, despite protests from several principals and their bargaining unit that it doesn’t invest enough in schools.

This was only the first board vote, on the so-called lump sum budget. Next, there will be hearings before the board and city council in April and May. The board is required to adopt a final budget by May 31. The preliminary budget passed 8-0 as part of the board’s “consent agenda.”

The board also heard a plea from City Councilmember Helen Gym to embrace a bold new vision and fund the district from a growth mindset, not one that assumes a shrinking student population.

The Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, the principals’ union, also challenged the estimate underlying the allotments that enrollment will decline by 7,000 students next year compared to before the pandemic.

“We’ve got a question of whether we truly invest in and value the children and families and communities here in our city, or whether we’re going to leave them behind,” Gym said. “That’s not a question for Harrisburg, that’s not a question for city hall, that’s going to be determined right here in this building, and determined by all of us.”

A dozen principals and other district staff members also criticized the budget and spoke at the board meeting how their schools will be affected.

“The problem is they use numbers as opposed to needs” to create cookie cutter budgets that will harm schools, said Tangela McClam, principal of Cassidy Elementary School in Overbrook. Her school, with 250 students, will lose six teachers, she said, or about 25% of her staff.

She had been able to limit class size to about 15 students, but now will have to double some in size, she said.

“We should not have to beg every year for what students need,” she said.

Gym, McClam, and others said that enrollment decline will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if schools continue to be underfunded. ”We’re not going to accept these lower enrollments,” Gym said.

One of the resolutions the board approved Thursday was to hire contractors for three new school building projects. One of those projects is the construction of a new building for Cassidy that will hold 600 students – more than double the enrollment there now. McClam said when she arrived in 2014 there were 400 students, a number that has declined steadily since.

The budget estimates the number of students in district-run schools will be around 110,000 students next year, with more than 80,000 in charter and cyber charter schools. As recently as the 2016-17 school year, the district’s enrollment was close to 130,000.

And while Philadelphia has had steady population growth over the past decade, it had a 25,000 population decline between July 2020 and July 2021, according to census data.

Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson told board members that the budget added $170 million to schools and will fund additional climate staff, more bilingual counseling assistants, and more robust special education services.

He explained how he had applied equity standards to the budgeting process. Small schools like Cassidy had been receiving as much as $1,900 more per pupil than larger schools because of the way positions are allotted. For instance, there is a mandate of having one counselor for every 600 students, but even if a school has fewer than 600 students, it has a counselor, meaning that small schools disproportionately benefit.

This year’s funding system sought to correct for that imbalance and reduced that per-pupil gap by about two-thirds. There are 68 schools in the district with enrollments under 350 students, and 24 with fewer than 250 enrolled.

Not all schools lost staff and other resources, but neither CASA nor district officials could estimate what percentage of schools came out ahead.

Monson’s preliminary lump sum budget and five-year outlook show a fund balance for next year of more than $500 million. But that will occur only if the Republican General Assembly approves Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed state budget, which calls for a record increase in state basic education aid to districts. It also revises how charter schools are funded. The changes Wolf wants would bring about $550 million in additional funds to Philadelphia’s schools next year.

But Harrisburg Republicans have pared down Wolf’s proposed education spending request each year, and have stalled on making changes to the charter funding formula, making it unlikely that this windfall will come through for the city.

In addition, Republican legislative leaders, via a landmark fair funding lawsuit, are opposing efforts to require the state to devote more state revenue to education and distribute it differently, in order to close the gap in spending between wealthy and low-income districts.

Monson told the board that he was careful to use the infusion of federal pandemic aid on non-recurring expenses, like school construction and repair. That money must be spent or obligated by September 2024..

Unlike every other district in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia has no taxing power of its own and must rely on the state and the city for most of its revenue.

But overall, Monson agreed with board member Lisa Salley when she said, “In essence, we are dividing a pie that is too small.”

The principals’ association had asked that every school, regardless of size, be assigned five positions – an assistant principal, a climate manager, a math and literacy coach, and a special education compliance manager. That request is not included in the budget, but schools did get discretionary money that principals could use to pay for these positions, although in most cases not enough to fund all of them, or even one.

Kahlia Johnson, principal of Overbrook High School, told the board that every school needs people in these important positions.

She explained that one day, as she was finishing up required paperwork, a student named Shelly walked into her office and said she had nowhere to live because her mother threw her out. The student said she stayed at school as late as she could, then she and her sister rode SEPTA until 11 p.m. They slept in an abandoned building. Johnson dropped everything to help her.

“Shelly’s life is difficult,” Johnson told board members.

Gym, who launched her political career as an education activist and is considered a potential mayoral candidate next year, urged the board not to repeat the scenario that occurred when Superintendent William Hite took over the district in 2012. At that time in the face of plummeting state aid, the district eliminated all nurses, counselors, and librarians, among other major staff cuts.

The district was under state control at the time, and Hite spent his first few years dealing with the ramifications of the cuts and the rest of his term attempting to rebuild. Hite is leaving in June, and a new superintendent will start in July.

“We lost thousands and thousands of staff members, and we lost a chance to really see our city grow and thrive,” Gym told a rally outside the building before the meeting started. She noted that it was “a movement of teachers, of educators, of school staff, loving community members, of union workers, and people who believed in investing in this city” who “turned that whole narrative upside down.”

The city took back control of the district in 2017 after the state determined that it was financially stable and no longer in acute academic distress.

Philly district, principals group split over next year’s schools budget

2022-03-23T18:07:36+00:00

Philadelphia school officials and a principals’ group are disputing whether the district’s proposed budget for next school year represents a step forward for classrooms, or harmful cuts at some schools.

The district’s top financial officer said the proposed $170 million increase for the 2022-23 school year, which officials will unveil in detail at a board of education meeting Thursday, will directly benefit students.

But during a virtual town hall event Monday, the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators and others argued that the proposal would lead to significant staffing cuts for some schools.

The principals stressed that additional literacy, math, and counseling staff are needed more than ever as students struggle to recover skills lost during a year or more of remote learning.

“Our fear is that a significant reduction of the workforce will leave us ill equipped to serve our children at the start of the school year,” said Lauren Overton, the principal of Penn Alexander School.

But Uri Monson, the district’s chief financial officer, said staffing cuts at schools would be tied to enrollment declines like the district’s typical process calls for, and are not part of an overall reduction in positions.

“There’s a shift in resources, but there’s no question more resources are being pushed into schools for students,” said Monson in a Tuesday interview with Chalkbeat.

Monson said the district suspended its usual practice of adjusting teacher allotments in October based on actual enrollment as opposed to projections. This meant schools did not lose teachers this year due to this practice, which is called “leveling.” But the district will resume leveling next year, meaning that staffing loss in some schools will be cumulative.

Members of the principals association say students need more support than ever after two years of the pandemic. And a significant share of administrators believe the enrollment projections for next year are off base, according to a survey from the association.

Monson acknowledged that because the draft 2022-23 budget incorporates two years’ worth of enrollment shifts, the impact is more dramatic and “has made it a little harder for folks” to accept.

The budget, Monson also said, includes a modified extension of a flexible staffing program that empowers principals to hire educators that meet the needs of students at their individual schools. And it closes a per-pupil funding gap between larger and smaller schools in favor of schools with bigger enrollments.

Yet the principals’ group says the proposal falls far short of funding five key positions it has long wanted every school to have: an assistant principal, a climate manager, a school-based literacy leader, a school-based math leader, and a special education compliance monitor.

The district released budget allocations for individual schools on March 9. The school board is scheduled to adopt a final budget for 2022-23 on May 26.

Monson said the district looks at demographics over multiple years to project enrollment. The pandemic didn’t change the general trajectory, even though it made the process of projecting enrollment “interesting,” he said.

But 65 percent of those surveyed by the school administrators group said the district’s enrollment projections are inaccurate, meaning some schools would be targeted for staff reductions in the budget based on population declines that won’t happen.

To make its case on Monday, the principals group highlighted data showing learning loss across the district in both English language arts and math, and cited the big increase in teacher resignations. From Dec. 1 to Feb. 15, 169 teachers resigned from the district, double the number of teachers who resigned during the same period in the previous school year. (Nationwide, schools have generally avoided a mass teacher exodus that some feared, a Chalkbeat analysis found.)

The administrators association says that its proposal for the district to fund the five specific staff positions at each school would create 1,145 positions in total, but that the district’s draft budget only supports 150 of those positions.

Cecelia Thompson, the lone school board member at Monday’s town hall meeting, said she’s willing to listen to arguments that the budget should contain dedicated funding for specific positions at each school.

Shakeda Gaines, president of the Philadelphia Home and School Association, asked parents and teachers to work together and fight for the positions. “We’re tired of watching y’all leave,” she told teachers at the meeting.

And Councilmember Helen Gym urged those attending Monday’s event to show up at a rally ahead of Thursday’s school board meeting in support of the principals group’s position.

“We’re going to make it very clear we think this issue is going to be a priority issue at this school board meeting,” Gym said.

Pennsylvania’s funding is a ‘catastrophic failure,’ plaintiffs say in trial’s closing arguments

2022-03-11T00:37:02+00:00

Pennsylvania’s system of funding education is a “catastrophic failure” that deprives tens of thousands of the state’s students of the resources they need to succeed in college and life, an attorney for plaintiffs in the fair funding lawsuit said during closing arguments Thursday.

As the historic four-month-old trial comes to an end, attorneys for Republican legislative leaders repeated the argument they have maintained from the outset: that the state, with more spending per capita on education than most other states, clearly reaches the constitutional standard of providing a “thorough and efficient system of public education that meets the needs of the Commonwealth.”

“This is a constitutional law case,” said attorney Patrick Northen, representing House Speaker Bryan Cutler. “The question is not how to construct an ideal system no matter how much it costs, but whether the petitioners have met their burden to prove the current system is unconstitutional. They have not met that burden.”

Northen and Thomas DeCesar, representing Senate President Jake Corman, told Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer that in any case, it is the role of the General Assembly, not the courts, to make policy decisions around such matters as education spending. Courts should not become a “super school board,” they said.

Northen said that more than 40% of state money is already spent on education, but it is not the only obligation the Commonwealth has, citing health, transportation, infrastructure, correctional institutions, environmental protection, and the judicial system itself.

The “principles” that the legislative leaders are fighting for, he said, is “to stand up for the rights of people” and defend “the American form of representative democracy. People speak through their elected representatives in the General Assembly, and it is the duty of the General Assembly to determine as a matter of public policy how to raise and spend money.”

They also reiterated that the “system of education” provided by the state goes beyond districts and includes charter schools, including cyber charters, for parents who are dissatisfied with their neighborhood schools.

And DeCesar said that the state has a lot of needs, including “plumbers, police officers” and other jobs that don’t need a college degree.

The case was brought in 2014 by six school districts, several families and two civil rights groups alleging that the wide disparities in resources and per capita spending among the state’s 500 school districts violates the “thorough and efficient” mandate as well as the equal protection clause. They want the state to invest more money in education and distribute it more equitably among districts.

The plaintiff districts – rural Panther Valley and Shenandoah Valley, William Penn, a suburb of Philadelphia, and three small cities, Lancaster, Wilkes-Barre and Greater Johnstown – say they all tax their own residents heavily but are still not able to raise enough money for services students need.

Plaintiff attorney Katrina Robson, presenting her recap of a trial that saw 40 witnesses and thousands of pieces of evidence, said the state had “politicized” education spending, making it over the years “subject to the push and pull of conflicting interests and adverse party platforms.” In 2011 the state cut $1 billion from education aid to districts, she said, “without conducting any studies” to determine whether those cuts would cause the state to fall below the constitutional standard.

Children in Pennsylvania’s under-resourced districts, who are disproportionately Black and Latino, have the “the same natural work ethic, the same natural intelligence, the same hopes, the same dreams,” as children in wealthier areas, she said.

Yet, in Pennsylvania, “in any given year,” 75% of Latino children will not reach proficiency in math, and 80% of Black, Latino and low-income children will fail to attain a college degree.

“In any given year, the number of Black children in the entire Commonwealth, all of them, sitting for the AP computer science exams, could fit in this courtroom,” she said. “Suggesting that this disaster is because children ignore opportunities allows us to place the blame for failure at their feet rather than the General Assembly’s. Or to constitutionally bless a system where wide swaths of children are failing to achieve, and where particular groups of underserved students bear the brunt of it.”

The wide variation in opportunity that Pennsylvania tolerates starts from the moment students entered school “and had their needs triaged, as if they were walking into a field hospital instead of a kindergarten. It was the system’s failure, not theirs.”

She cited studies showing that students from historically underperforming groups did far better if they attended well-resourced districts “that can afford the supports they need. These aren’t differences driven by a lack of student interest or poverty in the home. These differences exist because some districts … can provide what these students need to learn and others cannot.”

Northen and DeCesar continued to cast doubt on the relationship between spending and student outcomes, which has been a subject of debate throughout the trial, with experts on both sides of the issue called. While there was a consensus that education costs money, it cannot be determined how effective what DeCesar called the “colossal” increase sought by the plaintiffs would be.

He also questioned spending decisions already made by the plaintiff districts. Panther Valley, noted DeCesar, introduced a new set of courses in its high school, including broadcast journalism.

“There’s no requirement in the Pennsylvania constitution that districts provide opportunities in broadcast journalism,” he said.

He also noted that Wilkes Barre built a new high school, while William Penn chose to upgrade the lighting on its football field, and that some of the pictures of deteriorating building conditions shown by the plaintiffs had been fixed.

Attorney Sophia Lee, representing the executive respondents, which include the governor and Department of Education, largely backed the position of the plaintiffs that out-of-school factors impact learning, and that schools must, as she put it, “meet students where they are when they arrive at the doorsteps of our schools.”

Gov. Tom Wolf has sought to make education a centerpiece of his administration and has proposed a $1.5 billion increase in basic education funding for next year’s budget.

The next phase in the case is a series of filings and procedural motions that will continue through July 6, after which Jubelirer will make a ruling. The losing side will likely appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Closing arguments in Pennsylvania school funding case set for Thursday

2022-03-09T23:12:04+00:00

Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday in Pennsylvania’s school funding trial, marking the beginning of the end for a case that began in 2014. But it will likely take months if not years before there’s a final resolution in the legal battle.

The arguments come four months after the trial started last November before Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer. The plaintiffs – six school districts, three families, and two civil rights organizations – want to overturn a longstanding system of paying for education that has resulted in some of the largest gaps in revenue between rich and poor districts in the nation.

They want the state to spend more money on education and distribute the aid more equitably to reduce the gaps, and bring all districts up to what they are calling “adequacy.”

On average, states pay for about half the cost of their public schools, with local communities picking up most of the rest along with some help from the federal government. But Pennsylvania pays for 38% of the cost, one of the lowest percentages in the nation.

In all, the plaintiffs called 29 witnesses, including school superintendents, teachers, a student, economists, and academics who study school finance and governance. They argued that the state’s poorest school districts, both rural and urban, lack the resources to provide an education that meets Pennsylvania’s constitutional standard of providing a “thorough and efficient system of education,” at the same time that local taxpayers are overextended.

“I’m asking the state of Pennsylvania to help us. Who else is there to ask? We can’t keep asking our local taxpayers,” testified David McAndrew, the superintendent of the Panther Valley district. “I can’t ask our teachers to work for free.”

The defendants include both the legislative and executive branches of state government. But only the Republican lawmakers who control the General Assembly are actively contesting the case.

Those GOP lawmakers called 10 witnesses, most of whom disputed any strong relationship between spending on schools and student outcomes. Most prominent among these was economist Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who said such a link has never been proven. He questioned the methods used in a 2007 study that found Pennsylvania districts needed an additional $4.6 billion to give all students an adequate education.

More recent studies that have shown a connection between spending and outcomes “are very inconsistent … in how big or how serious the relationship is,” he said.

The defendants have also emphasized the availability of school choice. Their first witness was the head of a small Christian private school in York. They also called the heads of two cyber charter schools, who emphasized that students in all school districts can enroll in cyber charters.

In one memorable moment from the trial, attorney John Krill, representing Assembly Speaker Jake Corman, asked Matthew Splain, the superintendent of the 600-student Otto Eldred district, why someone “on the McDonald’s track” should study Algebra, or why a carpenter would need to know biology.

Citing the constitutional mandate for a system of education that “meets the needs of the Commonwealth,” Krill then said, “The Commonwealth has many, many needs. I think there is a need for retail workers, people who know how to flip pizza crust. My point is, do these proficiency standards actually in any way imaginable serve the needs of the Commonwealth such as they should be mandatory across the board? I think the answer is no.”

Later, under questioning from a plaintiff attorney, Splain noted that a broad education is beneficial for everyone. He used the example of basic knowledge of biology, which he said helps them make basic health decisions, such as whether to be vaccinated.

Meanwhile, plaintiffs showed the court pictures of leaking roofs and crumbling brick in aging school buildings. Witnesses described conditions in one district where 75 kindergarten students only had one nearby toilet. In another, where some students started school not knowing even how to hold a book, the district could afford only two reading specialists. At one school, children were learning in windowless closets. And a teacher described using a history book so outdated that Bill Clinton was mentioned as the president.

“We think we’ve exposed deep flaws in Pennsylvania’s funding system, while also outlining interventions that do work,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, the executive director of the Education Law Center, which is part of the plaintiffs’ legal team. She cited universal preschool and small class sizes among other policies. “There are supports and interventions that work but aren’t being implemented due to lack of funding,” she said.

One witness for the plaintiffs, economist Rucker Johnson of the University of California, presented a study of states where similar school funding lawsuits were successful and resulted in year-over-year increases in per-pupil spending. For people in those states from low-income backgrounds, this study found, there were improvements on such measures as high school graduation, family income, and incarceration rates.

“There was a reduction in poverty,” Gordon Klehr said. “We want that for Pennsylvania.”

While the proceedings are entering their final phase, any actual changes in how schools are funded are likely years away. The closing arguments, which will be livestreamed, will set in motion a series of post-trial procedural motions and filings that will last through July 6. The timetable is set out in Jubelirer’s scheduling order.

Oral arguments on the legal issues will follow on a date still to be announced, after which Jubelirer will issue a decision. That decision could be weeks or months away. And the losing side is likely to appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Any possibility of a political solution before the case runs its course seems remote. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has proposed a record $1.55 billion increase in state education spending for next year’s budget. But this proposal is already facing opposition from Republicans in the legislature.

GOP leaders defend Pennsylvania’s school funding as adequate and constitutional

2022-02-19T00:02:31+00:00

Republican legislative leaders wrapped up their case in Pennsylvania’s landmark school funding trial Thursday, after presenting 10 witnesses to bolster their position that the state’s system of public education – 500 school districts in which some spend nearly three times as much per student as others, where poor students generally get less and wealthy students get more – meets the basic constitutional requirement of being “thorough and efficient.”

The plaintiffs in the case want the Commonwealth to invest more money in public education and distribute it more fairly. But the GOP legislators, who are the only state officials putting up a defense against increased funding, used their witnesses to highlight their preferred alternatives – charter schools, especially cybers, and tax breaks for corporations to fund scholarship organizations that help students attend private schools.

The case, now in its fourth month, has highlighted two drastically different views of education: Republicans legislators view the public school districts as one piece of the state’s educational offerings, while the plaintiffs say the state has failed to maintain a constitutionally required system of public education because of the huge gaps in spending between rich and poor districts.

Anthony Holtzman, representing Senate President Jake Corman, told Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer that the cyber charters, for instance, are an “alternative to local public school districts,” and he urged her to consider them “a piece of the system of public education” when she is “assessing whether the system is unconstitutional.”

Republican legislators’ first witness also was the head of a private Christian school that gets funding from the state’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit.

Those two programs currently cost $340 million, and Republican legislators have sought to increase that amount significantly each year while generally paring down Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s requests for hikes in the state’s basic education subsidy.

Jubelirer must rule on whether the current method for funding education meets the constitutional standard.

The case was first brought by six school districts, three families and two statewide advocacy groups nearly seven years ago. They called 29 witnesses from the plaintiff districts and Philadelphia, which is not a plaintiff, as well as several economists and researchers.

Those witnesses painted a picture of inequity and poor school conditions – one bathroom for 75 kindergartners, in one case, falling-down ceilings, no art and music in elementary school, and insufficient funds to attract qualified teachers.

The crux of the Republican legislators’ argument became clear before they called any witnesses. Attorney John Krill, representing House Speaker Jake Corman, suggested that unequal spending on education better served the needs of the Commonwealth.

During his cross examination of Matthew Splain, superintendent of the Otto Eldred School District, Krill asked why someone on the “McDonald’s career track” should study Algebra, or whether a carpenter needs to know biology. Splain had just testified about how his 600-student district on the New York state border often lacked resources to hire enough qualified teachers in subjects like math and science.

“The Commonwealth has many, many needs,” Krill said. “I think there is a need for retail workers, people who know how to flip pizza crust. My point is, do these proficiency standards actually in any way imaginable serve the needs of the Commonwealth such as they should be mandatory across the board? I think the answer is no.”

Later in his testimony, Splain said everyone should have a basic knowledge of biology. “There’s a lot of major decisions students will have to make,” citing as an example whether to get vaccinated during a pandemic.

When it was their turn to present witnesses, the respondents cast doubt on the relationship between resources and student outcomes.

Economist Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, disputed the validity of “costing out studies” that attempt to determine “adequacy” levels for school spending. A study cited by Matthew Kelly, one of the plaintiffs’ witnesses, said that Pennsylvania needs $4.6 billion more in education revenue to adequately educate all its students.

“School districts do not have the funds they need to be able to give their students a chance to meet state standards,” Kelly said. “Those districts that are impacted the most are often those districts that have the lowest capacity to generate funding on their own, and the greatest need.”

Hanushek has long argued that there is not a strong relationship between spending and student outcomes. He said on the stand that studies “don’t provide much confidence that there’s any relationship” and range widely in their conclusions, from “some that suggest more resources might decrease student achievement to a number that suggest that resources in some cases might increase student achievement.”

Recent studies have more frequently suggested there is a relationship, but are “very inconsistent … in how big or how serious the relationship is,” Hanushek said.

One witness, former district administrator and charter school official, Mark Ornstein, was withdrawn after he acknowledged that parts of his expert report – on standardized test scores and the effect of class size on learning – had lifted language from other sources that he did not cite.

Two witnesses presented analyses showing that some districts in the state with the most low-income students actually spend the most per pupil, and that Pennsylvania is among the most generous and progressive when it comes to education funding.

During cross examination, the plaintiff attorneys questioned the methodology of both studies that undermined their conclusions.

Jason Willis, of the nonprofit research group WestEd, prepared a report for the case comparing spending for what he called peer districts. It showed that some of the poorest districts, including York City and Chester Upland, were among the highest spenders.

Chester Upland, Willis concluded, spends $36,000 per pupil, more than the wealthy, nearby Radnor.

However, during cross examination, plaintiff attorney Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, of the Public Interest Law Center, pointed out that in comparing his calculations to available data, it appeared that Willis had excluded students in charter schools from the enrollment numbers, but had included the revenue that the districts send to charters.

The error vastly increased the per-pupil cost for the poor districts and “flipped the inequity of Pennsylvania school funding on its head,” Urevick-Ackelsberg said. More than half the K-8 students in Chester, for instance, attend charter schools, as do 70,000 of Philadelphia’s 200,000 students.

In response, Willis said “I have not been able to validate those numbers relative to the information you’ve been sharing with me today.”

Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, disputed that more money leads to higher student achievement, arguing that more school spending can be counterproductive if not spent wisely.

He also presented a chart that ranked Pennsylvania as sixth among the states in public school spending, though he acknowledged that its per-pupil revenue could be inflated because charter students may have been left out of the enrollment count.

He also presented a chart showing that Pennsylvania ranks 24th out of 49 states on a “progressivity” scale, meaning that it allots more money to poor students compared to wealthier ones. But there again the study may have excluded charter students from the enrollment in calculating per-pupil spending, he said.

The plaintiffs had sought to keep Eden out as a witness – both because he hasn’t done his own peer-reviewed, original research on the relationship between spending and student achievement, and because of his “pretty strong views” often expressed on social media.

Eden has tweeted that “teachers unions” is a misnomer, saying they could be called “K-12 cartels that hold children hostage for ransom.”

Two leaders of cyber charter schools also detailed for the judge the services they provide students. Pennsylvania has 14 cyber charters, which enroll nearly 61,000 students, making the sector equivalent to the second largest district in the state and more than twice the size of Pittsburgh. Districts spent nearly $1 billion on their students who attend cybers, which studies have shown fall below state averages in student achievement.

The case will resume Tuesday with the plaintiffs calling Kelly as a rebuttal witness. Jubelirer will issue a scheduling order that will determine whether or when there will be closing arguments.

In his final budget, Wolf proposes huge hike in education spending, including for early childhood

2022-02-08T23:52:51+00:00

In his final budget address, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on Tuesday proposed a “generational” investment in state K-12 schools with what would be an historic 21% or $1.8 billion increase in education funding.

“Refusing to fund education equitably does not save us money,” said Wolf, who is finishing his second and last four-year term. “It just means we wind up spending more on social services, remedial programs, even prisons. And that calculation doesn’t even take into account the opportunity costs of failing to invest in our kids: the skills our workforce doesn’t develop, the products and services that never become reality, the business growth and tax revenues that vanish.”

The budget still must go through the Republican-dominated legislature, and early reaction has been negative, calling it unrealistic and overreaching.

“For the eighth straight year, it falls on the Legislature to rein in calls to dramatically increase state spending,” said House Speaker Bryan Cutler, a Republican from Lancaster.

Wolf laid out a total state budget plan with spending of $43.7 billion, up from $41 billion this year. He said that the state could afford such an increase without raising the state income or sales taxes. The state is projected to end this fiscal year with a $12 billion surplus, although Wolf also is projecting a 2% decrease in revenue collection this year.

His proposal includes a $70 million increase in early childhood education funding – $60 million into Pre-K Counts, which his office said would allow 2,300 additional children to attend preschool. The plan would put another $10 million into the Head Start Supplemental Assistance Program, but that mostly would cover rising costs.

Wolf’s budget also would standardize tuition at cyber charter schools at $9,800 per student, which he said would save districts $199 million. Now, each district pays a different amount per student in charter school tuition based on a complicated formula dependent on its own level of spending; by moving to this one figure, most districts would pay less.

It would also change the reimbursements for special education students at charter schools to conform more closely to their actual needs and the cost of educating them. Now, the formula sets each district’s special education fees for charters at one level – often three times the amount for a regular education student – regardless of the severity of the student’s disability. He said that change would save districts $174 million.

Philadelphia school officials said that the proposal, if adopted, would mean $410 million in new money for the district, in addition to bringing $145 million in savings due to the charter funding reforms.

In an emailed statement, Superintendent William Hite called Wolf’s proposal “bold” and said that “new, recurring funding paired with much-needed charter school funding reforms will significantly improve the District’s long-term financial outlook, allowing us to make new investments our students and schools deserve.”

Pennsylvania ranks 47th among the states in the percentage of K-12 education dollars that comes from the state as opposed to local districts, resulting in some of the widest spending gaps between rich and poor districts in the country.

In the past, Wolf has sought historic increases in education spending in an effort to close that gap, and has urged that the entire basic education subsidy money be funneled through a fair funding formula adopted by the legislature in 2016. In distributing funds to districts, that formula assesses need by assigning weights to students based on such factors as poverty and English language status, as well as looking at the concentration of poverty and a district’s wealth, taxing capacity, and tax effort.

But he was repeatedly stymied by the Republican-led legislature, which approved smaller increases than he sought and chose to allocate only new dollars through the formula and guarantee that no district, even those losing students, would receive less money than they got the year before.

While proposing the historic $1.25 billion increase in basic education aid, the largest single conduit of state money to districts, Wolf did not repeat his call for allocating all of it through the fair funding formula since that has been a non-starter with the legislature. In fiscal year 2021-22, basic education aid to the state’s 500 districts is about $7.1 billion.

But last year, in an effort to target more funds to the poorest districts, the legislature did approve a budget that included $100 million in so-called “level up” funding for the 100 poorest districts. For the 2022-23 school year, Wolf is proposing that $300 million be put in the “level up” pot.

“We can afford to invest a whole lot more in the fair funding formula without raising one penny in state taxes,” Wolf said in his budget address. “And we can afford to do it without asking any school district…to sacrifice one penny in state funding.”

Wolf also wants to improve college affordability by putting $200 million more into the Nelly Bly Scholarship funds to help students attend community colleges and schools in the state university system. Pennsylvania currently ranks among the bottom states in its overall support of higher education.

Pennsylvania GOP leaders highlight private choice options in school funding trial

2022-02-03T01:03:34+00:00

In Pennsylvania’s historic school funding trial, Republican legislative leaders began their defense Wednesday by highlighting the private choice options available to families who want to leave the public schools.

Their first witness was Aaron Anderson, founder and CEO of the 225-student Logos Academy, a private Christian school that relies on revenue from the state’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit, or EITC, and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit, or OSTC, programs.

He testified that $1.8 million of his school’s $3.3 million budget this year comes from those programs, which provide businesses with corporate tax breaks in exchange for donations to scholarship organizations that pay students’ tuition at private schools, including religious ones.

Just last month, both of the programs were criticized in a report by the state’s Independent Fiscal Office as having inadequate oversight and failing to collect any performance data that might help determine whether they are effective.

But in Pennsylvania’s long-standing battle over school funding, Republicans in Harrisburg have consistently argued that the answer to educational inequity is not putting more money into “failing” school districts, but giving students and parents a way out through charter schools and private schools.

Anderson’s school is in the York City school district, one of the state’s poorest. He said his school could not survive, and certainly not expand, without additional funding through revenue received from the tax-credit programs. He has plans to nearly double the size of the school to 400 students.

He said his school population is 37% white, 28% Latino, 23% Black, and 12% multiethnic or mixed race, with 59% living at or below the poverty level.

“It’s not that we could not run a school, we could run a much, much smaller school, probably not a K to 12 program,” said Anderson. “But truly there is no way we would be able to retain our staff or to run the program that we have without those tax-credit dollars.”

He said that not all students who want to attend can access one of the scholarships. “Our children are in a district where parents think their children are not being served well,” Anderson testified.

On cross examination by attorney Anne Marchitello of the O’Melveny and Myers law firm, which is working pro bono on the case, Anderson acknowledged that his school turns away students who may be more costly to educate.

“A small number, but yes, there are students we don’t accept,” he said, using the example of a ninth grader who reads at a fifth-grade level or one with multiple disabilities. “But in the spirit of who we are and what we’re trying to do, we’re not highly selective. We really want to serve kids.”

In this case, brought in 2014 by six school districts, three families and two statewide advocacy groups, the plaintiffs argue that Pennsylvania’s funding system is so inequitable that it is unconstitutional. Pennsylvania is near the bottom in the percentage of state share of education costs compared to local contributions. This has resulted in some of the largest per-pupil spending gaps in the country between wealthier and poorer school districts as well as sky-high local tax rates in some low-income communities.

The trial is now in its 10th week.

In the first nine weeks of the trial, educators brought in to testify from the plaintiff districts said repeatedly that they lacked sufficient resources to provide their students with the “thorough and efficient” education mandated in the state constitution, highlighting poor building conditions, large class sizes, and the inability to provide students with needed services.

In their cross examinations of those witnesses, attorneys for the Republican legislative leaders have sought to highlight districts’ achievements and any advanced classes or special programs they offered in an effort to convince Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer that the basic constitutional standard is being met. They also have sought to provide evidence that spending more money on education doesn’t necessarily lead to higher achievement.

State GOP leaders came up with the idea of corporate tax breaks as a way to create choice options at private and religious schools after several failed attempts in the late 1990s to enact school vouchers, which would have given tax money directly to families to use for private and parochial school tuition. EITC was enacted in 2001. OSTC, which provides benefits only to families living within the boundary of a school that falls in the bottom 15% in the state based on test scores, passed in 2012.

The total amount of potential tax breaks is capped at $280 million each year; of that amount, $55 million comes through the smaller OSTC program. That cap has been growing steadily, and expanding the benefit is often the subject of negotiations over the state budget.

This year, the cap for these programs was increased by $40 million. The legislature increased basic education funding by $300 million.

In fiscal year 2019-2020, the last year with available data, 68,430 students in the state received $145 million in EITC scholarships, an average of $2,120 per student, according to the IFO report.

Pennsylvania’s EITC program was among the first of its kind in the country; similar programs have been passed in 13 other states. Of the 14 current programs, the IFO report said that Pennsylvania’s is among the largest and least regulated.

That is by design, not due to mismanagement. The legislation authorizing the programs specifically prohibits the collection of much data.

“The statute should be amended to allow for the collection of student performance and demographic data so that program effectiveness can be evaluated,” the IFO report said. “Across states, Pennsylvania has one of the largest tax credits, but collects and publishes the least amount of outcome data.”

Because of provisions in the law, there is no way to determine whether the program is helping low-income families in low-achieving districts, or whether much of the benefit is going to families that live in high-performing and high-wealth districts. The income cap for eligible families is about $131,700 for a family of four – roughly 500% of the federal poverty level and “higher than all other states that have an income limitation,” the IFC report said.

“Because some portion of families could likely afford private school without a scholarship, it is unclear how much behavior is incentivized by the credit.”

Republicans expect to continue their case Thursday with testimony from David Donley, the executive director of the House Appropriations Committee.

Constant cutting is ‘heartbreaking,’ testifies Wilkes-Barre leader in Pennsylvania school funding case

2022-01-27T00:48:54+00:00

The petitioners in Pennsylvania’s landmark fair education funding lawsuit wrapped up their case Wednesday with testimony from Brian Costello, the superintendent of schools in Wilkes-Barre, a small city in which 70% of the students are Latino and Black, 82% are economically disadvantaged, and nearly one in eight are English language learners.

Wilkes-Barre, with an enrollment of 7,300, is the second largest of the six petitioner districts, which range from Lancaster, with more than 10,000 students, to Shenandoah Valley, with about 1,000.

Like educators from the other districts who testified before him, Costello said that Wilkes-Barre lacked enough resources to provide a quality education to its students, many of whom have high needs. Pennsylvania has one of the largest spending gaps between rich and poor districts in the country, and it also ranks low in the percentage of education dollars that come from the state compared to the local contribution.

Petitioners want the state to invest more in education aid and distribute the money more fairly, saying that the current system violates Pennsylvania’s constitutional mandate to provide a “thorough and efficient system of education.”

Costello said that the district had to take austerity measures in order to avoid running a deficit. “Through draconian measures, we have been able to achieve [a] fund balance,” he said.

Among those measures: the elimination of all K-8 art classes, a loss he called “heartbreaking,” adding that students, including his own daughter, were motivated in other courses because of the opportunity to take art.

“Cutting programs that you know are going to affect children is extremely difficult and it makes you question, you know, ‘What are we doing?’” he said.

The district also furloughed 37 teachers and cut all its librarians. Michael Horvath, a recent graduate of the district, testified on Monday about how his lack of experience in library research led to difficulties for him in college.

Through these and other austerity measures, Wilkes-Barre improved its bond rating enough to build a new $80 million high school because it was less expensive than repairing its three existing buildings that housed high school students, he said. Those buildings had deteriorated to the point of danger, with sheds outside of some entrances to shield passersby from a crumbling parapet.

During cross-examination, as they did with other witnesses from plaintiff districts, attorneys for Republican legislative leaders sought to highlight Wilkes-Barre’s achievements, including the new high school, to build a case for Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer that existing conditions and programs meet the constitutional requirement.

At one point, plaintiffs showed pictures of poor building conditions, including a room in which two students were wearing coats because of the cold.

But other students are in shirtsleeves, and Costello sparred with attorney Patrick Northen, representing Senate President Jack Corman, who suggested the students had no coats because it wasn’t really cold in the building.

“I was in the room, I know it was cold,” Costello said, adding that the reason the students were in shirtsleeves was because they were too poor to afford appropriate clothing.

In building their case, the plaintiffs brought a total of 29 witnesses, most of them educators from the plaintiff districts, as well as Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite and Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson. Philadelphia is not a plaintiff – it was under state control when the case was originally filed seven years ago – but supports the goals of the case.

Plaintiffs also brought in state Secretary of Education Noe Ortega, who testified that the state needs to invest more in education for it to give all students equal opportunity. Ortega and Gov. Tom Wolf are technically defendants in the case, but they support the need for more education spending by the state.

Other witnesses included economists and researchers who testified about the magnitude of the spending gaps among districts, as well as delineating the long-term costs of not investing now in education. Economist Clive Belfield cited higher health and welfare costs, more crime, and lower taxes paid by workers relegated to low-wage jobs because they didn’t finish high school.

The witnesses all went under intense cross-examination by attorneys for the legislature, who sought to undermine the contention that more money leads to higher student achievement.

The plaintiffs’ case took almost nine weeks. Legislators will begin their case on Monday, with a witness list that includes economists and academics who question the relationship between per-pupil spending and student achievement, as well as educators from charters and private schools, including cyber charters. Republicans in Harrisburg have long promoted school choice in the form of charters and vouchers as their main education reform strategy.

The first witness will be David Donley, the executive director of the Republican House Appropriations Committee. Also on the list is Aaron J. Anderson, a psychologist who heads Logos Academy, a faith-based private school, and Christine Rossell, a professor of education who argues that school desegregation is a better approach to inequity than more spending.

District’s chief financial officer testifies Philly needs more state aid to meet student needs

2022-01-25T02:06:05+00:00

A $3.5 billion budget. Upward of 125,000 students, plus 75,000 in charters. More than 20,000 employees, including 9,000 teachers. All in the poorest big city in America.

But the Philadelphia school district — the state’s largest by far — does not receive enough money to meet the needs of its students, and it is the only one of Pennsylvania’s 500 districts that has no taxing authority of its own, Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson testified Monday in the landmark fair funding trial.

“We have no control over our revenues and limited control over our expenditures,” he told Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, who is hearing the case. Jubelirer must decide whether the state’s school funding system violates the state constitution’s mandate for a “thorough and efficient system of education.”

The case, now in its ninth week, was brought by six districts, three families, and two statewide civil rights groups seeking to compel the state to spend more on education and distribute it to districts more fairly.

Philadelphia is not one of the plaintiffs — the district was under state control when it was filed — but one of the families is from the city, and the board of education has endorsed its aims. Superintendent William Hite testified in the trial earlier.

Without more funds, and with the end of federal pandemic aid, the district will start running shortfalls in fiscal 2025, Monson said.

While the board of education cannot raise revenue, the district must meet a series of mandates, including payments to charter schools, pension obligations, and special education services, among other requirements.

“We’re the poorest big city in the country,” Monson said, with a poverty rate of 24%. Significant numbers of its students are homeless, in foster care, lack sufficient nutrition, “things that should be basic” for students to be prepared for education. So the district “has to supplement (services) in order to make up for that,” he said.

Out of 500 Pennsylvania districts, Philadelphia ranks near the bottom — 473rd — in the amount of money it spends per “weighted” student, using a formula that not only counts heads but factors in the concentration of low-income and high-needs students, Monson said. At the same time, it ranks near the top — 19th — in a measure of local tax effort for education.

“The local population is pretty highly taxed; it is one of the highest districts in the state for local tax effort,” he said. Philadelphia residents “are putting a lot of funds into education, but still ranks very low in resources provided on a per-student basis.

“We spend almost the least in the state having almost the highest need in the state.”

State aid is supposed to make up for the difference that districts can raise to meet the needs of students, but since the fiscal year 2014-15, the amount Philadelphia receives through the basic education funding formula increased by just $59 million, in inflation adjusted dollars, on a $1.1 billion base, or about 5%. That amount failed to keep up with mandates and students’ increasing needs.

The pandemic exacerbated the problem, requiring the district to spend more to pivot to virtual learning while a lot of local revenue dried up, including funds the district receives via so-called sin taxes, including liquor-by-the-drink, and a use and occupancy tax on business.

A five-year influx of $1.8 billion federal pandemic aid helped, he said, but did not erase a huge structural deficit — meaning that on an annual basis, the district’s expenditures exceed its revenues.

Monson became the district’s chief financial officer in 2016 after working in several finance positions for suburban Montgomery County and the city of Philadelphia.

When he took over, the district was still recovering from a fiscal crisis caused when federal aid from the recession ended and the state slashed aid to schools instead of making it up. The district laid off 1,000 people, including all its counselors and nurses.

Under cross-examination from Thomas DeCesar, an attorney for Republican Senate President Jake Corman, Monson acknowledged that the district is now in “decent financial shape” due to prudent fiscal management. But he was careful to distinguish between that and having money to meet student needs.

In making budget decisions, he said, “instead of starting from what needs to happen, you start from what you can afford,” he said. “All decisions are resource-driven as opposed to needs-driven.”

‘Pennsylvania is forgoing resources’: Economists say school funding matters

2022-01-21T23:47:08+00:00

Two prominent economists testified this week in the landmark Pennsylvania fair school funding case that research shows increased resources, if properly targeted, can improve academic achievement and life success for traditionally underserved students.

Both Rucker Johnson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Clive Belfield, a professor at Queens College, held fast under intense cross-examination by attorneys representing Republican legislative leaders, who have been trying to undermine the relationship between school funding and student outcomes.

This lawsuit, filed in 2014, is the first of its kind to go to trial in Pennsylvania, which has some of the widest spending gaps among wealthy and poor districts in the country, even though its overall per-pupil spending is in the top ten among the states. Pennsylvania also contributes less as a state to overall education spending, 38% compared to a national average of 47%, putting more of a burden on local property taxes. The trial is will be entering its ninth week.

Johnson, who specializes in education finance, has studied the impact of California’s so-called LCFF, or Local Control Funding Formula, an infusion of $18 billion in education dollars in 2014 that reshaped how school districts in the state are funded. The formula for distributing the dollars took into account the factors that Johnson said made it “progressive,” emphasizing each district’s need, demographics, and taxing capacity.

Using student-level data, he showed that younger students who benefited from increased spending “had a whole grade level acceleration of learning than previous cohorts from that same school prior to the funding increase,” translating into eight to 12 months of learning gains.”

Johnson emphasized that for the additional funds to be effective, they have to be predictable, recurring and sustained over a long period of time. This allows districts to make long-range investments and study their impact.

Year-to-year political haggling over education spending – the norm in Pennsylvania and many other states – creates uncertainty and inhibits educators’ choices, he said, limiting the potential benefits.

“When we don’t do sustained investments, we see evidence of fade out,” he said. Occasional bumps in funding “don’t translate to significantly improved outcomes.”

Johnson said that new investments in K-12 and preschool programs together show the greatest gains. This was shown both in California and New Jersey, where courts in several cases going back to the 1990s have ordered increased spending in the state’s poorest districts while also mandating universal prekindergarten.

“We see the effects double when preceded by access to quality pre-K,” Johnson said.

On cross examination, attorney Patrick Northen, representing Republican House Speaker Brian Cutler, emphasized that Pennsylvania’s average per-pupil spending is high compared to other states. Northen said that the district gaps occur because Pennsylvania, unlike some other states, does not put a cap on what local governments can spend.

But Johnson said that using the average per-pupil spending “masks the variation” among districts. That variation “is pertinent to the achievement gaps,” he said.

Northen presented school-level achievement data that showed a decrease in test scores after California put more money into education. Johnson pushed back on that point.

“I wish it was that easy….I wish that’s the proper conclusion I could draw, but I cannot,” Johnson said. That kind of aggregate data doesn’t account for other factors, such as an influx of immigrant students, that could have influenced the results. He said his analysis was more precise, looking at individual student data and charting achievement growth over time.

Belfield catalogued the overall economic benefits to Pennsylvania of higher educational attainment by calculating “post-secondary parity,” or what would happen if economically disadvantaged students graduated high school and attended college at the same rate as other students in the state.

Fewer than 47% of disadvantaged high school graduates in Pennsylvania enroll in college, compared to 69% of non-disadvantaged students, he said.

“In economic terms, this low level of attainment is inefficient in the sense that the investments in education yield extremely high benefits,” Belfield said.

He estimated the gains if both groups graduated at the same high rate as $18.56 billion, in the form of lower spending later on welfare, health and prisons, coupled with higher productivity by adults with higher levels of education. In addition, with better paying jobs, the graduates would pay more in taxes and buy more, he said. He said he based that number on the size of the state’s economy and its state budget.

Northen questioned the analysis, disputing that he could isolate the effect of schooling on life outcomes compared to other factors including family circumstances.

But Belfield said that by not investing more in education, especially the education of economically disadvantaged students, “Pennsylvania is forgoing resources.”

Pennsylvania doesn’t spend enough on schools, state education secretary testifies

2022-01-19T00:44:33+00:00

Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Noe Ortega testified Tuesday at the fair funding trial that the state cannot reach its goals for post-secondary enrollment and completion without investing more in K-12 education.

He also said that wide gaps in post-secondary attainment between students of different racial and socio-economic groups are due to inadequate investment and inequitable distribution of resources.

Attorney Dan Urevick Ackelsberg of the Public Interest Law Center presented Ortega with data showing that while nearly half of white high school graduates from the class of 2011 – 46.3% – attained a college degree within six years, that number dropped to 19.9% for Black students and 20.7% for Hispanic students. For economically disadvantaged students, the number was also 19.9%. Overall, just 42% of Pennsylvania high school graduates attained a college degree.

“Can these disparities in college attendance and attainment be overcome without increasing investment in K-12 education? Ackelsberg asked.

“It would be difficult,” Ortega responded.

Karen Molchanow, executive director of the state board of education, testified earlier that Pennsylvania has an undereducated workforce, with just 50% having post-secondary credentials, putting it behind 29 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The state board has set a goal to reach 60% by 2025.

Ortega said that at the current rate for recent graduates, the state would not reach that goal, even when adding the 3% who achieved industry certifications.

The department believes “insufficient numbers of working-age Pennsylvanians have industry certification, insufficient numbers graduate from college, and there are significant disparities in post-secondary outcomes” depending on race and socio-economic status, Ortega said.

The historic case, which could reshape how education is paid for in Pennsylvania, was brought by six school districts, three families, and two statewide advocacy groups. It was originally filed in 2014 and is the first in a series of such cases to go to trial in Pennsylvania, where gaps among rich and poor districts are among the largest in the country and where the state share of total education spending ranks 47th.

Attorneys for Republican legislative leaders sought to exclude from evidence the post-secondary achievement data presented by the plaintiffs, which comes from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that works with states, school districts, and colleges to match student records and create data sets to highlight workforce and education trends.

Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, who is hearing the case, allowed the testimony to proceed and said she would rule later on the admissibility question.

Ortega and Gov. Tom Wolf are also respondents in the case, but are not mounting a defense of the current funding system, unlike the GOP leaders.

Ortega also testified that, according to data collected under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act), the percentage of “highly effective” teachers declines in school districts as the percentages of Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students increase.

In wealthy, white districts, 97% of teachers are highly effective, compared to 79% in poorer districts with more students of color. “As the share of students of color increases, (the percentage of teachers rated ineffective) becomes higher,” Ortega said.

In William Penn, the largest of the plaintiff districts, a quarter were rated ineffective – 116 of 447 teachers.

The trial is in its eighth week.

Spending gaps in Pennsylvania among widest in the country, college dean testifies

2022-01-14T01:34:54+00:00

A college education dean who has written extensively on educational equity testified Thursday at Pennsylvania’s school funding trial that gaps between need and available resources in schools are particularly stark in the state, where one in five children come from families living below the federal poverty line.

These gaps further disadvantage low-income students, said Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Poor students, disproportionately those who are Black and Latino but also some rural white students, have less access to high-quality teachers, college prep courses, and other academic resources while dealing with more barriers, such as poor health and family instability, he said.

“The disparities in Pennsylvania are great,” said Noguera, who has written dozens of articles and several books on educational inequity across the country and the impact of increased revenue on outcomes in previously underfunded districts. Noguera was called as an “expert” witness, as opposed to a fact witness, by the plaintiffs in the case – six school districts, three families and two statewide advocacy groups seeking to overhaul how education is paid for in the state.

He testified that 42% of Black children in Pennsylvania and 35% of Latino children live in conditions of concentrated poverty, meaning in neighborhoods where at least 30% of the residents are poor, numbers far above the national average of 19% of all students.

In schools with concentrated poverty, educators can be “overwhelmed” by student needs and the lack of resources to deal with them, Noguera said, leading to high teacher turnover that further erodes conditions for high student achievement. Teachers leave for wealthier districts where the pay and working conditions are better, he said.

The result of underfunding schools has broad societal implications, he said, because it leads to large numbers of people without the skills to gain well-paying jobs that support families. “The long-term loss affects all of us,” he added.

On cross examination, attorney Patrick Northen, representing House Speaker Brian Cutler, said some high-poverty districts in the state spend more per student than the state average, including Pittsburgh and Lancaster, one of the six plaintiff districts.

Under Northen’s questioning, Noguera acknowledged that some research shows that more revenue does not necessarily lead to higher student achievement. “Money alone is not the answer,” Noguera said, emphasizing that districts need to use funds on “proven strategies.”

This lawsuit, originally filed in 2014, is the first such case in Pennsylvania that has gone to trial. The plaintiffs sued on the grounds of both equity and adequacy, saying that the current system violates the state constitutional mandate for a “thorough and efficient system of education.” Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, who is hearing the case, must decide the standard for “thorough and efficient.”

Plaintiffs want the state’s school funding system to be overhauled, both by adding more money to the pot and distributing it more equitably. Through their cross examinations, Republican legislative leaders are mounting a defense that seeks to undermine the relationship between spending and academic achievement, while highlighting accomplishments of the plaintiff districts as evidence that the constitutional mandate is being met.

Philadelphia is not among the plaintiffs since it was under state control at the time the suit was filed. But the city has endorsed it and Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite spent Wednesday on the stand, testifying that Philadelphia lacks the resources it needs to adequately educate its students, about half of whom live below the federal poverty line and most of whom are Black and Latino.

Thursday morning, before Noguera’s testimony, Hite was cross examined by John Krill, an attorney representing Senate President Jake Corman. Krill questioned Hite about the five Philadelphia schools that were recently cited by the U.S. Department of Education as “Blue Ribbon” schools as well as 7,300 students who earned industry certifications – both accomplishments cited on the district’s own website.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Kristina Moon of the Education Law Center objected that information on the website is hearsay and is not in evidence. Krill argued it was relevant because “it contradicts the dire picture” that Hite presented in his direct examination.

Hite said he was “very proud” of the Blue Ribbon schools and the district’s Career and Technical Education program. As with other superintendents called to testify, he was put in the position under cross examination of treading a fine line between touting their districts’ achievements and making the case for more resources.

Noguera’s testimony continues Friday. Next week, the trial will resume on Tuesday. More Philadelphia witnesses are expected to testify, including Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, a principal, and a school counselor.

Hite testifies lack of resources holds back Philly students

2022-01-12T01:29:08+00:00

Philadelphia school superintendent William Hite spent Tuesday testifying at the school funding trial in Harrisburg, reiterating several times that he believes a lack of resources is the main reason that more Philadelphia students do not achieve academically at high levels.

Hite, who is leaving the state’s largest district in August after a decade as superintendent, said he agreed to testify in the trial “in order to make sure that in the future, whoever comes in after me … should not face the same types of circumstances I’ve had to face in trying to educate children without sufficient resources and support to do so.”

The trial, before Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, comes in a case that seeks to overhaul the state’s school funding system. Pennsylvania has some of the widest spending gaps in the nation between wealthy and low-income school districts, and ranks 45th in the nation in the percentage of education costs borne by the state as opposed to localities.

This case, originally filed in 2014, is the latest in several such cases in Pennsylvania, but it is the first that has made it to trial. Previous judges have ruled that the issue of school funding is a matter for the legislature, not judicial intervention.

Philadelphia, the state’s largest district by far, was under state control at the time the suit was filed and is not a plaintiff in the case, which was brought by six districts, three families — including one from the city — and two statewide advocacy groups. The Philadelphia Board of Education has passed a resolution endorsing the suit and expressing hope that it will result in more revenue being available to educate city students.

The plaintiffs sued the governor, legislature, and Pennsylvania Department of Education, but only the Republican legislative leadership is mounting a defense.

Under questioning from attorney Kristina Moon of the Education Law Center, which is helping represent the plaintiffs, Hite painted the picture of a district in the nation’s poorest big city with increasing needs and insufficient funding to meet them.

For instance, 12% of students in district schools are English language learners, with more than 100 languages spoken as first languages by its families, and 17% percent of students have disabilities. Both are higher than the state average. Additionally, thousands of students experience homelessness or are in the foster care system, Hite said.

“Are you sufficiently staffed to meet student needs?” Moon asked.

“We are not,” Hite answered.

Most of the district’s students are low-income, so many that the district simply provides free breakfast and lunch to all students because it is cheaper that way rather than doing the paperwork to determine who exactly is eligible. All but three of the district’s 216 schools have a student body poor enough for the whole school to qualify for federal Title I funds, which targets low-income students.

The English learner population grew from 8% to 12% in less than a decade. But due to budget constraints and other limitations, the district has been unable to hire enough teachers of English as a Second Language or Bilingual Counseling Assistants to work in schools, Hite said.

In other states where he has worked, including Georgia and Maryland, school funding made an effort to keep up with needs, he said. Districts there “all had budgetary challenges,” he said. But in those places policymakers saw to it that “funding caught up with expenditures moving forward,” especially after federal stimulus money from the 2008 recession ran out.

In Philadelphia, however, “the experience was very different.”

Hite became superintendent in 2012. With federal funds expiring, then-Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican, slashed state aid to schools, with Philadelphia losing a quarter of a billion dollars. Some of Hite’s first acts were to lay off nurses, counselors, and other school employees not strictly mandated by state law, and to cut extracurricular activities. Many schools opened with just teachers and a principal, and hardly any other staff. Within his first few years, he also closed 24 schools.

Gradually, the district regained its financial footing, but it came at great cost.

“It doesn’t instill a lot of trust in an educational entity when you talk about opening schools with just teachers and principals and without extracurricular activities and other things that for families and children would represent what schools are,” he said.

Moon led Hite through a comparison of Lower Merion and Overbrook high schools, which are barely three miles apart, but which have vastly different demographics and student outcomes.

Overbrook’s student body is almost entirely Black and low income, and its performance on the state Keystone exams is low, with just 6% of students scoring proficient or advanced. At Lower Merion, which is mostly white and affluent, 94.9% of students are at least proficient.

High percentages of the relatively low number of economically disadvantaged students at Lower Merion score proficient on the tests, 80.6% in English, 87.5% in algebra, and 72.2% in biology. That contrasts with figures in the low single digits for economically disadvantaged students at Overbrook. Not one low-income student scored proficient in the biology test at Overbrook, Hite said.

“Is there any reason Overbrook’s students or any Philadelphia students are not capable of reaching Lower Merion’s level of achievement?” Moon asked.

“Other than funding, no,” Hite said, “and making sure young people have access to the type of resources Lower Merion enjoys.” Lower Merion spends nearly $27,000 per student, among the highest of the state’s 500 districts, compared with less than $20,000 per student in Philadelphia.

Moon also led Hite through the story of how Mitchell Elementary School in West Philadelphia improved its test scores when it got additional resources as part of the district’s acceleration network, formerly called the turnaround network, that focused on improving schools with very low achievement.

From 2015 to 2019 Mitchell got extra staff positions, including reading and math coaches, a counselor, and an assistant principal. It showed big jumps in reading, math, and science scores from 2017-18 to 2019-20, although overall achievement levels still remained low. “The overall progress was trending in the right direction,” Hite said.

Mitchell improved enough that it exited the acceleration network, and lost its extra funding — other schools needed it more. “I am concerned about that, but it’s an unfortunate product of having to triage resources due to the availability of funds,” he said.

Overall, Hite said, “we are not graduating children who are college and career ready” based on the results on standardized tests and other measures. “Every day I walk into a school and see what’s there and what could be done [with sufficient funds] and it becomes discouraging, unfortunate, and sad for me personally.”

Attorney John Krill, representing Senate President Jake Corman, started his cross examination of Hite, pressing him to quantify how much more in personnel and resources it would take to bring all Mitchell students to 100% proficiency on math and reading.

Hite avoided giving a specific number. “When you have schools with low proficiency, two significant things should happen: sufficient resources to meet whatever needs of those children are, and those resources need to be sustainable, predictable and recurring,” he responded.

There will be no public court session Wednesday. Krill will resume cross examination of Hite Thursday. Attorney Patrick Northen, who is representing House Speaker Brian Cutler, will not participate in cross examination because his law firm, Dilworth Paxson LLP, does work for the Philadelphia district.

Other planned witnesses from Philadelphia include Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson and a school principal and counselor.

Pennsylvania fair funding trial resumes: ‘We have done great things … but we don’t have the funding we need.’

2022-01-07T14:14:02+00:00

Nearly two months after it started, the landmark fair funding trial underway in Harrisburg is shaping up as a battle over defining educational “must-haves” vs. “nice-to-haves.”

The trial, which has the potential to overhaul how education is paid for in Pennsylvania, resumed Thursday after a two-week holiday hiatus. Jane Harbert, who retired in 2020 after seven years as chief of schools and four years as superintendent of the William Penn School District, spent the entire day on the stand.

Six districts, including William Penn, along with three families and two statewide advocacy organizations, have sued the state alleging that its system of funding education is discriminatory and unconstitutional. The state has among the widest per-pupil spending gaps among wealthier and poorer districts in the country and ranks 45th in the percentage of education costs paid by the state.

Harbert, like educators from other plaintiff districts called as witnesses before her, was compelled under cross examination by attorneys for Republican legislative leaders to defend achievements in her school district. Attorney Patrick Northen, representing House Speaker Brian Cutler, cited many – including a debate team that has bested those from more affluent areas, a host of middle school sports teams, and a national award for increasing Advanced Placement offerings – as evidence that the district is doing fine with current resources.

Harbert repeatedly said she believed although the district had its share of success stories, many students are being denied the opportunities they deserve. Despite being able to offer many AP courses, she said, without early intervention and extra services when they are younger, many students cannot access those courses.

“We have done great things, but the reality we face on a regular basis is, we don’t have the funding we need,” Harbert said.

This is despite having the highest local tax effort (as measured by the amount raised compared to total property values) of any district in Delaware County and the second highest in the state, Harbert said under questioning by Public Interest Law Center attorney Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg. Mandated costs, such as pension contributions and charter school reimbursements, far outrun the available resources or the ability to tax residents, she said.

In William Penn, which encompasses six towns on the southwest border of Philadelphia, four of five students are low-income.

“Our students come in with learning gaps, those need to be addressed at a very early age,” she said, but the district doesn’t have enough funds to apply the needed interventions.

Northen highlighted William Penn’s accomplishments and sought to get Harbert to acknowledge there is a difference between what educators would like to have in their districts and what is constitutionally required. Urevick-Ackelsberg objected, saying Harbert is not an attorney, and she didn’t answer.

The Pennsylvania constitution, like those in several states, mandates a “thorough and efficient” system of education “for the good of the commonwealth.” How to define that is at the core of what Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer must decide.

The trial, expected to last a total of eight to 10 weeks, resumed after a break that saw an exchange between a prior witness and attorney John Krill, who is representing Senate President Jake Corman, have its moment on social media.

During the cross examination of Matthew Splain, superintendent of the rural 600-student Otto Eldred school district and board chair of the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, Krill suggested that many activities offered by school districts, including arts and music, are not required under the “thorough and efficient” definition. He criticized the state’s proficiency standards in math and reading, which apply to all students, questioning why a carpenter needed to know biology, or why someone on “the McDonald’s career track” needs to learn algebra.

“Lest we forget, the Commonwealth has many, many needs,” Krill told Jubelirer after a plaintiff attorney lodged an objection to his line of questioning. “I think there is a need for retail workers, people who know how to flip pizza crust. My point is, do these proficiency standards actually in any way imaginable serve the needs of the Commonwealth such as they should be mandatory across the board? I think the answer is no.”

In response, Splain described a high school band where high achievers and special education students played together.

“Tell me that’s not a must-have, that those kids don’t need that,” Splain told the court, a catch in his voice.

Urevick-Ackelsberg picked up on that thread during Harbert’s testimony Thursday, asking her if she thinks all students, regardless of any future career, need critical reading, writing, and math skills.

“We are not the sum of the career that we choose,” she said. “Everybody needs critical thinking skills so they can read a novel, make good decisions about health, good decisions about where they want to work, where they want to be. They need critical thinking, writing, math and reading skills for all careers and for their personal life, too.”

Harbert’s cross examination continues Friday.

Philadelphia Parking Authority’s demand for a refund could have big implications for district, CFO says

2021-12-21T02:14:27+00:00

School officials say they are seeking more information and weighing their options after the Philadelphia Parking Authority claimed that it overpaid the district by $11.3 million in 2020 and wants a refund.

The district’s chief financial officer, Uri Monson, said that while the amount may seem small compared to the district’s $3 billion annual budget, the PPA’s move could have big implications for the district’s future planning if it is allowed to stand.

Monson said that money from the PPA, given annually as part of a longstanding revenue-sharing arrangement, is “recurring money” and adds up over time. If the annual amount can’t be predicted with some certainty, “that significantly affects how we make investments in schools,” he said.

The $11.3 million is 77% of the $14.7 million the PPA paid the district last year.

As far as Monson can tell, the PPA is recalculating what it should have paid the district in the 2020 fiscal year based on new estimates of its future liabilities, he said.

PPA’s latest action “has raised questions,” he said. “We don’t understand all the numbers and are not convinced all the things they’re putting in are supposed to be counted” as part of the state’s revenue-sharing formula.

The PPA told Monson it “does not have any supporting documentation to provide” to back up its claim of overpayments, according to an email obtained by Chalkbeat through the office of City Council member Helen Gym. But emails between Monson and the PPA’s chief financial officer suggest that the overpayments had to do with miscalculations relating to debt incurred as a result of its obligations to retirees.

The PPA also did not explain why those funds were tied to payments to the school district and not another part of its budget.

Monson has been aware of the claim since October. The issue became public after the school district presented its quarterly report to the City Council.

Gym organized a protest Monday outside the PPA office, where people go to pay and contest parking tickets. She was joined by leaders from the district’s two major unions, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators. Also, there were advocacy groups, including Children First and the faith-based organization POWER.

“The PPA wants to siphon millions of dollars from our schools where every single day students and staff … endure conditions that would never be tolerated in a wealthier, whiter school district,” said Hillary Linardopoulos, representing the PFT.

The amount that the authority wants back is equivalent to the cost of 100 teachers, counselors or nurses, or could be used to remove a lot of asbestos, mold, or lead pipes in the district’s aging schools, Gym said. She called the PPA’s action “an outrage.”

A PPA spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

In 2004, Republicans in Harrisburg engineered a takeover of the PPA, which not only hands out the tickets when meters expire but also runs the Philadelphia airport, operates parking garages across the city, regulates taxis and limousines, and manages red light cameras.

As part of that deal, some of the revenue PPA collects from parking tickets is supposed to be paid to the school district. It was expected to yield $45 million a year for schools. However, that much money has never materialized, and in some years, there have been no payments at all.

In 2014, parking fines nearly doubled, which PPA justified as a way to send more money to the schools. But after that, money sent to the district declined until the City Council held a hearing in 2016, drawing attention to the issue again.

A blistering 2017 audit by then state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale found that PPA potentially shortchanged the district by $77.9 million.

Since 2015, revenue from the PPA to the district totaled $53 million, meaning that PPA is seeking the return of more than 20% of its payments since then. The district got nothing in the 2021 fiscal year due to the pandemic, said Monson, but it had been counting on returning to annual PPA payments of about $15 million a year in its future projections.

Monson said that PPA has promised additional answers in January.

In Pennsylvania, it’s past time to focus on school funding gaps

2021-12-17T13:00:00+00:00

“So, what were you like in high school?”

The question comes up at least twice a semester. Truthfully, I am a high school teacher who hated high school. I’d retreat during calculus class to the restroom windowsill to read novels. During lunch, I’d hide in the library to avoid monotonous lunch-table gossip and peruse the latest Time magazine. (President Obama had just been sworn in, and the iPhone now featured a built-in speaker.) During science classes, I’d drum my Ticonderoga pencils and watch the Amtrak train zip by the open window.

I longed to be on that train; to be taken from my high school and its suburban trappings to Boston or New York City. What I did not know then is that years later, I would follow that train line to the heart of North Philadelphia to be a high school English teacher. There, I would realize that the neat details of my own schooling were evidence of resources that weren’t shared equally across the state.

Lydia Kulina-Washburn

My sprawling, recently built high school campus in Central Pennsylvania was surrounded by mossy green athletic fields. Science labs were stockpiled with dead critters to dissect and the student weight room resembled an Equinox gym. Classes were never large and most students were academically on grade level. We had a brand new ventilation system that provided temperate conditions year-round. The only time it was defunct was when a few seniors let some chickens loose in the ductwork.

The high staff-to-student ratio was best demonstrated by the number of secretaries. There was the front-door attendance secretary, three office secretaries, the principal’s assistant, the athletic secretary, the vocational technology secretary, and the guidance secretary who gave the warmest hugs and could, from time to time, be manipulated to sign a hall pass so I wasn’t marked late to class. The hallways were replete with guidance counselors, psychologists, home economics teachers, and librarians.

A decade later and 70 miles down the track in North Philadelphia, there were no fertilized athletic fields. The school sat near the abandoned garment corridor, and until the school received a large grant for historic preservation, the environmental conditions within the school mirrored the conditions of textile workers of decades past.

Few classrooms had proper cooling, and students struggled to learn in the warming spring and fall. In the years prior, my classroom’s only source of cooling had been the brown, wood-paneled Kenmore mini-fridge that I kept for my chicken salad. Of course, this was not enough to prevent paramedic visits or student heat exhaustion. Now and then, while assisting student groups, I’d glance up as a stealthy sophomore snuck up to the fridge to stick his sweaty head in. Who could blame him? I did the same between periods.

There were unfelt dangers as well. In an expose in 2017, the Philadelphia Inquirer observed that many city classrooms were filled with toxins such as lead paint and asbestos. Until the historical preservation grant, my school was no exception. Students couldn’t drink the school’s water to cool down as it was found to be contaminated with lead. I had to stop washing my hands because the water burned my hands. According to the Inquirer’s report, there were over 30 cases of damaged asbestos throughout the building. I vividly recall running to the lavatory, squatting and holding my breath, knowing that a damaged pipe showered the toilet with asbestos particulates daily.

While suburban counterparts had copy rooms filled with sticky chart paper and Post It notes, we were allotted one ream of paper a month for all of our copies. (I’d pray that Jesus would multiply the sheets as he did the fish and the loaves.) Meanwhile, the school’s lone secretary was constantly juggling phone calls, legal filings, appointments, attendance, visitors, district documentation — everything. Every employee was a performer in this high-energy “School Soleil” balancing act. For years, there was no budgetary allotment for assistant principals, so everything from teacher instruction to school culture fell on the shoulders of one individual. In turn, teachers taught classes in multiple content areas, covered classes with vacancies, and filled in as testing coordinator, department head, and emergency counselor. This not to suggest that all suburban schools are shiny and new. But they are often overwhelmingly better resourced, whether dealing with students or building maintenance.

Every employee was a performer in this high-energy “School Soleil” balancing act.

I wish that students dealing with the visceral realities of community trauma and Philadelphia’s gun violence had a few more counselors on staff. I wish the students with carefully hidden headphones had a music class. I wish the parade of students that reminded me of my high school self, those who had a novel hidden in their backpack and appreciated the quality of a Ticonderoga pencil, had a library to escape to during a noisy lunch. We all deserved a restroom without falling asbestos.

A landmark case is underway now, with plaintiffs challenging the state’s school funding system. “Low-wealth Pennsylvania school districts have $4,800 less to spend per pupil on students than wealthy school districts — and this gap, one of the widest in the country, is growing,” activists are pointing out. So it’s a good time to grapple with the glaring juxtapositions of American schools.

Opponents of school finance reforms will argue that funding does not make a difference, pointing to examples of unwise district spending or districts that outspend the national average but do not have a higher achievement rate — ignoring the intense physical and economic needs of some districts’ buildings and students. But research and common sense suggest that investing in urban classrooms does make a difference.

Resources matter. Smaller classes matter. Counselors matter. Having a library matters. Copy machines matter. Copy paper for instructional materials matters. Living wages for educators matter. An asbestos-free classroom matters. Ventilation matters.

I can’t help but think of Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian route and the contrast of all the schools on its journey. How is it that two schools could be so different in the same state? How is it that one district has had a proper ventilation system for decades while another issues hundreds of school fans attached to plywood? A budget is nothing more than a statement of priorities. In 2021, how does your education still depend on what part of the track you live on?

Lydia Kulina-Washburn is a high school educator with seven years of experience teaching in Philadelphia schools. She holds a master’s in education with a focus in urban education from Temple University and is focused on exploring the connection between public schools and community place-making. When not grading essays, she can be seen walking her goldendoodle. Follow her here.

Landmark Pennsylvania fair school funding case set for trial

2021-11-09T23:05:23+00:00

After seven years, Pennsylvania’s landmark school funding case is set to go to trial on Friday, giving educators and parents in low-wealth districts the opportunity to tell the court how students are harmed by a system that has resulted in some of the widest spending gaps among better-off and poor districts in the country.

“The case is important because the Pennsylvania legislature has for more than a generation been ignoring its duty to make sure students have the resources they need to learn and be effective citizens of the Commonwealth,” said Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center, which along with the Education Law Center and the private firm O’Melveny is arguing the case. “On their own, the legislature will not take care of the most basic needs that Pennsylvania has.”

The case was originally filed in 2014 on behalf of six school districts — urban, suburban and rural, including the William Penn district that abuts southwest Philadelphia. Three families, including one from Philadelphia, are also plaintiffs, as are two statewide advocacy groups – the Pennsylvania chapter of the NAACP and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, or PARRS. It will be tried before Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubeliler in Harrisburg.

At issue is whether the state is providing enough money to adequately educate all its students and whether the funds are distributed equitably based on the needs of districts.

“We are asking for substantial new investments in state funding for public education, distributed based on need, so that local wealth will no longer be what determines if Pennsylvania students can receive a quality public education,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center. “The specifics of this new system will be up to the state legislature to determine, under the oversight of the court order. We are not seeking a specific dollar amount or method of funding schools.”

The School District of Philadelphia is not part of the case – it was under state control when it was filed – but Superintendent William Hite is expected to be among the witnesses in a trial predicted to last eight to 10 weeks. Hite and other District officials have said that they are counting on this case to bring more money to district schools, which struggle to educate some of the state’s neediest students with a per-pupil expenditure that is far below its many of its wealthier suburban neighbors.

Besides William Penn, the plaintiff districts are Lancaster, Wilkes-Barre, Greater Johnstown, Panther Valley, and Shenandoah Valley. They have diverse student populations that are mostly low-income, and limited taxing capacity of their own to raise sufficient funds for schools.

The plaintiffs argue that the current funding system violates the state constitution’s mandate for a “thorough and efficient system of education,” as well as its equal protection clause. They say the legislature’s own analysis shows a statewide adequacy shortfall of $4.6 billion.

“In the six-plus years since the Petition was filed, Respondents have done nothing to turn around what is indisputably a failing system,” the plaintiffs’ pre-trial brief says. “Instead, Respondents have exacerbated or ignored the endemic funding shortfall and entrenched inequities, with disastrous results for Pennsylvania’s children.”

The brief notes that 44% of third graders fail to meet state proficiency standards in math, and 38% fall short in English. High school achievement in math and English, as measured by state tests, show more than a third failing to meet standards.

And the results in poor districts are worse.

“By every measure, the results are far more disastrous for low-wealth school districts, and the economically disadvantaged children they educate,” the brief says. “Compared to their more fortunate peers, those children are less likely to be proficient on state exams from the first moment they are tested to the last.”

In their pre-trial brief, attorneys for House Speaker Brian Cutler argue that school funding is a matter of public policy, not judicial interference.

“Petitioners’ grievances consist primarily of public policy disagreements with the decisions made by Pennsylvania’s elected representatives. In an effort to elevate these routine policy disputes to constitutional significance,” the plaintiffs “misleadingly attempt to create a dystopian view of Pennsylvania’s education system,” the brief says.

Cutler’s attorneys say that on average, Pennsylvania’s students outperform peers in most other states and have a high college completion rate. Citing census data showing that the state ranks sixth in total per-pupil revenue, Pennsylvania “outspends most of its sister states,” and “districts are clearly providing opportunities for their students,” the brief says.

While acknowledging that there are spending gaps among districts, and that the current system “isn’t perfect,” the brief says that the state constitution “does not require a public school system that is beyond criticism. Nor does it require the General Assembly to cure all of the economic, social, community, family, and personal factors that cause students – and subgroups of students – to succeed at different rates.”

In their pre-trial brief, attorneys representing Senate President Jake Corman downplayed the role of funding in assuring a quality education.

“This case is replete with social issues and murky questions of how to determine if a school is doing a good job,” and “whether the school’s performance is tied to its funding,” the brief says. “Moreover, there are significant problems with Petitioners’ theory of causation, which rests on the belief that simply providing more money to schools will lead to greater academic success.”

Plaintiffs “ignore the reality that student results are not the same as student opportunities, and assume that school districts are spending their funds in a wise and efficient manner.”

Most states fund schools primarily through local property taxes, which gives an advantage to richer districts. State dollars, and some federal aid through programs like Title I, which provides funding for low-income students, are meant to compensate for inequities. But these dollars rarely make up all the difference.

Over the years, similar legal challenges have been brought in about half the states with varying results.

Pennsylvania “has long been one of the least equitably funded state school finance systems in the country,” said Bruce Baker, a professor of education at Rutgers University and a national expert on school funding. And Philadelphia “has been one of, if not the, least adequately funded major urban district.” Baker has testified in other states’ funding cases, but is not involved in this one.

The average per-pupil expenditure across the Commonwealth puts Pennsylvania in the top 10 among states, he noted. “But a lot of that is driven by the relatively high expenditures in the Philly suburbs in particular.”

He also said that while student test scores across the state are good on average, “the inequities are huge, and they have systematically fallen on certain types of districts over time.”

According to an interactive tracker that Baker helped create, some of the most underfunded districts in the country compared to need are small Pennsylvania cities, such as Allentown and Reading, which fare even worse than Philadelphia, he said.

“We should be funding at a higher level places with greater needs,” Baker said. But that is not, for the most part, how the state-based system in the U.S. works. “Instead of having more, in Pennsylvania in particular they have a lot less,” which impedes students’ ability to succeed, he said.

This is not the first case in Pennsylvania brought by advocates seeking to overturn the funding system – PARRS filed a case 30 years ago, and Philadelphia filed its own lawsuit several years later.

In those cases, Pennsylvania’s courts ruled that school funding is a matter for legislators, not judges, to decide. That stance contrasts with other states, including neighboring New Jersey, where the courts have ordered the legislature to direct more money to poor, underfunded districts in cases starting with Robinson vs. Cahill in 1973, and culminating with the state Supreme Court decision in Abbott v. Burke.

In that case, the court ruled in 1990 that its method of funding schools violated its “thorough and efficient” clause in its state constitution and ordered more funds sent to 28 poor urban school districts, including Camden and Newark.

“While courts in the rest of the nation have been wrestling with this problem since the 1970s, and have had great results as seen in neighboring state of New Jersey, Pennsylvania courts refused to look at this question for many years,” Churchill said.

That changed in 2017, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed itself and said that this case could go to trial.

The defendants include the General Assembly, Gov. Tom Wolf and the state Department of Education. But only the Senate and Assembly leaders are mounting a strong defense of the current system in court.

Wolf, a Democrat, campaigned in 2014 on the platform of sending $1 billion more in state aid to schools, but the Republican-controlled legislature never agreed to hikes that big. And while lawmakers revised the formula for distributing state education funds in 2016 to account for special district circumstances, including poverty, the legislature has not applied the new formula to most of the aid, only to new dollars.

After this year’s budget deal, officials say lawsuit is best hope for reforming school funding

2021-07-01T21:05:00+00:00

After state lawmakers agreed to a budget last week that largely left unspent a combined $10 billion from a state surplus and federal pandemic aid, Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite said he is increasingly looking to a seven-year-old fair funding lawsuit to address Pennsylvania’s gaping disparities in education funding.

The budget included $300 million more in basic education aid, one of the largest increases in state history, but fell far short of what some advocates and school officials had hoped for.

In Philadelphia, the school district will get $80 million more in education funding for the 2021-22 fiscal year. Hite said he was pleased with the increase but disappointed that the legislature didn’t do more.

“I’m thrilled to get the $80 million,” Hite said. “But the more important thing is fully funding public education and running as much money as possible through the funding formula.”

The fair funding lawsuit, filed in 2014, seeks to overhaul the state’s system for funding education, long recognized as one of the most inequitable in the country. The lawsuit argues that state aid to education is both inadequate to meet all students’ needs and is also distributed inequitably.

Mayor Jim Kenney said the budget deal, which fell far short of the $1.35 billion increase in education spending that Gov. Tom Wolf had proposed in February, showed that Republicans in Harrisburg “don’t care about education, they don’t care about children’s welfare.”

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of six low-income school districts as well as several parents and civil rights groups, is scheduled to begin on Sept. 9 in Commonwealth Court.

State lawmakers adopted a new “fair funding” formula a year after the lawsuit was filed, which is weighted to take into account high-needs student populations, such as English language learners, low-income students, and students with disabilities. The formula also gives weight to a district’s concentration of poverty, household incomes, and taxing capacity.

But the formula has not been used to distribute the state’s full pot of education aid, only new money, and now drives only about 11% of the funds.

Philadelphia is not a plaintiff in the case, but Hite and Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson will be called as witnesses, said attorney Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of the Public Interest Law Center, which is helping to represent the plaintiffs.

“They are going to testify about the inadequate resources they have,” Urevick-Ackelsberg said.

In addition to the $1.35 billion increase, Wolf, a Democrat, proposed changing how the state distributes the money by running all the basic education aid through the fair funding formula, even before the influx of federal pandemic aid into the state. Had that proposal been adopted, Philadelphia would have received an additional $261 million.

Other struggling districts, including Reading and Allentown, would have also seen their allocations rise significantly.

Studies have found that Pennsylvania underfunds its schools relative to need, which puts a heavy burden on local taxes and results in some of the widest gaps between poor and wealthy districts in the country. The state contributes about 38% of overall education costs; the national average is about half.

Another witness will be Christopher McGinley, Urevick-Ackelsberg said. McGinley was a teacher and principal in Philadelphia, a member of the School Reform Commission when the district was run by the state, and a member of the Board of Education for two years until last March.

He also served as superintendent in Lower Merion, one of the state’s wealthiest districts.

McGinley told Chalkbeat that he gave a lengthy deposition in the case last year.

“A lot of the questions posed to me were about the differences in funding in suburban communities and in Philadelphia,” McGinley said.

State data shows that, relative to student need, Lower Merion spends two-and-a-half times as much as Philadelphia — $26,735 per student compared to $10,235.

Urban districts are not the only ones affected by the wide spending disparities. Many rural districts are affected as well.

McGinley agreed that addressing the issue is not likely to be resolved politically.

“I think given the politics of Harrisburg, the lawsuit is the only chance of unlocking adequate and equitable funding,” he said.

Due to its size and high-needs students — it is by far the largest of the state’s 500 school districts — Philadelphia is always in line for a huge chunk of any dollars driven either by the fair funding formula or the federal Title I program, which is meant to help schools and districts combat poverty. Last year, the state distributed $200 million from the first federal pandemic relief fund in a way that minimized Philadelphia’s share — just $13 million, compared to the $40 million it would have gotten had the fair funding formula been used.

Even though research showed that the pandemic was having a great effect on Black and brown students, on a per-pupil basis “the district receives less than every other school district in the commonwealth,” Kenney and City Council President Darrell Clarke wrote to Wolf last August. Philadelphia educates close to half the Black and brown students in the state.

And other analyses of state aid have shown that the formula disproportionately affects districts with more Black and brown students, even when controlling for poverty.

In one of the latest pre-trial motions, attorneys for the legislature sought to eliminate any evidence showing racial disparities that result from the current method of distributing state funds.

Republicans generally want to save money for fear of future deficits, while Democrats want to spend it on immediate needs. That partisan difference played out in this year’s negotiations.

Wolf’s proposal initially included a tax increase to raise enough money so that no district would lose funds as a result of the distribution. With the influx of federal pandemic relief funds, his proposal could have been paid for without increasing taxes at all.

Still the Republican-controlled legislature, citing the need to save for potential future economic downturns, decided not to spend most of the $7.5 billion in funds from the American Rescue Plan. They also decided to put an unanticipated $3 million surplus in a “rainy day fund.”

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t put the commonwealth in a position…that we can’t fund education or fund social programs moving forward,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Stan Saylor of York, told reporters when the budget was adopted. “There may be criticisms of us for not spending all that money now, but what about next year? What about two years from now.”

Advocates wanted the state to use the funds on immediate needs, such as fixing school buildings with dangerous toxins, such as lead, asbestos and mold. Such repairs are one-time expenditures, which the state wouldn’t have to pick up after federal funds ran out.

Activists, including City Council member Helen Gym, last week protested in Harrisburg demanding that the General Assembly “spend the money.” They were arrested.

Two days later, the governor and legislature agreed to increase basic education funding by $300 million, including $100 million in so-called “level up” funds targeted to the 100 poorest districts, including Philadelphia. The advocates considered the “level up” allocation a victory, since it acknowledged the persistent inequities that mark the state’s school funding.

About half Philadelphia’s $80 million increase, $39.5 million, is coming from the “level up” supplement, according to state data.

Pennsylvania budget deal includes small education increases but does not spend most federal aid

2021-06-26T00:39:00+00:00

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and the General Assembly have reached a budget agreement that increases funding for education but mostly leaves unspent a $3 billion state surplus and much of the $7 billion in federal pandemic aid.

Advocacy groups that had urged Harrisburg to use the money now decried the deal, which was disclosed Friday morning and passed both houses in a late-night session. Those groups had hoped to spend those extra funds to make a major dent in school funding inequity and shore up other social services. Among the states, Pennsylvania has one of the largest spending gaps between better-off and low-income districts. And the state’s share of total education spending, at 38%, is in the bottom five nationwide, which puts more of the funding burden on local districts and exacerbates the gulf between rich and poor.

“This was a missed opportunity,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, or PCCY. “This was a once in a lifetime shot to actually make an extraordinary down payment on solving Pennsylvania’s nationally embarrassing inequity in school funding. Instead, they put the money in reserves. They didn’t need a tax increase to solve school funding inequity, but they walked away from it.”

According to the deal made between Republican legislative leaders and members of Gov. Wolf’s staff, state basic education funding will increase by $200 million, bringing the total to $7 billion. In addition, the budget includes an additional $100 million to be distributed among the 100 poorest districts, which Cooper and others said was a small but significant victory.

Called “Level Up,” that proposal came from a coalition of equity-focused groups that recognized a full overhaul of the state’s education funding system, as Wolf had originally called for in his budget, was unlikely.

“It supercharges the formula for the poorest districts,” said Cooper, policy chief for former Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell.

Advocates sought to make the “Level Up” supplement permanent by writing it into the school code, but that did not happen. Instead, the additional amount will be added to the base school aid for the 100 poorest districts.

“While only a one-time measure, by approving this supplement, the state legislature has finally acknowledged the widening gaps and the profound shortchanging of students that remains the norm in the state’s lowest-wealth school districts,” said a statement from Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center.

The law center represents several districts, parents, and civil rights groups claiming the state funding system is unconstitutional and should be overturned. Commonwealth Court will begin hearing arguments on Sept. 9.

The proposed $40.8 billion state budget, a 2.5% year-over-year spending increase, puts most of the state surplus into a rainy day fund and spends $2.5 billion of the $7 billion in American Rescue Plan funds, all of which must be used by the end of 2024.

According to Cooper, the basic aid increase and Level Up dollars will bring $80 million in additional funds to Philadelphia.

On Wednesday, a group of religious leaders and City Council member Helen Gym were detained after they blocked the door of the Senate gallery in an act of civil disobedience against Republican priorities. The protesters urged legislators to “spend the money” on education aid and other social services.

Sen. Vincent Hughes, a Philadelphia Democrat who spoke at a rally before the protest, said that budget makes some progress, citing the Level Up funds “that reflect an attempt to get to education equity” among other provisions, including $30 million devoted to a new community violence program.

But, he added, “with an unprecedented $7 billion in unspent budget surplus and American Rescue Plan funds...this fight is not over.”

Speakers at the rally, and in chants and songs as they walked through the capitol building, called the persistence of education funding gaps in Pennsylvania unconscionable. “They sit on a $10 billion surplus while our children live in poverty,” Gym shouted as she was led away during her arrest. “Shame on the state.”

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, on Friday called the budget agreement “shameful, perpetuating a “deeply racist funding system that shortchanges predominantly Black and brown students.”

In his budget proposed in February, Gov. Wolf had sought a $1.35 billion increase in basic education funds. He also proposed that the entire $7 billion in basic education aid be driven through a fair education funding formula, approved by the legislature but never fully implemented, that weights district and student needs based on such factors as poverty, student needs, and taxing capacity.

Wolf’s proposal, which he initially wanted to pay for with a tax increase, included enough money so that no district would lose funds under the aid redistribution. But Republicans were never on board, even when the American Rescue Plan funds made it possible to maintain funding in all districts while boosting it for others, thanks to the redistribution — and without a tax increase.

“We struck a balance between making some targeted investments in our budget to help the economy recover,” House Speaker Bryan Cutler, Republican from Lancaster County, told reporters Friday morning.

Also included in the budget is a $50 million increase for special education and a $30 million increase for pre-kindergarten programs.

Philadelphia Council member Helen Gym among those arrested in Harrisburg fair funding protest

2021-06-23T23:37:09+00:00

HARRISBURG — Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym was among 15 people arrested in the state Capitol Wednesday during a protest of Pennsylvania’s education funding priorities in a planned act of civil disobedience that took place as Gov. Tom Wolf and the General Assembly work on finalizing next year’s state budget.

A group of about 50 people, most affiliated with the faith-based advocacy group POWER, participated in a rally on the capitol steps and then walked through the building singing, chanting and praying, many of the clergy garbed in their full liturgical robes. POWER Executive Director Rev. Dwayne Royster, who was among those arrested, carried his bishop’s crozier, or staff.

Their message was that Pennsylvania must increase its spending on education and distribute state dollars more fairly. The legislature adopted a fair funding formula in 2014 but has since only applied it to new school aid dollars, not all education funding. The group would like to see the formula applied to all funding, which would redirect more money to Philadelphia and other districts that serve mostly low-income students of color. Legislators limited use of the formula because some districts, primarily those with shrinking enrollment, would have lost significant revenue.

Now, the group said, the Commonwealth has the among widest spending gaps between rich and poor districts. At 33%, it also ranks near the bottom in the percentage of education aid that comes from the state compared to local dollars. And they also say the American Rescue Plan funds and the state makes it possible to stave off any losses districts might incur.

With $7 billion in federal aid through President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and a $3 billion state surplus, this is a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to increase education aid and distribute it more fairly, speakers said at the rally.

Rev. Dwayne Royster leads a rally on fair education funding at the state capitol building in Harrisburg on Wednesday.

“For the first time ever, we actually have the money on the table to do the priorities to make sure our children across the Commonwealth are able to go to schools that, I’ll say the bad words, are fairly funded,” said state Rep. Joanna McClinton of West Philadelphia, the House Democratic leader. “Why should your zip codes determine your future, determine your opportunities?”

Other speakers at the rally, which was organized by We the People, a statewide coalition of advocacy groups, called the persistence of education funding gaps in the state unconscionable and immoral. They carried signs demanding “tax the rich” and “love and teach all our children.” Gym, who assumed office in 2016, started her public career as an education activist.

Philadelphia Democratic Sen. Vincent Hughes said with the federal funds, “there are no more excuses” for not making Pennsylvania’s education funding more equitable and adequate to all districts’ needs. He led the assemblage, which organizers said included a few dozen Democratic legislators, in a chant of “spend the money, spend the money.”

On Monday, POWER held demonstrations around the state under the banner “still separate, still unequal,” and traveled from rich to poor districts to demonstrate the stark differences. In Philadelphia, they walked the two miles from Gompers Elementary in Overbrook, which is mostly low income and Black, to Merion Elementary across City Line Avenue, where the enrollment is mostly white and very few students are low-income.

“The actions on the budget and the actions to make it harder for people to vote are really tightly connected,” said Marc Stier, director of the liberal Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. He said that polls show that the public, “including a substantial portion of Republicans,” supports spending the American Rescue Plan funds on education, housing and health care. “They want to reduce inequity,” Stier said. The House on Tuesday approved a bill to change voting rules, and the Senate moved it out of committee. Gov. Wolf has said he will veto it.

Royster said that the group has “come to exorcise the demon of white supremacy, we have come to exorcise the demon of oligarchy, we have come to exorcise the demon of oppression from the Pennsylvania Capitol.”

Rabbi Mordecai Liebling protests at the state capitol in Harrisburg on Wednesday over fair education funding for schools in Philadelphia.

At first the group was told that the Senate was not in session and the gallery was empty. Then a person exited the gallery, surveyed the scene and said, “I’m not even from Pennsylvania and they let me in,” said Greg Windle, an aide to Gym. At that, the group demanded entrance and resumed chanting and banging against the door. After about 10 minutes Capitol Police warned the demonstrators that they were in danger of arrest, and shortly after started handcuffing those who continued to sit in front of the doors. They said that Senate leaders feared the group would continue to chant and disrupt the Senate’s proceedings.

Wolf, a Democrat, has proposed significantly increasing education aid and running all the money through the fair funding formula. Stier said that he believes the Republicans are afraid to use the federal funds to do this because “when the money runs out” in three years, they will have to raise state taxes to continue spending “that has widespread public support.”

The state is required to adopt a final budget by July 1.

The arrested protesters were charged with criminal trespassing and released after about two hours. Fines and fees will amount to about $200 each.

Southeast Pennsylvania superintendents call for charter funding reform

2021-05-06T17:09:24+00:00

A group of Southeast Pennsylvania school superintendents said Wednesday that the current funding model for charter schools is unfair and outdated, and that it diverts needed dollars away from their districts.

Payments to cover the cost of charters, especially cyber charters that are fully virtual, are forcing school systems to cut programming or push for tax increases in their districts, school leaders said during a press conference over Zoom.

“We’re maintaining maximum tax effort just to keep our programs going,” said Sam Lee, superintendent of the 6,000-student Bensalem Township School district in Bucks County. “If something doesn’t change relating to charter funding, options and opportunities for our students will be severely compromised.” About 100 Bensalem students are enrolled in cyber charters.

Superintendents said there are two main problems with the charter school funding system: Cybers receive the same amount as brick-and-mortar schools, even though they do not have the expense of maintaining a building. And charters get one amount for general education students and an additional sum for students with disabilities, which is the same regardless of the severity of their needs. Those payments can be double or even triple the regular education amount, and often exceed the actual cost of educating the students with disabilities enrolled in the charters, most of which have mild impairments.

Although Pennsylvania cyber schools have consistently performed poorly in state and national studies of effectiveness, about a quarter of the charter students in Pennsylvania are enrolled in cybers. And charter cyber enrollment increased during the pandemic by about 25,000 students.

“This is not just an urban issue,” said Jim Scanlon, the superintendent of the West Chester Area School District, which has about 12,000 students and a $270 million budget spread across small towns, suburbs, and farms. “In all school districts in the Commonwealth, tuition dollars are sent to poorly run charter schools.”

Under the Pennsylvania charter school law, which has not been significantly revised since it was first enacted in 1997, the reimbursement formula considers the district’s prior year per-student cost for general and special education students. For West Chester, the amount allocated for students with disabilities is more than double that of general education students — $34,000 compared to $16,000.

He said that providing speech and language therapy costs his district an extra $1,500 per student, not $16,000, which would be the cost of educating a student with complex medical needs or who is enrolled in a life skills class. Charter schools enroll very few students with severe disabilities.

“It’s like going into a restaurant and buying a hamburger, but being charged for a five-course lobster dinner,” Scanlon said.

State law does not require charter schools to spend the special education funding on those students.

In his proposed 2021-22 budget, Gov. Tom Wolf is recommending a uniform payment of $9,500 per student to cyber charter schools and a three-tiered payment system to all charters for students with disabilities, depending on their needs. While similar to the funding formula used to allocate state special education money to school districts, it will likely face opposition in the Republican-controlled legislature.

Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite had a conflict and was unable to join the Wednesday press conference, but said Thursday that he agrees with his fellow school leaders. Changing the special education funding formula alone would safe Philadelphia $52 million a year, he said.

About half the 170,000 charter school students in Pennsylvania are enrolled in Philadelphia schools. Both Hite and members of the Philadelphia Board of Education have long sought changes in the charter funding formula and are urging support of the governor’s proposed changes. More than $1 billion of Philadelphia’s $3 billion budget goes to charter school payments.

Lenny McAllister, CEO of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, a lobbying group, said the governor’s changes would cost charters $229 million. He said the proposal “only further highlights where the governor ranks the needs of Pennsylvania’s neediest students and their families: as second-class citizens.” Charter advocates say this because the regular education formula gives a smaller amount to charters than the host district’s full per-student cost.

He said that the governor and “special interest groups” are scapegoating charters for budget problems that are actually caused by rising teacher pension costs.

Scanlon and the other superintendents said they weren’t trying to end school choice.

“This is not about the competition” said Daniel McGarry, superintendent in Upper Darby, a diverse suburb adjoining Philadelphia. “It’s more about leveling the playing field.”

Under state law, Pennsylvania charters must be nonprofit, but they are allowed to have management contracts with for-profit entities. And some do, including several cybers.

“Taxpayers are funding a for-profit business … and it is not right,” said Stephen Rodriguez, superintendent of the Pottstown School District in Montgomery County.

“For most of the charter era, Philly has taken the brunt of it,” said Lawrence Feinberg, the director of the newly formed Keystone Center for Charter Change at the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, which organized the press conference. “But with COVID, all 500 districts got slammed with cyber charter tuition.”

The Center was established in an effort to get long-sought changes to the charter reimbursement formula “over the finish line,” said Feinberg, who is also the president of the Haverford Board of Education.

Heeding pleas, Philadelphia revises district budget to add positions to schools

2021-04-23T03:04:04+00:00

After educators and the public weighed in on what all schools need to be successful, the Philadelphia Board of Education revised its proposed 2021-2022 budget to add at least one position to each building.

The budget changes follow a citywide survey, focus groups conducted in several languages, and a coordinated campaign by principals and their union to guarantee five key positions to every school: assistant principal, full-time literacy coach, full-time math coach, climate manager, and a special education compliance manager.

Currently, those positions are allotted depending on a school’s size; principals of smaller schools can choose to hire one or more from a limited pot of discretionary funds.

While adding 335 positions at an annual cost of $40 million, the proposed budget stops short of heeding that request in full. But it adds two permanent positions to about 110 schools considered off-track or low-performing, and one new position to others considered near or on track to reach the board’s five-year academic benchmarks.

The district also plans to spend some of the more than $1.1 billion it is getting in federal coronavirus relief money to provide “short-term, intensive” support for students as they return to school buildings following a year of remote learning. The district plans to hire 50 additional school psychologists, 10 occupational therapists, and 20 speech therapists to shore up special education services upended by the pandemic, and to serve schools most affected by escalating gun violence. Some 20 schools will get additional behavioral health counselors.

The school system’s Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said at a budget hearing Thursday that the district would allow principals to decide on what centrally allocated positions they want to add. Those positions are not limited to the five roles principals had sought to guarantee.

“If one type of position is chosen by everybody, we will rethink how our allocation formula works for that support,” he said. “If choices are varied, we will look at the allocation formula with greater discretion going forward.”

Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, Teamsters Local 502, or CASA, which led the campaign for more positions, said she was “cautiously optimistic” and called the revised budget “definitely a start.” While principals will still need to choose among competing priorities, “We definitely thank them for beginning to look at budgets in a different way.”

Almost all the speakers at Thursday’s hearing held one of the five positions and explained why they were essential to the success of any school.

“Each one provides a special level of support to address the multiple barriers that students encounter,” said Joyce Abbott, the climate manager at Andrew Hamilton elementary school. In her role, she leads efforts to ensure the school is safe and conducive to learning.

“How can we say this role is not needed?” Abbott said.

Monson said that 11,700 people, mostly parents, responded to the citywide survey that sought input on how the district should spend its money, especially federal coronavirus relief funds. Among respondents, addressing environmental hazards in schools was the top priority. Also cited were the need for more school-based behavioral and mental health services, before- and after-school enrichment, and special education supports.

The district’s proposed operating budget for fiscal year 2022 is $3.1 billion not counting federal relief money, and $3.9 billion when it is included. The $1.1 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act, the third and most recent federal coronavirus relief bill, must be used within four years. According to Monson’s budget presentation, that money will also be spent on building improvements.

Monson disclosed that the state allocated to Philadelphia $161 million less than the city had expected from the federal relief funds, forcing it to revise its five-year plan that had anticipated fund balances through 2024. That means, without additional sources of permanent revenue, the district expects to start running a shortfall in 2024, he said. The Board of Education has no taxing power and relies on the city and state for most of its funds.

District officials will appear before the city council on May 12 to defend its spending plan, and the school board is scheduled to approve a budget at its May 27 meeting.

In $5.2B budget proposal, mayor touts funding for education as key to Philadelphia’s pandemic recovery

2021-04-16T20:36:51+00:00

Unveiling his $5.2 billion budget proposal, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney vowed Thursday to expand education funding “from pre-K to college,” calling it key to the city’s pandemic recovery.

His five-year plan envisions a full return of teachers and students to classrooms, with $1.38 billion in city funding for the School District of Philadelphia each year. This is on top of the $1.3 billion in federal funds over three years that the district will receive through the most recent coronavirus relief bill.

Kenney proposed investing a quarter of a billion dollars over five years in the Community College of Philadelphia, or CCP, with $54 million dedicated to the Octavius Catto Scholarship.

“This initiative will enable 5,000 first-time [college] students to attend college tuition-free, and with the supports they need like food, books, and transportation stipends to successfully earn their degree,” the mayor said.

Kenney said the city will work with CCP to recruit Black men, who are currently underrepresented at the college. He also plans to leverage the scholarship to increase the number of teachers of color in the city.

“In partnership with our public schools and regional higher education institutions, we will create a seamless pipeline that will recruit, mentor, and retain emerging teachers of color to educate our kids,” Kenney said.

In addition, Kenney plans to add 700 new slots to PHLPreK and the city will add case management services to community schools, which support the well-being of students and families by expanding learning opportunities, integrating health and social services, and improving school climate.

Kenney first promised to open community schools during his run for mayor in 2015. The city now has designated 17 such schools, serving some 10,000 city students.

“As in the past, we are investing in our future to improve the long-term outcomes of Philadelphians,” Kenney said Thursday.

Not everyone is satisfied with what’s proposed for schools and youth in Kenney’s budget.

Councilmember Helen Gym tweeted that the budget must “modernize school buildings so students and staff learn and work safely.”

She also said the city should enact a trauma plan to increase staff and supports, including counseling for students in communities with high rates of gun violence.

“Create a youth-driven anti-violence agenda including youth employment and enrichment programming, restorative justice, and leadership and mentorship opportunities for teens year-round,” Gym tweeted.

The mayor’s virtual address was played for Council members Thursday, but was pre -recorded from Kenney’s office on Wednesday.

Before June, city lawmakers must come to an agreement on next year’s budget and a five-year financial plan for the city. Hearings are scheduled to start in a few weeks.

Ryan Smith, who is a safety officer at Kensington Health Sciences Academy, told Chalkbeat he is pleased with the mayor’s vision to expand community schools.

“The kids can be off the street and in the school, in the art program, and in a GED program, and a basketball program. I’m excited,” Smith said.

Advocates call for Pennsylvania to send $100 million to 100 underfunded school districts

2021-04-16T01:12:44+00:00

Advocates for fair school funding in Pennsylvania announced a new campaign Thursday called “Level Up” that calls for the state to funnel $100 million in additional revenue to the 100 districts that lose the most under the current system for distributing state education aid.

They say it gives the legislature an “alternative” to boost funding to some of the poorest districts in the state, which includes Philadelphia and other urban areas. Many small rural districts are affected as well.

It comes as Republican legislative leaders show no signs of supporting Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposal to increase basic education aid next year by $1.5 billion and distribute the money based on a fair funding formula adopted by the legislature five years ago but only used for new money. Now, just 11% of the aid is distributed that way. Legislators limited use of the formula because some districts, primarily those with shrinking enrollment, would have lost significant revenue.

Pennsylvania ranks 44th in the state share of total education spending, which puts more burden on local property taxes. And it has the worst disparities of any state between its wealthy and poor districts.

Level Up is a coalition of children’s and students’ rights advocates, educator associations, research and policy groups, and civil rights organizations who want Pennsylvania to invest more money in schools.

“Our coalition is supportive of the governor’s plan to boost funding and address equity,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center. This idea, she said is “an alternative approach that immediately begins to address the needs of the state’s most underfunded districts.”

Representative Michael Schossberg, an Allentown Democrat, introduced legislation that would create a mechanism for distributing any additional pot of money.

Schlossberg was one of several people, including superintendents, teachers and students, who detailed the consequences of inequitable education spending in Pennsylvania.

“My wife is a teacher in Allentown and her school was built in the 1870’s,” he said. Allentown is only now starting to ease into in-person learning while neighboring districts have been open for months.

In his wife’s classroom, “her [ventilation] system is a window, if it opens,” he said. Parkland High School, just blocks away but in an adjacent district, is in a modern building with separate wings for arts and music programs, he said.

What makes the Level Up approach different, he said, “is that it has more of a chance of passing” than the governor’s proposal.

Frank Dalmas, superintendent in the tiny impoverished Sto-Rox district outside Pittsburgh, said he has consistently been forced to cut services.

“This is a tool in the tool box for lawmakers….a principled way to drive money... to districts that need it the most,” he said.

The $100 million Level Up money would be driven through the fair funding formula, which is based on enrollment and takes into account a district’s poverty, taxing capacity and other factors.

Pennsylvania schools, like others around the country, are getting federal pandemic relief money. But that is temporary, and won’t fix the embedded inequities in the system, the advocates say.

Tomea Sippio-Smith, the K-12 education policy director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, another of the advocacy groups supporting the Level Up campaign, called it a “pragmatic” approach to getting needed money to struggling districts.

“At this rate, it will take decades and decades” for districts to achieve adequate and equitable funding, she said.

ELC, along with the Public Interest Law Center, is suing the state on behalf of six school districts and several parents to force it to distribute education dollars more equitably and assure that all students have adequate resources. The suit, the first in decades to get this far, is scheduled for trial in September. Pennsylvania judges have consistently ruled in past cases that education funding is a political, not judicial, matter.

But even if the suit is successful, it could be years before the funding system actually changes.

The 100 most underfunded districts educate disproportionately more of the state’s Black and Latino students. Earlier this month some Democratic legislators used the April 4 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to pull together a coalition of city officials, advocates, students and teachers to support Wolf and call for revamping how education is funded in Pennsylvania and for a significant increase in the state’s contribution.

State Senator Vincent Hughes, a Philadelphia Democrat, called the state’s system racist and unconstitutional.

“The funding of education in Pennsylvania is separate and unequal,” said Hughes, who organized the event. “Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in the nation in terms of how it funds an adequate basic education.”

Philadelphia schools could get $300 million more in Wolf’s proposed budget

2021-02-04T00:03:52+00:00

Gov. Tom Wolf proposed Wednesday a groundbreaking state budget that would significantly boost state education aid for public schools and redistribute the funds in a way that is more aligned to districts’ enrollment and needs.

The reallocation would largely benefit urban areas like Philadelphia. If Wolf’s plan is adopted, the state’s largest district would receive more than $300 million in additional funds next year.

Wolf, who is approaching the end of his second term, wants to hike the income tax rate on higher earners — over $84,000 for a family of four — to pay for the increases. This would raise $3 billion, about half of which would go to education.

“Today, I’m proposing we do things differently,” he said in a 20-minute, virtual budget address.

He said changing the way the state allocates aid will address longstanding and damaging inequitable and inadequate education funding in the state.

“Far too many parents across the commonwealth...felt like the opportunities available to their kids would be determined less by their talent and more by their zip code,” he said.

Democrats and education advocates praised the governor’s action as needed and long overdue. “We’ve been waiting for this moment,” said state Sen. Vincent Hughes, a Philadelphia Democrat whose legislative district includes some wealthy districts adjacent to the city. “This is something we have been fighting to achieve for decades...to deal with a significant level of inequity in education funding. The governor has thrown out a challenge.”

Republican legislative leaders objected to the proposal, particularly the proposed tax hike.

“This is a massive tax increase on Pennsylvanians who are already suffering,” said state Rep. Kerry Benninghoff, the House majority leader. “What we heard from the governor is that the administration’s idea is more taxation in order to move Pennsylvania ahead and return us to normal. We disagree with that.”

Wolf’s proposal would boost the income tax rate from 3.04% to 4.49% for high earners while expanding a tax forgiveness program for those with lower incomes that, for some, would eliminate taxes altogether, he said.

The state’s income tax rate is the lowest in the country among the 41 states that have an income tax, and it hasn’t been raised since 2003. It is a flat tax because of a “uniformity” clause in the state constitution.

Wolf proposed the expanded tax forgiveness program because he is unable to put forward a graduated income tax without a constitutional amendment. However, Republicans said they were prepared to argue that this also violates the constitution.

An analysis by the liberal-leaning Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center found that, under Wolf’s tax proposal, more than 40% of Pennsylvania families would see their taxes go down and the taxes for another 27% would stay the same. Only the most well-off third of Pennsylvanians would pay more, the analysis found.

In overall education spending, Pennsylvania also has one of the lowest state contributions compared to the share paid by school districts — less than 40% compared to a national average of about half. This has resulted in high property tax burdens in many areas and one of the widest spending gaps in the country between wealthy and poor districts.

Philadelphia superintendent William Hite called Wolf’s proposal “bold,” saying it would have a significant impact on the district’s ability to invest in classrooms and infrastructure. Board president Joyce Wilkerson said “it takes a big step toward ensuring that education dollars are distributed equitably across Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania’s system for allocating most of the aid to school districts has long been criticized as unfair and inadequate. For 30 years, it has been disconnected from a district’s demographic and enrollment trends and students’ level of need.

In 2014, the legislature adopted a funding formula that would have corrected that by giving extra weight per pupil to factors such as poverty, English learner status, and special education. It also considered concentration of poverty and a district’s taxing capacity.

But lawmakers only applied it to new allocations, not the entire pot, while inserting a “hold harmless” clause that assured no district could get less than it got the year before, even if its enrollment dipped. More than 300 of the state’s 500 districts fall into that category, mostly small and rural, although Pittsburgh is also among them.

A report by the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth released last week found that this “hold harmless” provision benefited shrinking districts at the expense of those with stable or growing enrollment. Since 1991 — the last time aid was calculated on a per pupil basis — $590 million has been paid to districts for students they no longer educate, while growing districts have received no funding for more than 200,000 additional students, the report found.

Of the additional $1.5 billion proposed for K-12 education in Wolf’s proposal, more than $1 billion would go to the “hold harmless” districts to cushion the impact of the change in the allocation formula. The rest will go toward a $200 million increase in the basic education subsidies to school districts, and $200 million to special education.

A December report found that school districts over the past decade have been forced to shoulder an increasing burden of special education costs.

“The governor’s historic education budget proposal could be the start of a better future for the commonwealth,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, which advocates for equity issues in schools including for special education students.

The Education Law Center is one of two groups representing plaintiffs in a longstanding school funding lawsuit expected to go to trial this year that could impact the political calculus.

In his budget, Wolf also wants to reform charter school funding by paying less to cyber charters, which have consistently low academic performance, and changing the way charters are reimbursed for special education students. A growing number of districts in the state have complained that reimbursements to charters for students who attend them are eating into their already stretched budgets.

“We support the Governor’s call for a charter school law that allows the highest quality charter schools to thrive, prevents financial mismanagement and provides appropriate levels of funding to both brick and mortar and cyber charter schools,” said Frank Gallagher, superintendent of the Souderton Area School District, in a statement on behalf of a coalition of districts organized to advocate for charter funding reform.

Prior efforts to do this, however, have failed. The charter law has not been significantly altered since 1997.

The head of the state’s largest charter school lobbying group called the proposal “callously wrong.”

In his first year in office, Wolf tried a similar bold overhaul of the state’s income tax and its education funding formula. But it caused a nine-month budget impasse with the Republican-controlled legislature and no major change.

The state must adopt a budget by the end of June.

‘Frustrated and disappointed’: Child care providers in Pennsylvania call on governor for help

2021-01-26T21:30:04+00:00

Pennsylvania child care providers, advocates, and key legislators renewed pleas to Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration last week to release $302 million in federal aid — but change how it is distributed to child care centers.

Every week, child care centers are being forced to lay off workers or face closure due to soaring costs and a state subsidy system that abruptly changed in September, decimating their finances.

Despite months of advocacy on the issue, nothing has changed.

“I know Gov. Wolf cares” about saving the child care sector, on which so much of the state’s economy depends, said Nancy Thompson, executive director of Jolly Toddlers in Bucks County, a sentiment echoed by others involved in a Zoom press conference last week. “That is why I am so frustrated and disappointed.”

Public Citizens for Children and Youth organized the press conference, which featured legislators from the Women’s Health Caucus. They and the providers said the collapse of the industry disproportionately affects women, particularly women of color, many of whom either work in child care or rely on it. Widespread closure of child care centers would hurt working families across the state, they said.

Providers and advocates began drawing attention to the issue last summer, when the state said it would change its subsidy reimbursement policy in September. The change based subsidies on currently enrolled students, rather than pre-pandemic enrollment numbers, leading to a sharp drop in reimbursements at the same time that providers were spending more on health measures to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Of the $900 billion federal relief package already passed by Congress in December, $10 billion was earmarked for the child care industry. About $302 million of that is expected to go to Pennsylvania through the Child Care Development Block Grant, which supports state-subsidized child care for low-income families.

But the state Department of Human Services said it still does not have all the official details from Washington.

“The Department of Human Services is reviewing the recently signed Consolidated Appropriations Act and guidance on allowable uses and determining its impact on Pennsylvania and the programs and services we administer,” wrote Erin James, press secretary for the DHS. “We are grateful for the additional support and will continue to work with the incoming Biden administration and Congress to ensure Pennsylvania and other states have the funding needed to navigate the pandemic and economic uncertainty.”

They have until Feb. 25 to submit their plan to the federal government, but have not outlined how the funding might be distributed or what the priorities might be.

Providers and advocates are urging policymakers to quickly allocate the money in a way that avoids further closures of child care centers. They would like to see the subsidy policy changed to account for enrollment declines since the start of the pandemic.

As of late December, about 480 child care centers have permanently closed, according to a letter sent to Tracey Campanini, deputy secretary of the Office of Child Development and Early Learning, or OCDEL, from a coalition of 10 child care advocacy organizations, which make up Start Strong PA. Some providers believe that number is higher because smaller centers that accept only private pay can be harder to track than those that accept public funding.

In the letter, providers and advocates proposed a number of recommendations for how federal money could be used to help both working families and child care centers. The letter was in response to a call for policy recommendations from OCDEL.

The first priority was consistent with the message of Thursday’s press conference in pressing for reestablishing subsidized funding based on pre-pandemic enrollment. Child care centers often rely on both government subsidies and direct payments from more affluent families — but a spike in unemployment during the pandemic also has made private payers scarce.

Some providers across the state and the country have taken out personal loans or have taken on other forms of debt in order to cover costs. Others have had to layoff staff or cut workers’ pay.

“In regular times, our system is based on enrollment, and I can pretty much get behind that,” said Leslie Spina, director of Kinder Academy. “You shouldn’t get paid if children aren’t there. But this is not the normal time.”

Spina has seen a 50% drop in enrollment since March, when the pandemic forced schools and centers to close. Since then, she has had to close one of her five Philadelphia locations, shift a second to a virtual program, and put on hold construction on a sixth center that was near completion. Spina estimates that her costs have doubled since the pandemic started.

Providers and advocates are confident that enrollment will increase as vaccination rates go up and things start to return to normal. Before the pandemic, childcare centers across the state consistently had waiting lists.

With enrollment from every possible direction decreasing, the fixed costs for providers have increased during COVID-19 as child care centers partition staff into strict “pods” that limit staffing flexibility, escalate cleaning protocols, purchase individualized supplies, and incur other pandemic-related expenses.

Advocates and providers also have asked the state to provide financial relief directly to child care staff, who are not represented by unions and don’t receive hazard pay.

The child care industry has said nationally it needs about $50 billion to survive the pandemic. They would reach that number with the $10 billion approved by Congress in December and the $40 billion included in President Joe Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

Even before the pandemic, gaps in affordable child care made it difficult for some parents to work in Pennsylvania. The Center for a Strong America estimates the cost of that to be as high as $2.5 billion.

“Employers were struggling before to find workers because of issues with access and affordability of child care,” said Steve Doster, the Pennsylvania State Director of Council for Strong America and a signatory of the letter.

Advocates believe there could be a need for more child care subsidies, even after the pandemic.

The letter said: “Families, who most likely exhausted savings to make ends meet, will return to the labor force with significantly fewer financial resources resulting in a need for subsidized child care.”

Advocates also fear that federal funding might make the child care industry an easy target for state budget cuts, especially as state revenue has decreased since the pandemic.

“There will be an in-depth desire on the part of the House leadership and the Senate leadership to say, $300 million came in from the feds, we can reduce state funding by that amount,” said Donna Cooper, Executive Director of PCCY.

“PA Republicans and Democrats need to say this money is not going to supplant state funds,” said Cooper, otherwise “you’re begging for the money you used to have to be replaced.”

With inauguration, some hope for early child care in Philadelphia

2021-01-20T22:25:30+00:00

Mary Graham remembers a few years ago when someone asked her why early childhood educators didn’t go on strike for a day to protest the industry’s low wages and reimbursement rates.

“We can’t do that. We can’t do that to working families. The country would fall apart if child care shut down,” she recalled saying, even if such a move would shed light on a chronically underfunded and underappreciated industry.

The coronavirus pandemic effectively did shut down much of the child care industry in Pennsylvania for several months starting in March, with devastating costs. Even as centers were allowed to open back up, enrollment has been down and the financial costs of doing business has increased with new health regulations. Widespread school closures, skyrocketing unemployment, disappearing child care centers, and prolonged lockdowns have made clear how crucial child care is to the economy.

The crisis has pushed child care to become a top policy issue, and President Joe Biden’s proposed massive relief package is evidence of a monumental shift, giving hope to an industry that has experienced a dreadful year. As such, for child care providers across Pennsylvania, Inauguration Day this year is about more than just a transfer of power.

The $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan announced by the Biden team before the inauguration includes $40 billion for the child care industry. With the $10 billion for child care passed by Congress in the last coronavirus relief package, the proposed number matches the $50 billion in federal aid that advocates have repeatedly said was needed for the sector to survive.

Child care became a campaign topic in 2020 both nationally and locally, as politicians laid out plans for helping struggling Americans navigate the crisis. Bipartisan support for child care has grown over the past several years as the lack of affordable and high-quality child care has been pinpointed as an important barrier to employment. Advocates and child care providers alike are increasingly optimistic that 2021 might be the year that child care becomes a longstanding policy priority, not just an industry to be bailed out.

Biden’s proposal is already getting pushback from some senators who are alarmed by the price tag, and it’s unclear whether Congress, now controlled by Democrats by a narrow margin, will approve it in its entirety. But advocates say the plan’s commitment to child care indicates that the needs of the industry are being taken more seriously.

“Congress is going to have to do its thing and we’ll have to see what comes of this. But what is heartening is that our policymakers are hearing the message that child care is a vital sector to our economic recovery. The fact that it was so well represented in that package does speak volumes and gives us a sense of optimism that that will be successful in continued efforts to try and stabilize the sector,” said Steve Doster, Pennsylvania State Director for the Council for a Strong America and part of the Start Strong PA coalition, which has been advocating for increased funding for child care in Pennsylvania.

Still, child care has been gaining bipartisan support for years, on the state and federal levels. Advocates hope that even with a divided Congress, child care funding might be more likely to make it through the negotiations.

“The nature of the people who are in this field long term is to be optimistic, “ said Leslie Spina, director of Kinder Academy, which currently includes four child care and pre-kindergarten centers in Philadelphia. “The people who’ve been doing this for a long time, we always operate on a shoestring budget, we don’t get the respect that we deserve in a multitude of ways, but it goes beyond that. On the hierarchy of educating children in this country we are at the bottom of that hierarchy.”

So far, 2021 has encouraged that optimism.

Of Biden’s proposed funding package, $15 billion would go to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which funds state-subsidized child care for low-income families, while $25 billion has been proposed for an “emergency stabilization fund.”

Advocates are also encouraged that Biden’s most recent proposal includes $350 billion in local and state government aid, aimed at helping struggling state and local budgets. The relief bill is a one-time payment, but cuts to child care in the state budget could have lasting consequences for years to come.

“We are thrilled. They are finally recognizing the need,” said Graham, “but it is only a bandaid.”

Providers say the need is widespread, from short-term relief to keep the industry from collapsing due to COVID-19 to long-term increases in Pennsylvania’s reimbursement rates in order to increase wages and address dire staffing shortages.

The first priority is maintaining the landscape of high-quality child care centers that advocates have built over the past several decades. With at least 480 child care centers closed across the state, the child care gap is widening.

But the needs go beyond mitigating the effects of the virus. State-subsidized child care could be even more crucial after the pandemic, if unemployment rises and families are stretched increasingly thin. But in order to make child care a reality for working families trying to go back to work, advocates say the state will have to address the existing problems in the industry and those caused by the virus.

Graham has seen a 40% decrease in enrollment since the pandemic started, not including those children who are now attending virtually. Revenue has been cut even further, by about 60%, because of a change in state-subsidy payments. Even during a typical year, the state’s program to subsidize care for low-income families doesn’t cover the full cost of child care.

For child care centers to be considered “high quality” within the Keystone Stars program, they must meet certain requirements, such as having staff with advanced degrees. They also must provide staff with benefits, such as health insurance. So while there are higher reimbursements for higher quality, the costs are even more substantial.

One of the biggest issues is staff retention. Salaries offered by child care centers often aren’t competitive, especially when requiring advanced credentials and relying on a state subsidy for low-income families.

Addressing these issues would take commitment from both Washington and Harrisburg, but some child care providers believe if they can survive the COVID-19 crisis there could be a better understanding of the service the child care industry provides.

“It is wonderful, we are so happy with the proposals coming out of the incoming Biden administration,” said Graham. “It is a desperately needed emergency investment, but we also need long-term investments.”

Philadelphia schools due for more than $400 million from COVID-19 relief

2020-12-23T00:08:49+00:00

The Philadelphia school district is in line to get more than $400 million from the coronavirus relief legislation passed by Congress — but that doesn’t mean the system’s fiscal woes are over, Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said Tuesday.

The money “buys us 18 months for the local economy to recover and for things to normalize,” he said. It will also let the board of education focus on its goals for improving student achievement rather than worrying about plugging budget holes.

“It’s not a moment we suddenly sit back and say, ‘Great, now we have nothing to worry about’” regarding funding, he said. “This is one-time money, so we can’t paper over structural issues.”

The $900 billion federal relief package allocates about $57 billion to K-12 education. Most of that, $54.3 billion, is for public schools, including charters. The money is expected to be allocated based on the formula for the Title I program. Title I is the federal government’s primary program to aid low-income students and districts.

Pennsylvania would be due nearly $2 billion of the education money, and Philadelphia would receive nearly a quarter of that. In the last COVID-19 relief bill, Pennsylvania received about $473 million, of which Philadelphia’s share was more than $100 million. Monson said he doesn’t have an exact figure yet for the latest round of stimulus funding.

The legislation, which runs to more than 5,500 pages, gives districts wide latitude for spending, but homes in on addressing student learning loss, investing in improvements to school facilities to mitigate the spread of the virus, and upgrading technology.

In Philadelphia, the district faces huge challenges with ventilation in aging school buildings. Workers have been analyzing air quality in all the district’s schools, which have an average age of 70 years, and reports show many have alarmingly few classrooms that meet basic standards. This money will help accelerate ongoing improvement efforts, Monson said, while also freeing up funds to address other chronic problems, such as asbestos and lead paint. “We will be able to do more work than planned,” he said.

The school board passed a $3.5 billion budget last May, which showed a small surplus for this year and a predicted $145 million budget gap at the end of 2022. That was before the second surge of the virus and the subsequent loss of more city and state tax revenue.

The budget also didn’t figure in the costs of the new contract agreement with the teachers union and it counted on $35 million from a property tax reassessment, which the city has subsequently abandoned.

Monson told the board earlier this month that the financial picture had worsened considerably, outlining a shortfall $11 million this year and predicting a 2021-22 budget gap of $300 million, more than twice the size of what he forecast in May. In five years, the projected shortfall was over $700 million.

While the federal funds won’t totally wipe out these numbers, they will improve the fiscal picture enough to change the conversation, Monson said. Board president Joyce Wilkerson issued a statement saying that “these one-time funds will be immensely helpful in filling budget gaps for the next 18 months, while the district focuses on long-term structural deficits that challenge our ability to fully support student learning and achievement.”

At its December meeting, the board of education announced its intention to reframe its stewardship of the district around “goals and guardrails” that focus on raising student achievement and promoting equity.

Both publicly and internally, Monson said, questions have been raised how the board could do that while facing such huge gaps between available revenue and student needs. “Now the discussion is how we can reallocate certain resources, where we can put investments for the goals and guardrails,” rather than always searching for how to save money. “We’re starting these conversations already,” he said.

Because the money is not recurring, strategies like hiring more teachers to reduce class size would not be advisable, he said. Addressing learning loss would more likely have to be done through temporary programs, such as tutoring or summer school.

The federal legislation did not include additional money for local and state governments. That’s a problem for Philadelphia schools because, unlike every other district in Pennsylvania, it is entirely dependent on local and state revenue. The board has no taxing power of its own.

After the last recession, Pennsylvania used stimulus money as a replacement for state aid. When it dried up, districts faced huge shortfalls. Philadelphia alone lost more than $250 million, forcing it to lay off all of its nurses and counselors, among other austerity moves, the effects of which linger today.

But the latest bill prevents that from happening by specifying that states cannot reduce state education aid significantly without a federal waiver. Cities, however, have no such restrictions and Monson said he anticipates some pressure on the city to try to cut the funds it allocates to the schools as a way to meet its own needs.

“The city is facing its own challenges,” Monson said. “We won’t know what the city will do until we see the mayor’s budget.”

President-elect Joe Biden called this bill just a “down payment” and has said that he may push for another relief bill after he takes office.

Philly mayor, school board objected to COVID fund distribution

2020-12-09T00:42:38+00:00

Mayor Jim Kenney and city council president Darrell Clarke sent a letter to Gov. Tom Wolf in August complaining about how the state distributed $174 million in coronavirus relief funds to school districts, saying it denied the Philadelphia school district, the state’s largest, its “fair share” of the money.

A report issued this week by two state education advocacy organizations said that districts serving low-income, mostly Black and Latino students were shortchanged by the process. The groups urged state leaders to distribute any additional federal funds by using the state’s basic education formula, which takes into account factors such as poverty and the number of English language learners.

The letter from Kenney and Clarke called the formula the state used “inequitable” and called for Wolf to use his emergency education money to fix the disparity and “ensure Philadelphia students receive their fair share of state funding.”

Republican legislative leaders devised the formula used to distribute the health and safety grants — giving each of the state’s 500 school districts a baseline of $120,000 and then allocating the rest based on total enrollment. The result: Philadelphia received less per student than any other district, according to the letter.

After the Keystone Research Center and Education Voters PA released the report, Wolf, a Democrat, said he agreed the money should have been distributed using the state’s basic education funding system, also known as the “fair funding” formula.

“The District’s share would increase from $13 million to more than $40 million if the Fair Funding Formula was used to distribute these funds,” the letter said. The district’s chief financial officer, Uri Monson, told the board last week that it may have to do layoffs or furloughs because of shrinking revenue and rising costs from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Philadelphia Board of Education first objected to the distribution method when the money was allocated last spring. Board president Joyce Wilkerson said the formula “benefited wealthy suburban schools at the expense of large, urban schools. These are the same school districts that face the biggest hurdles and expenses related to reopening.”

Coronavirus relief method cost poor districts millions, report says

2020-12-08T02:49:54+00:00

When the state of Pennsylvania distributed $174 million in federal coronavirus relief to schools, it used a formula that shortchanged districts with large numbers of low income Black and Latino students, a new report shows.

By its calculations, Philadelphia alone would have received $30 million more.

The education advocacy groups that conducted the analysis, Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and Education Voters PA, said that they hoped to influence how any future federal COVID relief funds are allocated to schools.

“This is a pretty simple story about getting the allocation of these funds backwards,” said Stephen Herzenberg, president of the Keystone Research Center, the parent group of the budget and policy center. “And when you step back and think about the context in which this happened, the pandemic, the [coronavirus] relief, but also the country’s wrestling with its history of racial injustice … there’s a tone deafness to the distribution of these funds that is stunning. We cannot make this mistake again.”

The groups say that it made the most sense to distribute the funds according to the state’s basic education funding formula, which is weighted toward districts with the highest needs. That formula takes into account the number of low-income students and English language learners, as well as the concentration of poverty, taxing capacity, and other district conditions, which vary widely in the state.

Had this method been followed, Philadelphia would have received $43.6 million instead of $13.7 million, according to the analysis. The district could have used the money: Philadelphia schools may have to lay off or furlough staff to balance its budget this fiscal year, its chief financial officer told the board of education last week.

Pennsylvania received $5 billion of $150 billion distributed to states as part of the CARES Act, as the federal coronavirus relief bill is known. Of that amount, the state was required to distribute $470 million to school districts, charters, and private schools based on their federal Title I allotment, which considers the portion of students from low-income families.

But there was a pot of another $200 million with no requirements for how to allocate it. Of that amount, $26 million went to charter schools and $174 million to school districts.

That $174 million, designated as school health and safety grants, was distributed according to a method Republican legislative leaders devised. Each district, regardless of size, received $120,000 (charters got $90,000), with the rest distributed based on enrollment.

“The purpose of setting a baseline amount was to protect smaller school districts, ensuring that they received a sufficient amount to assist with COVID-19 health and safety mitigation,” said a statement from Neal R. Lesher, the communications and policy director of the House Appropriations Committee. “The rest of the funding was distributed based on the per pupil membership of the district, as the need for cleaning, PPE, technology and other expenses logically grows with the size of the district.”

Apparently, the Republican-controlled legislature and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, disagreed on how to allocate the funds, another reflection of the state’s deep partisan divide and largely urban-rural split. Wolf’s office issued a statement in response to the groups’ analysis: “This allocation was mandated by the General Assembly. The governor has always supported additional education funding through the Fair Funding Formula,” a reference to the basic education formula.

Resource disparities among districts in the state rank among the starkest in the nation; for instance, it is common to see well-funded and mostly white districts abut those that are mostly Black, Latino, and poor, with more needs but far less per student to spend.

Whether Pennsylvania districts are equitably and adequately funded is a “longstanding and devastating problem” in Pennsylvania, said Susan Spicka, president of EdVotersPA. A major fair funding lawsuit is now making its way through the courts and is expected to go to trial sometime next year. The plaintiffs, six school districts and several parents, want the state to contribute more towards education and to distribute it more equitably.

When the fair funding formula was adopted in 2015 after 25 years without a reliable and predictable system, it was applied only to new funding. Districts were guaranteed no less than they had received the year before, even if their enrollment had gone down. This benefited many rural districts, including some that are poor, but it hammered urban ones, which tend to educate more students of color.

“I don’t think it is ever a good idea to allocate money to schools without a formula that keeps equity in mind,” Spicka said.

At a virtual press conference Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and Education Voters PA convened, Steven Rodriguez, superintendent in Pottstown, one of the poorest districts in mostly affluent Montgomery County, said that the overall funding system in Pennsylvania, “has made second-class citizens of urban students.”

“When I compare my school district ... and think about what happened in the spring, that’s a pretty obvious example,” he said, noting that schools with greater resources “were able to immediately move into a virtual format. They had the curriculum, they had the setup, they had the technology. And even those who didn’t had families that were able to support in a better way than our families were.”

He said a lot of urban districts “still have families that don’t have internet in their homes, they don’t have a level of technology to fully support students doing virtual education, and quite frankly, need to work. So while on the one hand I can say I’m glad that $400 million was spent equitably, I’m very disturbed about the fact that $174 million was spent in a way that I’m not sure why it was spent that way, and I think that citizens need to ask that question.”

According to the groups’ analysis, the distribution method resulted in the districts in the poorest quartile receiving less per student than more affluent districts. Those needy school systems received a total of $36 million, rather than the $90 million it would have gotten had the basic education funding formula been used.

The 25% of school systems with the highest share of Black students also lost out, receiving $34 million instead of the $76 million. Those with the lowest share of Black students received $55 million. It was a similar story for districts with large number of Hispanic students — they received $33 million instead of $82 million.

Philadelphia officials had no comment as of press time.

“At some point,” said Spicka, “you have to realize some school districts are so desperately underfunded, and have so few resources, that the focus in Harrisburg should be leveling up these districts so every kid in Pennsylvania can succeed in school and in life.”

‘We consider this a first victory’: Penn professors see university gift as important step for funding Philadelphia schools

2020-11-19T23:30:09+00:00

Professor Ann Farnsworth-Alvear hopes a $100 million donation over 10 years from the University of Pennsylvania to the city’s school district will only be the beginning of a longer conversation about how to properly fund schools.

She along with other Penn professors and staff had pushed for months for their university to pay up to $40 million annually to the district. The money, known as payments-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOTS, represents 40% of what the university would owe in property taxes if not for its nonprofit status.

“As a faculty member and a parent, I am glad to see Penn recognizing its responsibility to the city’s children, and I am optimistic that we will emerge from this 10-year window that with new clarity about what is possible going forward,” said Farnsworth-Alvear, an associate professor of history and Latin American and Latino studies.

Penn’s gift is the largest single private donation to the district ever. Amy C. Offner, an associate professor in the department of history, said the money is “evidence that mobilization by students, teachers, parents, city officials, and the Penn community are moving our university in the right direction. We consider this a first victory — but just a first step.”

Members of Penn for PILOTS still argue that local wealthy property owners, like Penn, should be pressed to ensure the city’s schools are fully funded through recurring PILOTS.

“I measure ‘enough’ by looking at the value of properties owned by the University of Pennsylvania and other nonprofits,” Farnsworth-Alvear, said. “What taxes would be paid if non-profit status did not apply? Do people in Philadelphia want to continue to subsidize such non-profit entities?”

Penn President Amy Gutmann said on Wednesday the “historic commitment by the university and Penn Medicine will help support a most critical and immediate need that will benefit generations of Philadelphia students, their teachers, and school staff.”

But, considering the value of their properties, Farnsworth-Alvear believes that Penn and other nonprofits should be contributing more. Penn is the largest private property owner in the city.

“Realizing that city residents subsidize nonprofits in Philadelphia is my starting point for what I hope will be a broad public discussion,” she said.

Many universities benefitted from the labor of enslaved people, exploited research agendas and supported gentrification, said Gerald Campano, professor and chair of the literacy, culture, and international education division at the Graduate School of Education at Penn.

“I hope this first step by the university will lead to both local and national conversations about the unconscionable inequities in the school system and the role of higher education in addressing them,” he said.

Offner said that an institution as wealthy as Penn can afford to rise to this standard, and must do so to help resolve the chronic, structural underfunding of the city’s public schools.

One of the reasons the Penn contribution was so significant was the district had requested $120 million from the state to make all buildings asbestos and lead safe, said superintendent William Hite on Thursday. Despite the support of local education and government officials, that demand has so far fallen flat.

“We’ve done a good bit of work while school buildings have been closed,” Hite said, adding that the the need now is closer to $100 million. The Penn money will be used over the next 10 years “for specific purposes and that is lead abatement and asbestos remediation.”

Donna Frisby-Greenwood, CEO of the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, said the pandemic has not adversely impacted district fundraising compared with past years.

“When COVID first broke out, we thought, oh my gosh, we are not going to be able to raise a lot of money this year,” she said. But in the spring, when “the district needed...Chromebooks for every student, we raised $7.5 million from donors locally in Philadelphia.”

But Offner said although Penn’s gift will make a significant difference in helping the district remove asbestos and lead from school buildings, more is still needed for the schools.

“If every child in Philadelphia is to receive a quality public education, the school district needs a reliable, significant stream of revenue every year,” Offner said, “not time-limited gifts targeted to acute crises.”

Penn announces $100 million, 10-year gift to Philadelphia school district

2020-11-17T22:32:47+00:00

The University of Pennsylvania announced today that it would donate $100 million to the School District of Philadelphia over 10 years to help pay for the remediation of asbestos and other potentially dangerous conditions in aging school buildings.

It is the largest single private donation to the district ever, and it comes after years of pressure, including from a group of Penn’s own students and faculty, to contribute to the district in the form of “payments in lieu of taxes,” or PILOTS.

“All Philadelphia students deserve high quality and safe learning environments, but we know that achieving this systemwide in our aging school buildings requires significant resources,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. He said the gift “will go a long way in accelerating the district’s aggressive environmental remediation work.”

Penn president Amy Gutmann said the “historic commitment by the university and Penn Medicine will help support a most critical and immediate need that will benefit generations of Philadelphia students, their teachers, and school staff.”

As a nonprofit, Penn is exempt from paying property taxes, which is the school district’s largest single source of local funding. Penn, including its campus and hospital network, is also the city’s largest private landowner.

The advocates, who have mobilized for years to get Penn to contribute to city coffers, said the gift was welcome, but just a “first step.”

The Penn for PILOTS movement, as well as other organizations including Jobs for Justice, had estimated that if Penn paid property taxes on its holdings, it would owe the city about $100 million a year. The groups proposed that Penn pay 40% of what it would owe, or about $40 million annually. It also proposed that all the money go into an educational equity fund dedicated to the school district. (The city’s property tax is split between the district and the city, with the district getting 55%.)

Crediting the “power of mobilization” for the gift, Penn for PILOTS, in a statement, said that “the chronic underfunding of the Philadelphia public schools cannot be resolved with a limited commitment of ten annual payments; it requires a system of public finance that ensures that the city’s wealthiest institutions pay their fair share every year in perpetuity.”

The tax exemption, the group said, “deprives the public school system of funds that students, teachers, and staff need and deserve. Year in and year out, the poorest big city in the United States subsidizes one of the richest universities in the country... A time-limited gift will not make up for Penn’s accumulated debt to the public schools, nor will it ensure that Penn contributes what it owes in the future.”

Devan Spear, executive director of Jobs for Justice, echoed this point. “The chronic underfunding of the Philadelphia public schools cannot be solved with a limited contribution,” he said, calling on other large universities, including Drexel and Jefferson, to “look to Penn’s leadership when they consider what they owe to the city they call home.”

City council member Helen Gym, who has pushed for PILOTS since before she was elected, also characterized it as just a first step while urging other major institutions to “pay a fair share in addressing the shameful school funding crisis.”

The school district has estimated that it needs $500 million to remediate all its buildings of flaking asbestos and other hazards, including mold, peeling lead paint, and outdated or ineffective ventilation systems — an issue that has become more urgent with the coronavirus pandemic. Since schools closed in March, it has been accelerating this work, but the task is monumental. Penn’s statement said that the money “will allow the district “to dramatically accelerate and expand their response to environmental concerns in our public schools.” On average, the buildings are 70 years old; the oldest still in use was built in 1888.

Calling it a “tremendous gift,” Board of Education president Joyce Wilkerson said the funds will “free us to direct our focus to investing in a new and compelling vision for school facilities.” Superintendent William Hite called it “a great support” in helping the district to address immediate hazards and create “a 21st century learning environment for our students.” They and Mayor Kenney also called on other institutions to contribute.

“It takes all of us working together — government, business, nonprofit, and philanthropy — to tackle our most pressing challenges and ensure our kids have access to great schools in every neighborhood,” the mayor said.

Penn profs push university to pay PILOTS to help Philadelphia schools

2020-09-23T00:42:59+00:00

With the Philadelphia School District facing a potential annual shortfall of $800 million in five years, some faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing their employer to pay up to $40 million to the city.

The money, known as payments-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOTS, represents a portion of what Penn would owe in taxes if not for its nonprofit status. Other universities in the Ivy League pay them.

“Penn is the largest private landowner in Philadelphia,” said Gerald Campano, a professor in the university’s graduate school of education. “It is one of the city’s largest employers. It is a wealthy nonprofit and it doesn’t pay property taxes, and property taxes are the main local source of money for the Philadelphia schools.”

A longstanding campaign to force the city’s biggest nonprofits to make voluntary payments to the city has taken on new urgency this year as the school district faces a steep drop in revenue largely due to shrinking state and local tax collection caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are here because Philadelphia children face a terrible funding shortfall,” said Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, associate professor of history and Latin American and Latino studies. “Inadequate resources for public education are damaging our city.”

She said that if Penn isn’t paying its “fair share,” it hurts small businesses and low-income homeowners, who must pay more. With a poverty rate above 25%, Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the country. Mayor Jim Kenney’s effort this year to slightly increase the property tax rate to raise more money for schools died in the city council, mostly due to concerns about putting a larger burden on the poor.

Schools in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania are paid for primarily through a combination of state and local taxes. State revenue is designed to make up for differences in property wealth among districts.

Pennsylvania has enacted a “fair funding” formula for distributing state aid that takes into account a district’s needs relating to poverty, English language learners, and other factors. But it does not use the formula to distribute most of the money. And the amount of funds it contributes to education has not kept up with need. On average, states contribute about half of state aid to education; in Pennsylvania, the figure is closer to a third, which increases districts’ reliance on property wealth.

Philadelphia has a $3.4 billion operating budget for both district and charter schools, 49.9% of which is contributed by the state and 49.6% by the city. And the real estate tax is responsible for the 51% of the local share — $825 million, or about a quarter of its total revenue.

The advocates say that Penn, between the university and hospital system, owns $2.5 billion worth of land and has a $14.7 billion endowment. They want Penn to pay 40% of what it would if it paid taxes on its property, which would amount to around $40 million. “Those payments alone would allow the school district to remove the lead and asbestos from school buildings in three years,” said Farnsworth-Alvear. The renewed push for PILOTS has been “inspired by a lot of important social protests that are going on and by the country’s racial reckoning” in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, said Campano.

An Inquirer investigation from a year ago estimated that nearly $30 billion in city real estate is exempt from taxes, more than 10% of the available land, a much higher amount than the average for major cities.

Jobs with Justice is calling for the creation of an Education Equity Fund that would help the cash-strapped district fix aging and sometimes dangerous buildings, as well as hire more counselors, nurses and teachers.

A petition circulated by the faculty group has gathered 1,000 signatures, and 68 faculty members are seeking a meeting with Penn’s Board of Trustees, which is chaired by David L. Cohen, Comcast’s senior executive vice president.

Farnsworth-Alvear said that faculty members also sent letters to 16 individual Penn trustees in late July, but have not gotten a response. They want the trustees to put the issue on the agenda of Thursday’s virtual budget and finance committee meeting.

In resisting past calls for PILOTS, Penn officials have noted that the university contributes to the city in myriad ways, including its support of the Penn-Alexander Elementary School near its campus and through many social programs run by the affiliated Netter Center, which coordinates community partnerships with the university.

Reached through Comcast’s communications office, Cohen did not offer comment.

Talk of closing schools, tax breaks top Philadelphia school board meeting

2020-09-18T23:39:22+00:00

During a contentious six-hour meeting the Philadelphia Board of Education unanimously passed a controversial corporate tax break, while one member proposed closing schools and another said she was “disgusted” by newly restrictive speakers’ policies.

“If you really believe that Black lives matter, having that conversation about closing schools right now was utterly ridiculous,” said teacher Keziah Ridgeway, a member of the Melanated Educators Collective, or MEC,. “Y’all have money, in the words of Tupac, to fund everything else, but you don’t have money for our schools.”

Fellow educator and MEC member Dana Carter told the board it needed to stop planning service cuts and start holding Superintendent William Hite accountable for documented missteps.

“The miseducation of Black children leads to Black deaths,” Carter said. “How are we discussing school closures without talking about the $51 million we fumbled at Ben Franklin?”

During the meeting on Thursday, Hite updated the board on plans for reopening and online access, and vowed to reexamine controversial online policies that require hours of screen time for young students. “We’ve heard a great deal [from] teachers and families about the struggles,” he said.

The board also formally swore in two new non-voting student representatives, Keylisha Diaz of the Philadelphia Military Academy and Toluwanimi Olaleye of Carver High School for Engineering and Science. Member Leticia Egea-Hinton urged the pair to ask “tough questions” about district policy and practice.

“When you talk, we listen,” Egea-Hinton told the new student reps.

But the evening’s bitter discussions, which featured a new policy to mute public testimony when speakers stray from their registered topic, left many feeling that the board created three years ago is doing no better than the School Reform Commission, its state-run predecessor, at delivering equitable education or holding executives accountable.

“Board members seem to salivate over the closing of public schools,” said Kelsey Romano, a teacher at Saul High School and a co-chair of the district’s equity committee. “We will not forget the $600,000 office renovation and the employee paid for two full-time jobs in two districts. The trust is all but shattered.”

The evening’s most contentious debate concerned the proposed Keystone Opportunity Zone tax break for Hilco Redevelopment Partners, which board members approved with one abstention, pleasing trade unions and economic development officials, but infuriating advocates who saw it as a needless giveaway.

The session also featured a sobering financial presentation from chief financial officer Uri Monson, detailing millions in new costs - including rising cyber-charter payments - and millions more in lost revenues, thanks to plunging tax collection projections. Monson’s gloomy forecast was followed by a surprising suggestion from board member Lee Huang: that the district begin considering closing schools to save money.

“We may be forced to have that conversation,” Monson replied.

Huang acknowledged that closures can be “highly traumatic,” and critics swiftly countered that they wouldn’t save money either. Councilwoman Helen Gym called Huang’s suggestion “a terrible take” that doesn’t take history into account.

“Multiple studies on mass school closings around the country AND here in Philadelphia challenge the assertion that mass closings improve finances,” Gym tweeted.

The evening exposed other rifts. Led by Robin Cooper, the head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, or CASA, a string of principals and school staffers blasted the district for what James Murray, head of Rowen Elementary in West Oak Lane, called “systemic racism and inequality.” Among CASA members’ concerns: inadequate personal protection equipment, an overly aggressive push to reopen buildings, and discriminatory hiring by the district.

Tension among board members was also apparent. Members Mallory Fix-Lopez and Angela McIver spoke against the new policy to mute public testimony that veered off topic. Board President Joyce Wilkerson defended the policy as reasonable, but Fix-Lopez said it left her “disgusted.”

The evening was not without its bright spots for officials. Hite’s decision to suspend “leveling” of school staff earned him thanks from parents and teachers.

Education advocate Tamir Harper, a 2018 Science Leadership Academy graduate, praised the Hite administration’s recent work and assured the board, “we will get through this.”

Board of Ed makes a bumpy return to meeting in person

2020-08-14T05:11:11+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In what proved to be a long, disjointed evening marred by technical difficulties, the Philadelphia Board of Education held an “in-person” joint committee meeting on Thursday, its first non-virtual session since the arrival of the COVID pandemic in March.

The four-hour-plus meeting covered a range of topics but resulted in no specific recommendations from the two board committees represented: Finance & Facilities and Student Achievement & Support.

The evening’s most concrete lesson: Faithful fidelity to COVID safety protocols requires constant vigilance by leadership. That was brought home by board member Angela McIver, who on at least four occasions had to remind District staffers to sanitize the speaker’s lectern and its PowerPoint “clicker” before speaking into the microphone.

“You all should just be happy that you’re not my children,” McIver joked.

Otherwise, it was an evening of considering and discussing a variety of short- and long-term School District projects, periodically interrupted by problems with phone connections, poor audio, confusion over procedure, and breakdowns in video streaming. The agenda included an update on reopening plans, a debate on a resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, and a lengthy presentation about a proposed tax abatement for a South Philadelphia redevelopment project.

Where needed, votes on those items will take place at next week’s board action meeting on Aug. 20.

Board members also heard a sobering financial update from Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, whose latest figures show that the District remains on solid footing, but faces a future in which costs and revenues alike are increasingly difficult to predict.

Much will depend on additional federal stimulus, Monson said, but prospects for the proposed HEROES Act have dimmed as talks have stalled in Washington.

“The single biggest thing is going to be the federal response, HEROES or whatever they want to call it,” Monson said. “I’m less optimistic than I was a couple weeks ago … We’ll keep working and talking to folks about why we need those funds.”

Money matters: A positive balance for now

Board meeting photo by Lauren Wiley

While member Maria McColgan joined the session by phone, the seven other board members were present, seated at individual desks set six feet apart at the front of the District’s central office auditorium. Most wore royal blue T-shirts promoting the U.S. Census, the backs of which read: “I live, I vote, I count.” District officials sat, spaced apart, in what is normally the audience seating, and they came forward to speak as needed.

In his presentation, Monson told the board that the District’s current fiscal year looks on track to end with a fund balance of $179 million, slightly larger than anticipated due to cost savings associated with closing school buildings in March.

But the year to come will be a challenge, he said, due to questions about costs and tax revenue.

“For the economy to stabilize would probably be the single most important thing,” Monson said.

On the cost side, he said, “there are so many changing guidelines,” and that makes assessing costs difficult. Monson said his team is working with multiple projections for the costs associated with various scenarios, as recommendations evolve for pandemic-related items such as personal protective equipment, ventilation, and instructional supports.

Likewise, with revenue, District officials won’t start to get useful data until the fall, but Monson anticipates some declines. Locally, for example, real estate tax revenue will probably remain stable, but liquor-by-the-drink revenue looks “shaky,” he said.

For immediate needs, Monson said, state officials still have two big pots of cash they can dip into: the governor’s $60 million emergency fund and the far larger remnants of Pennsylvania’s share of federal stimulus from the CARES Act – about $1 billion. Some of that money could go to school districts, but for now, all of it remains in Harrisburg, unspent.

“We’re essentially waiting for the governor and the legislature to act,” said Monson. “The need is now.”

However, when asked by member Lee Huang, Monson told board members that so far the District hasn’t had to compromise for lack of finances.

“We have not said ‘no’ to anything,” Monson said. “There are enough reserves set aside [and] this buys us time. … There’s a point where we’re not able to do all the things we want to do now. We’re not there yet.”

Reopening: Principals’ plans due soon

With the start of virtual classes just weeks away, Chief of Staff Naomi Wyatt told the board that principals have just one week to submit their schools’ digital learning plans for review.

Few principals have yet done so. “All [plans] will be submitted and approved by Aug. 21,” Wyatt said. “To date, two have been submitted and approved.”

The principals’ plans are meant to show that they’re ready to manage their school’s students and staff safely and effectively as the virtual school year begins. Students will learn online until at least November. Principals have been asked to spell out plans for class schedules, staffing, student support, teacher observation and training, and more.

Principals have said that they have numerous unanswered questions about such matters, including allowable schedules for teachers and online privacy protocols for students. None testified at Thursday’s session, but Robin Cooper, head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, has said that the board can expect to hear from her members at its action meeting next week.

Wyatt also spoke extensively about cleaning, saying that 42% of District buildings have been completely cleaned, with the rest soon to be completed. She also said that ventilation assessments of all rooms in all buildings will be completed by Oct. 9, part of a larger “readiness” push. District officials are in the process of gathering 250,000 masks and 19,000 hand-sanitizer units, Wyatt said, and systems will soon be in place to track the need for such equipment at each site.

Four charters to try ‘hybrid’ learning

District officials told the board that all 86 Philadelphia charter schools had submitted their required “health and safety plans” to state officials. Christina Grant, head of the District’s Charter Schools Office, told the board that although most charters will start the year virtually, four have proposed “hybrid” plans with some in-person instruction. She did not name the four.

Grant’s office plays no formal role in evaluating, authorizing, or monitoring the implementation of the charters’ safety plans, and she has advised that parents who have questions about particular schools contact those charters’ boards.

However, the Charter Schools Office is involved in some discussions about interconnected services such as transportation, because the District pays for transit for charter students. “The four schools that are exploring hybrid options, to the extent that they need busing, we’re going to provide that,” said Grant.

Black Lives Matter resolution uncertain

The board discussed a proposed resolution supporting District participation in a “Black Lives Matter Week of Action.” The resolution would encourage District officials to “participate in the national Black Lives Matter At School Week … during the first week of February each year.”

Some Black board members found the resolution wanting. Board President Joyce Wilkerson said she had “no interest” in supporting rhetorical statements when more substantive action is merited.

“It isn’t enough to say, ‘Black lives matter.’ We need to do more,” Wilkerson said.

Board member Julia Danzy said she would like to see racism addressed comprehensively, and all year round. “We don’t just exist in February. We exist 12 months of the year,” she said.

Other members urged action on the resolution, including Lee Huang and Mallory Fix Lopez, who said that a vote in favor of the resolution next week would be a good way to show board support for students and staff as the school year begins.

Consultants for antiracism training

The board debated a proposed $700,000 contract for the Massachusetts consulting firm KJR Consulting, focusing in particular on a $150,000 portion earmarked for “antiracism” training for Superintendent William Hite’s 110-person executive team.

Some members questioned the need to hire a Boston-area firm with little experience in social justice when many in Philadelphia have done extensive work in that area. “We talk about building internal capacity,” said Fix Lopez. “How does that help internal capacity?”

Added member Leticia Egea-Hinton: “Is there no one in Philadelphia who does this work, that understands Philly? … I sort of feel that we really needed someone that was closer to our roots.”

Wyatt said that KJR was a familiar enterprise that has good relationships with District executives and can build on past “mindset” work it has done with central office staff, in which it helped promote the idea that “all students can learn.”

KJR has worked with the District since 2018, Wyatt said, and is well-positioned to engage in hard conversations.

“They do understand the leadership team,” she said. “Because we’ve worked with them, they’re going to be able to lead us in a familiar way.”

Wyatt said the District would bring in other partners, too.

“We’re also working with Philadelphia groups,” she said. “We’re not working exclusively with folks that aren’t from Philly.”

Member Ameen Akbar said he was concerned that the District’s various anti-racism efforts weren’t as well coordinated as they could be. Principals, teachers, and administrators are all involved in various initiatives, he said, but the overall effort “feels like it’s missing some pieces. … It just feels piecemeal,” Akbar said.

Request on Keystone Opportunity Zone

The Philadelphia Department of Commerce is requesting the District’s support for a series of tax abatements at the site of a former South Philadelphia refinery. Duane Bumb, the city’s deputy director of commerce, gave a detailed presentation about development plans for the 1,300-acre site near the Philadelphia International Airport, which officials hope to make a Keystone Opportunity Zone.

That would spare the developers a number of costs, such as some sales and occupancy taxes, but require them to make “Payments in Lieu of Taxes”, or PILOTS, amounting to 110% of the assessed real estate value. The PILOT agreement for the South Philadelphia site would guarantee the District about $746,000 annually, Bumb said.

Board member Akbar said the massive development project provided a “real opportunity” for internships and other student benefits. Filling out the various parcels is expected to take a decade or more.

And although Bumb was optimistic about such prospects, he could offer no guarantees. Board President Wilkerson said she worried that once the board gives its blessing to the project, the annual PILOT payment will be the extent of the benefit.

“My concern is, we’ll sign off and then we’ll never see [the developers] again,” Wilkerson said. “People will ask us, ‘Where are the jobs?’ and we’ll say, ‘uhhhh.’”

Proposed consultant deal aims to help administrators confront COVID, racism

2020-08-12T21:24:49+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Thursday will mark the partial return of in-person Board of Education meetings in Philadelphia, as administrators and board members meet in person for a semi-virtual session at District headquarters.

District officials say the public will not be permitted to attend the evening session in person, due to health guidelines limiting the size of public gatherings, and can instead watch live-streamed video, as in recent virtual meetings.

But board members and District officials will meet face to face for the first time since March, and officials hope the in-person session will pave the way for more inclusive meetings to come. Board spokesperson Janice Hatfield called the hybrid session “a test to understand the technological needs and challenges in conducting in-person board meetings.”

Hatfield said the session would be partially in-person so that board members can “stand in solidarity with our school communities, as they navigate the challenges of remote learning and the eventual and safe return to their classrooms.”

As at previous virtual sessions, committee members will read summaries of submitted public testimony into the record. Testimony will also be posted on the District website.

The meeting, scheduled from 4 to 6 p.m., will serve as a joint session for two board committees, Student Achievement & Support and Finance & Facilities. Each is intimately engaged with different aspects of the District’s reopening plans.

The board will hear the latest updates and public feedback on those plans and also consider a proposed three-part, $700,000 consulting contract meant to help the District improve its pandemic planning while better confronting issues of systemic racism.

Critics on social media have questioned the value of that contract, most of which is earmarked for training the District’s 700-person central office staff in various administrative skills, including “project management, supervisory skills … and MS Office/Google Suite.”

But $150,000 is for an antiracism component that aims to “build awareness, urgency, and capacity for antiracist leadership” within the District’s 110-member “Executive Team.”

“Haven’t we spent enough on Hite’s executive suite and team?” tweeted teacher K.R. Leubbert. “These consulting firms are running the biggest grift in the world.”

Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools (APPS) said her group would testify about the proposal and asked: “Is this essential at this time?”

And teacher Ismael Jimenez, a member of the Caucus of Working Educators, said it was improper for the District to pay consultants for antiracism work while also asking staff to contribute to such efforts for free.

“There are many organizations and … educators doing the work in the city for years who are now disrespectfully being asked to volunteer time,” Jimenez tweeted.

But District officials say the proposed deal with KJR Consulting of Massachusetts, specializing in organizational efficiency and customer service, would improve the District’s internal planning and “change management” capacity. The District’s lack of planning and project management capacity has been a known weakness since last year’s surprise wave of asbestos-related school shutdowns revealed that the District does what Board President Joyce Wilkerson called “an inadequate job managing complex projects.”

And although KJR has relatively little apparent experience in anti-racism work, it recently completed a series of workshops in Manchester, Connecticut. Participants in their “living room conversations” reported general satisfaction (“The differentiation between diversity, inclusion, & equity … was said in such a sensible, comprehensive manner,” reported one), but local critics remain unimpressed.

“I don’t know what a ‘living room conversation’ is, but I can guess and it isn’t the type of antiracist work that we need,” tweeted teacher Charlie McGeehan.

Meeting in a time of tumult

Philadelphia’s board meeting takes place as school districts and universities nationwide find themselves embroiled in controversy and confusion about reopening plans.

Infections have reportedly spread rapidly in some districts that have reopened, leading to sudden reversals and frustration. In one high-profile case, officials in Cherokee County, Georgia, sent 826 students and 42 teachers into quarantine due to possible exposure after just six days of classes. Other reports of waves of infection and changing plans can be found across the nation.

In Pennsylvania, where districts are still considering a range of hybrid and virtual strategies, new guidance from Gov. Wolf spells out detailed metrics to guide reopening decisions. Although the state won’t enforce any restrictions, it recommends that only counties with low transmission rates – 5% or less – return to full in-person instruction.

Most of Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia and eight neighboring counties, is classified as “moderate,” with infection rates between 5% and 10%. The Wolf administration guidelines recommend hybrid or fully-remote learning for such counties.

But with final decisions still falling to local school boards, reopening proposals continue to trigger controversy statewide. In Lower Merion, among the state’s most prosperous districts, teachers are pushing back against a plan that would bring them back to classrooms even as students remain at home. Over 2,500 have signed a petition calling for virtual instruction; their concerns include health and safety but also the same child-care issues that now bedevil all working families.

“I want to be able to [teach] from home so I can take care of my own kids because I don’t really have easy choices for child care that are within our means,” teacher Andrea Malkin told ABC6 News.

The head of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators (PASA), Dr. Mark DiRocco, told CBS21 in Harrisburg that the Wolf administration’s latest “dashboard” will be “very helpful to our school leaders,” but comes with only weeks to go and may be of limited use to those districts where “a lot of decisions have already been made.”

DiRocco cited “a lot of unanswered questions out there” about what he called “operational level questions,” including details of social distancing and recommended mask use. “The clock is running out on this,” DiRocco said. “If we’d gotten it earlier, it would have been more helpful.”

In Philadelphia, principals say that getting answers to those operational questions is paramount. Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators (CASA), the principals’ union, said that she won’t be testifying Thursday, but expects her members to have plenty to say at the board’s Aug. 20 action meeting about “the lack of details around school opening.”

Principal Alonzo Fulton of Harrington Elementary said that even after last week’s multi-day “leadership seminar” for principals, numerous nuts-and-bolts questions remain unaddressed. “So many holes, so many questions,” said Fulton.

Among principals’ concerns: They don’t yet know whether they can require virtual students to show their faces on-screen – key to ensuring that students are actually attending, they say. Other issues concern the details of social distancing, the logistics of laptop and classwork distribution, the quality of online assessments (“If a student is at home and is getting help from a parent, what does that do for the accuracy of the data?” asked Fulton.), and the details of teachers’ workdays.

Fulton said that the last question is of particular importance because teachers’ availability is guided by the District’s contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and he can’t give final instructions to his staff until he knows what that deal allows.

“The teachers’ workday is still unclear,” said Fulton. “I don’t want to be in a position where I’m engaging the PFT in battles.”

PASA’s DiRocco said those sorts of operational questions pose a major challenge to administrators. Policies that seem simple get complicated fast in practice; guidelines for mask use, for example, can depend on the distance between desks.

“If you can’t have kids six feet apart, and you only have five feet, do you still have to wear the mask all day? That’s an operational question,” said DiRocco.

Concerns rising in the region and nation

Reopening is just the beginning, DiRocco said. Handling outbreaks and possible infections once classes are in session will require a lot of detailed decision-making, DiRocco said, and right now, districts have little to guide them.

And with cold-and-flu season coming this winter, “we’re going to have a lot of suspected cases,” DiRocco said. Faced with the option of quarantining classrooms, groups of students, or even entire buildings, district leaders statewide need more clarity about what they “can” or “should” do vs. what they “must” do, said DiRocco.

“What is the format and protocol for quarantining?” DiRocco asked. “We don’t have that criteria.”

Elsewhere in the region, similar concerns abound, and districts’ plans are changing rapidly. In New Jersey, for example, where new data continues to show significant transmission risks for young people and their families, state officials have abandoned a plan to require in-person instruction. On Wednesday, Gov. Phil Murphy announced that local school boards may opt for fully virtual instruction, while the New Jersey Education Association continues to push for a fully virtual start statewide. Reopening “cannot be left in the hands of nearly 600 individual school districts,” the union said.

A similar conflict is breaking out in New York City, where city officials are hoping for a partial re-opening, citing broad demand for in-person learning from community members, while teachers’ unions worried about safety argue for a fully virtual fall.

Meanwhile, a growing number of major universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, have cancelled fall programming and committed to all-virtual learning. Among the apparent casualties: college sports, including much of the multibillion-dollar college football industry.

But some K-12 systems and universities still plan to reopen in the fall, at least partially. One such university is Pennsylvania State University, which won’t have football but plans to offer in-person classes for students who sign COVID liability waivers. A leader of one faculty group called that “unacceptable,” but university administrators say it is “important that students and families understand there is COVID-19 risk everywhere.”

As parents get ready to make decisions about returning to school, questions abound

2020-07-16T23:27:04+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia school officials on Wednesday announced a plan for reopening schools that gives families a choice whether to send children to school part-time in the fall – two days a week for most students – or choose full-time virtual learning in what the District is calling a Digital Academy.

Superintendent William Hite said that parents can register for the virtual-only option between July 22 and Aug. 4.

District spokesperson Monica Lewis said the virtual town halls and parent and teacher surveys that offered people a way to provide feedback were incorporated into the planning. She said Wednesday that no further details would be available until July 22 about how the Digital Academy will work.

Information released at that time “will include the registration process, descriptions and expectations of students and staff,” Lewis wrote in an email response to a list of a dozen questions.

But since the school-opening announcement, questions have poured in. A crowd-sourced page organized by teachers Zoe Rooney and Emily Simpson accumulated nearly 200 questions in 24 hours, many of then concerning the virtual academy.

They include who will teach in the academy, how they will be supported, how classes will be reflected on transcripts, whether students from the same school who choose all-virtual will be grouped together, how virtual students will stay together with their school community, how “specials” classes like art and music will be delivered, and whether internet access and tech support will be guaranteed.

They also would like to know what the school day will be like; online learning between March and June was a combination of teacher availability for student conferences and actual delivery of lessons. Hite said that unlike that time, when delivery of new material was delayed while the District attempted to provide all students what they needed for internet access, this will be the instruction of new material.

There were also questions about student-teacher ratios, whether teachers from the child’s home school would be teachers in the virtual space, and what would happen if the District is forced to shut down entirely and go virtual for everyone.

“Does your child’s normal school teacher(s) return to instructing your child?” the questioner asked. “Do you as a teacher return to instructing your students?”

There were also concerns about whether the Digital Academy pulls resources from the school in which the child is enrolled and what will happen in cases where courses are tracked – AP or honors, for example. The parents also want to make sure there will be regular feedback, and want to know how services will be delivered to students in special education programs.

Next week’s board meeting

The Board of Education is holding a special meeting on Thursday, July 23, at which it will vote on the health and safety plan for the new school year that is required by the state.

But it will not vote on the full reopening plan, according to board spokeswoman Janice Hatfield. Advocates are saying that the board needs to do that. Hatfield said an agenda will be posted Monday.

“This is major, major,” said Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools. “Plus, there is a price tag to this.”

Haver pointed out that Hite put a price tag on the plan of between $60 million and $80 million. “The board has to work on any major expenditures and grants, money in and money out. They need to lay out as closely as they can where this money’s coming from, and is it coming from something else people expect money to be spent on.”

Hite made reference to using up fund balances that the District expected from the end of the 2020 fiscal year and anticipates next fiscal year. But the District’s overall fiscal posture goes south quickly after that, with an $800 million shortfall forecast by 2025, not counting extra COVID costs.

Ideas for improvement

Critiques are also trickling out of the plan itself, which mostly calls for students and teachers to self-monitor their health.

The plan “is a good start, but it’s got to evolve and get better,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY).

Cooper cited 10 areas in which it can be improved, including more explicit social distancing rules – making sure that room capacity is adjusted so that six feet of distance can be maintained between all individuals.

“They have to assure there is never more than X number of people in a room,” she said.

She also called for mandatory temperature checks for all people who enter buildings and she wants to see more sanitizing protocols, including signs similar to those in airports, where someone signs off on the time of the most recent cleaning of bathrooms.

“Based on the challenges the District has faced with ensuring buildings are cleaned regularly, significantly improved oversight and support of all building maintenance staff is a necessary predicate for re-opening,” according to a draft PCCY statement.

Most important, “Schools should re-open for in-person instruction when the science indicates that that opening with reasonable protocols does not put children, school personnel and the families of all students and school personnel at the heightened risk of COVID infection.”

Said Cooper: “We have to overcompensate in this area. It’s literally life and death.”

Other areas of concern where Cooper said there need to be more explicit standards are ventilation and transportation. With many students taking SEPTA, there should be some effort to get guarantees that social distancing on buses and subways will be enforced.

She also said that all contact sports should be banned for the fall semester and replaced by non-contact sports and that football should be cancelled.

Schools relieved as Pa. budget poised to avoid education cuts, for now

2020-05-28T13:44:58+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

It appears Pennsylvania’s public schools will get at least a one-year reprieve from any large-scale, state budget cuts.

In a budget bill that squeaked through the State House on Tuesday, lawmakers decided to hold all major education spending even for the next twelve months. If that bill is ultimately signed, money for Pre-K, K-12, and state universities will be identical to what it was this year.

That’s notable because most of the state budget will be revisited five months from now — after the election and after state officials have a better sense of the fiscal damage wrought by the coronavirus.

But school boards, child care operators, and university presidents won’t have to worry about substantial state cuts until at least 2021.

Mike Straub, spokesman for the House Republican Caucus, said schools needed to know where they stood financially before the academic year began. The prospect of a cut in five months — during the middle of the school year — is something parents, teachers, and students “shouldn’t be faced with right now,” he said.

Republicans who control the State Senate expect the proposal to clear their chamber, as well.

“We wanted to be sure to send the message that education was important,” said Jennifer Kocher, spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R-Centre). “We wanted to provide a little bit of stability.”

For education advocates, the news comes as a relief.

“It is a huge victory,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth and a former education advisor to Governor Ed Rendell. “[It’s] a really testament to the hard work of all the lawmakers and all the advocates and all the educators to make the case clear that schools are essential to this recovery.”

Chris Lilienthal, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the commonwealth’s largest teachers union, said he was “very happy that Governor Wolf and the legislature have decided to provide some stability for our school districts at a very difficult time.”

Wolf’s office has not yet said whether the governor will sign the stopgap budget.

Advocates and lawmakers think that is likely.

Still, daunting fiscal and logistical hurdles remain.

“It’s not all rosy,” Cooper said.

One advocacy group is projecting a large drop in local tax dollars, which make up about 40% of all school district revenue. School districts also tend to count on increases to state aid so they can keep up with mandated expenses such as pension, health care, and charter school costs. Universities, meanwhile, face the prospect of a sharp enrollment dip and a resulting drop in tuition revenue.

And there are unanswered questions about how school will look in the fall — specifically how much of it will be in person. Some medical officials recommend schools provide masks, testing, and other forms of disease mitigation that could require substantial new investments of their own.

Given all of that uncertainty, state lawmakers opted to provide some financial assurance to education leaders. By doing so, they’ll likely need to make tough choices in other parts of the state budget. Pennsylvania will collect about $3.8 billion less in revenue this fiscal year than it had originally anticipated, according to recent projections from the Independent Fiscal Office.

“Flat funding … for 12 months offers school districts really critical stability as they’re working through their budgets this spring,” said Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters of Pennsylvania. “But this funding is only the beginning of what’s necessary.”

In other states, officials have forecasted major and immediate cuts to education spending. The School District of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest, looked at dire revenue projections from Harrisburg and prepared for an $80 million cut to funding when forecasting a $1 billion deficit in five years.

The latest news likely means those doomsday projections will be somewhat softened — at least until next school year.

The funding, however, may come with some expectation that schools hold the standard 180 days of classes in the upcoming academic year. This year, the state allowed districts to opt out of the 180-day requirement embedded in law.

Republican leaders in the State House do not want that option on the table for 2020-21.

“What we’re asking for is that next year students go to school for 180 days,” said Straub. “Basically the existing law would remain in place.”

That does not necessarily mean 180 days of in-person school, Straub added. But it does mean that schools would have to submit and receive approval for distance learning days if they need to use them next year.

In the current school year, some districts went weeks without formal instruction as they tried to pivot online.

“Our members are hearing from their constituents on this, day in day out,” said Straub. “They expect their schools to be operating.”

School officials plead their case for more funds before Council

2020-05-21T03:19:29+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated 5/21

Philadelphia School District officials, the teachers’ union president, and advocates implored City Council on Wednesday to do all it can to make sure that schoolchildren don’t suffer from severe cuts to educational programs, especially in this time of crisis.

At the annual District budget hearing, Council members were receptive and praised the District for its response to the pandemic and its work in pivoting to online learning. But they were largely noncommittal about supporting a property tax hike proposed by Mayor Kenney that would raise more money for the District.

Several topics dominated the discussion, including the need to improve internet access across the city.

In response to a question from Council member Helen Gym, Superintendent William Hite said that Comcast and other internet service providers had been asked, but declined to open residential hotspots to general use. A Comcast spokeswoman said in response that these are not designed for broad public use.

Council members also questioned Hite, Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, and acting Facilities and Operations Chief Jim Creedon about ongoing work to make schools safe from lead and asbestos hazards. They praised the District for taking advantage of the empty school buildings to catch up on remediation work.

And they extracted a promise from Hite that all students would be given a cap and gown they can wear for a virtual graduation.

But the dominant theme was the need for sufficient funds to avoid a repeat of what happened during the last recession, when state and federal dollars to Pennsylvania’s school districts were slashed by $1 billion, with Philadelphia absorbing a quarter of those cuts. This resulted in thousands of layoffs, including all counselors and nurses.

“Our response to the crisis must be reflective of who we want to be as a society,” said Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. “Quite simply, we must reject efforts to return to an austerity budget that mirrors years of cuts, from which our young people are still suffering. The long-lasting impacts — both in terms of learning regression and impacts of the trauma of this crisis — will require careful attention and resources.”

Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children & Youth, urged City Council to counteract what she termed the “shortsighted cockiness” of the White House and U.S. Senate that, she said, if not curbed, will push the country into a devastating depression.

“I implore you not to let the incompetence in Washington visit more pain on the children of this city. Show them what leadership looks like,” Cooper said.

Monson pointed out that, before COVID-19, the District briefly had a budget that was “structurally balanced,” meaning that its revenues matched its expenditures. The virus crisis threw that plan into uncertainty because COVID has wreaked havoc on state and city revenues while adding expenses to prepare for a safe reopening of school in September – whatever form that might take.

“At this time, we need your support more than ever because we are deeply concerned that the COVID crisis will lead to a financial future marked by structural deficits that are devastating to public education,” said Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson. “The District has moved from a place of financial stability to a looming financial crisis that could be more severe than even what we lived through seven years ago, when the District experienced a $300 million funding cut, which led to drastic layoffs, reduced supports for schools, and significant decreases in school building maintenance and more.”

Wilkerson gently urged the Council to approve what she called the “nominal” property tax increase Kenney has proposed – a 3.95% hike on the School District’s share of the tax, which he said would result in a $58 higher annual payment on a home assessed at $150,000.

While emphasizing the board’s advocacy for more state and federal dollars, she said Kenney’s proposal would “provide predictable funding for our schools. Our children deserve nothing less.”

At the state level

The board members and other education advocates are trying to prevent the legislature from passing a budget that plugs the state’s own projected $5 billion hole by reducing state aid to school districts. Philadelphia and other districts are asking that federal stimulus dollars be passed through to them, in addition to maintaining levels of state basic education and special education dollars.

Districts are also seeking a change in the way that charter schools are reimbursed, especially for their special education students, a proposal put forward by Gov. Wolf and included in the District’s budget before COVID-19. That budget projected that the District would structurally balance its budget through 2025, primarily by saving more than $100 million a year in charter costs.

Charter schools educate just over a third of the city’s public school students and now get about a third of the money, but their costs have been rising by 4% a year compared to 1% for the District. Of the $700 million in additional funds that the District has received since 2015 – most of it from the city – half of it has gone to charter spending, Monson said.

But charter funding reform is now almost certainly off the table. Although Monson’s new budget projection continues to show a modest fund balance of $16 million in fiscal 2021, he said the shortfall would balloon to $800 million in 2025.

Monson ran through numbers showing that today, the state and the city contribute roughly the same amount to the District’s $3.2 billion budget, a ratio that has tipped since the last recession, when the state provided a much higher percentage of the District’s funds.

Council members are clearly reluctant to further tap city taxpayers. At least two, Allan Domb and David Oh, clearly said they were opposed, and President Darrell Clarke expressed skepticism.

Seeking to close the digital divide

Council members returned to the theme of internet access and urged the District to step up negotiations with service providers. The District has not been able to provide an estimate for how many families lack internet access, but last week it released figures showing that only 57% of students were participating in online learning, and less than half of students in the elementary grades.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Bilotta pointed out that Comcast has offered Internet Essentials free of charge for two months to new users, increased the speed, and removed UPDATE all END UPDATE barriers to families based on past delinquencies and nonpayments. It also opened outdoor Xfinity hotspots to anyone, not just Xfinity customers. And she reiterated that the family of CEO Brian Roberts donated $5 million toward the purchase of the Chromebooks provided to students.

She explained that the residential hotspots, which she described as residential access points, are not engineered to support a high volume of users.

Still, Council members – and school officials – seemed to want to ask more of Comcast, which has its headquarters in Philadelphia, and the other providers, including Verizon and AT&T.

“If you’re not providing internet access, it becomes futile to provide Chromebooks,” said Council member Cindy Bass. “You might as well give students pencil and paper. One goes hand in hand with the other.”

Advocates also said that it was time to look at the service in a more holistic way.

“We are calling on the School District to actually assess the needs of students and work with Comcast to better meet their needs through Internet Essentials, and more importantly, by opening up residential hotspots,” said Devren Washington of the Movement Alliance Project, formerly the Media Mobilizing Project.

Council members, several of whom are parents of District students, were also concerned about graduation and were pleased that Hite agreed to arrange for students to have caps and gowns.

Doha Ibrahim, a graduating senior at Lincoln High School and a student representative on the Board of Education this year, said that the best way for Council to honor the class of 2020 is to do its part to make sure the schools are properly funded.

She noted that her class started school at the beginning of the last recession.

“At this critical moment, we are asking you to honor the class of 2020 by safeguarding the education of all future classes by showing that education funding is too important to cut. Don’t send our schools backward. Please do what it takes to fund education at its current level.”

This story has been updated to reflect that Comcast says it has removed all barriers, not most, to families accessing Internet Essentials due to past delinquencies.

Anatomy of a billion-dollar deficit

2020-05-01T13:56:44+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Last Wednesday, the School District of Philadelphia’s finance team hopped on a conference call to review a spreadsheet full of large numbers.

It should have been boring. But it wasn’t.

Over the course of that hour, the following people and topics would be invoked:

Governor Tom Wolf, tax delinquency, the U.S. Department of Education, the price elasticity of hard alcohol, the fate of Philadelphia’s restaurant industry, the global stock market, and school Superintendent William Hite.

And that’s only a partial list.

One day later, district CFO Uri Monson revealed a sobering new budget. It projected Pennsylvania’s largest school district to have a $1 billion deficit by fiscal year 2025.

So how did the school district come up with those figures?

The short answer: a mix of instincts, math, and bedrock principles.

The longer, more interesting answer can be found by following that conference call — which district officials allowed WHYY to monitor.

***

Accounting isn’t the sexiest government job — but right now it’s one of the most important.

Across Pennsylvania, a small army of people are trying to gauge the budgetary fallout of the coronavirus epidemic.

If you want to see the full scope of the epidemic on government budgets, the School District of Philadelphia is a good place to look. The district relies on a huge range of unrelated taxes — taxes that connect to disparate corners of the economy.

District officials can’t control the rate or collection of these taxes. In economic downturns, they can only watch the storm clouds gather, and predict how bad the damage will be when the tempest arrives.

In this instance, the district’s financial staff started its conversation about five-year revenue projections by examining local real estate taxes. It was an easy conversation.

The city provided a projection that showed real estate values holding steady, but a four-percentage point drop in the proportion of people expected to pay their taxes. It would cost the district about $44 million.

One staffer thought the delinquency estimate was too pessimistic. Monson agreed.

“I don’t disagree with you,” he said. “But our policy on real estate has always been that we take their projections.”

One of the budget office’s guiding principles was to avoid inference wherever possible. If the city says it will collect ‘X’ million — that’s how much money to put in the spreadsheet. If the mayor or governor proposes spending a certain amount on education in the upcoming budget, use that figure until the legislature passes its own bill.

“Generally speaking, we will not do a change unless there is some sort of public document,” said Monson afterward.

It’s a useful rule because it removes the district from guessing or being accused of playing politics.

But in a global pandemic, it’s not always easy to apply.

Take the case of the school income tax, a levy mostly related to stock market profits. The district typically gets around $50 million through this tax.

There was no reason to expect any drop in this line. The tax is based on gains made in last year’s stock market — and the city was not excusing folks from this tax. It’s typically paid by wealthier Philadelphians — the type who could probably still afford to pay during an economic crisis.

Monson wondered: Would people simply neglect to pay the levy because they were distracted or money-conscious?

“I warned the Board [of Education] yesterday that I think this is the biggest question mark,” Monson said. “Just because it’s people’s behavior.”

Chasing normal

Much of the conversation revolved around predicting human response to this unprecedented crisis.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in their debate about the liquor-by-the-drink tax, a restaurant and bar levy which normally brings in about $80 million.

The group first had to establish when it thought restaurants in Philadelphia would start to reopen. In a prior meeting they’d landed on June 1, but had now pushed that back to July 1.

They also had to determine whether people would want to drink at restaurants once they opened again. Monson mused about a “two-week spike” in sales upon first opening, followed by a dip as folks looked into their thinning wallets.

Finally, the team had to think about the “elasticity” of drink prices in Philadelphia. Would restaurateurs try to entice folks out with discounts? Would they jack prices to make up for months of lost revenue?

After some debate, they settled on a number for the coming year: $71.6 million. Bars would reopen on July 1, they guessed, and over the next year they would lose about a month’s worth of revenue compared to normal.

“I’m still wondering if that’s too high or not,” Monson said.

Where there was no clear guidance from the tax-collecting agency, Monson and his staff relied on gut instinct and publicly available commentary. They read newspaper articles and economic projections from analysts at Moody’s and Goldman Sachs.

Monson described himself as a voracious reader, and said he’d been paying close attention to coverage of consumer behavior in places like South Korea — where society has started to reopen.

Somehow all of that led to $71.6 million and a July 1 restart.

“That was purely just gut,” Monson said later. “And that’s what some of this is. When there’s nothing factual — when even the experts don’t have an answer for you — my role has to be based on reasonable assumptions and what’s reasonable at the time.”

Predicting the politicians

Of all the humans whose behavior Monson had to predict, none mattered more than those in Harrisburg who pass and sign state budgets.

What would Governor Tom Wolf and the members of the Pennsylvania Legislature do?

“Let’s get to the fun stuff,” Monson said to his staff. “State revenue.”

This is where Monson broke his own rule.

Typically, the school district takes the governor’s education funding proposal and plugs that figure into its budget.

In recent years, this can create an unusually rosy picture since Wolf, a Democrat, tends to propose more education spending than his Republican colleagues will often approve.

But again, it’s a rule of engagement that removes district judgment from the equation.

This time, though, Monson and his team went off-script.

Although Wolf has not yet changed his proposed budget, the state’s Independent Fiscal Office released a report in April that showed state revenues dropping by a staggering 10 percent due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Since the IFO report is an official government projection out of Harrisburg, Monson felt it was fair to extrapolate from it. He and his team mapped out a 10 percent cut to education spending.

“I had multiple attempts to communicate with the governor’s office to get some kind of direction on that,” Monson said later. “I even warned them that we’re gonna come out and say this unless you give me a reason not to. I got nothing back. So I have to do something.”

The district’s budget office made a crucial, second change to its predictions on state revenue.

It said it was no longer reasonable to assume that the legislature would pass a proposed change to the charter school funding formula — one that would have significantly boosted the district’s financial outlook. This time there was no government document to reference. Monson said it was based on information from legislators and a dose of the obvious. With all focus on the pandemic, there would be no time for a debate on charter schools, Monson said.

Combined, these two changes were a massive hit to the district’s financial outlook.

Betsy DeVos to the rescue?

As the call wound down, Monson’s team discussed a final tweak to the state’s numbers.

Originally, they assumed a ten percent cut to state aid. But they found a clause in the federal stimulus package that gave them hope.

In order for states to receive money from the recently passed stimulus bill, they had to agree to certain conditions. One was that states would give every educational institution — K-12 or higher-ed — at least as much money in the upcoming budget as they did in the average of the prior three years.

There was a waiver process for this clause. States could apply to the U.S. Department of Education for the freedom to make deeper cuts. But so far, as far as Monson knew, Pennsylvania hadn’t applied for that waiver.

The district budget team set the three-year average as the new cut line. Instead of losing $120 million from the state’s basic education subsidy, the loss was now around $80 million.

Spread over years, this was still a major hit — just not quite as bad as before.

“It’s more complex to explain, but I think it’s more justifiable as an assumption,” Monson told the group.

State money was always the hardest pot of money to predict. No economic model or Moody’s analyst could forecast the whims of Pennsylvania’s lawmakers.

More shoes to drop

For all the assumptions made in this one-hour phone call, there are many more the school district hasn’t made yet.

District officials expect the state to ask for districts to contribute more money toward the state’s pension system for teachers. That hasn’t been accounted for yet.

The district’s two largest unions have labor contracts about to expire. That hasn’t been accounted for yet.

The virus could come roaring back in the fall. That hasn’t been accounted for yet.

And after this conversation, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney proposed a property tax increase. That hasn’t been accounted for yet.

One could walk away from the phone call thinking the district was far too optimistic. Will restaurants really be open by July 1?

Or one could conclude that the district was doing a doomsday exercise so it could project a big deficit and scare politicians away from making big cuts. Was the state really going to gouge its education budget?

The only certainty is that these numbers will change — more than once.

“We don’t know the end of this,” Monson said. “When you have that much uncertainty, that’s where it gets really, really hard.”

Through some combination of political guesswork and behavioral economics, the district had set its new financial course.

Ultimately, these numbers will become people: Jobs gained or lost. Programs saved or cut.

But even when they’re just numbers in a spreadsheet, there’s humanity woven into them. Monson and his colleagues will watch how you respond to this crisis — how your elected officials act.

Then they’ll hop back on the phone.

“Everyone stay safe,” Monson said at the end of the call. “I’m sure we’ll be circling back soon.”

Board starts closure process for two Universal charters, calls for more stimulus funding

2020-05-01T03:41:48+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Board of Education voted Thursday to start the closure process for two charter schools and approved renewals for three more.

At its monthly action meeting, held virtually using Zoom and broadcast live over the internet and public access television, the board agreed to send “notices of non-renewal” to two West Philadelphia schools run by Universal Companies, Bluford (K-6) and Daroff (K-8). That begins a closure process that could last years. Both schools have long records of poor academic performance, as well as financial and administrative problems.

The board also voted to grant five-year renewals to three other charter schools: Northwood Academy in Frankford, Imhotep Institute in Germantown, and People for People Charter School in Fairmount.

Together, the three renewed schools serve about 1,900 students. The board did not offer an estimate of the cost of the renewals. Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools (APPS) testified that her group estimates that the likely cost would be in the neighborhood of $200 million over the next five years.

The rejected Universal schools, Daroff and Bluford, serve about 720 and 530 students respectively. Both are “Renaissance” charters, meaning they operate in place of District neighborhood schools. Rather than using a lottery, Renaissance charters must accept all students in their catchments.

It is not clear whether Universal officials will appeal the non-renewal decision to the Charter Appeal Board in Harrisburg, a step that could kick off a lengthy review process. But in a statement after the vote, a Universal spokesperson said the nonprofit would “defend” its schools “vigorously,” contending that their schools are “outpacing many of the School District of Philadelphia schools in our respective peer groups … and meeting the benchmark in organizational structure and finances.”

District assessments tell a much different story about both schools, however, indicating that Bluford and Daroff have consistently fallen well short of District standards on multiple academic and administrative fronts.

According to reports from the Charter Schools Office, Bluford and Daroff have underperformed their peers on academic measures. District assessments show that over the last four years, both have fared poorly when compared to “similar” schools. Likewise, on management measures, both Bluford and Daroff earned a “does not meet standards” rating – the District’s lowest – for finances and administration.

At both schools, classroom observers noted “mixed” levels of quality instruction and student engagement. The District’s assessments also point to poor board practices, including ethically questionable actions such as board members using school buildings for private charity events.

On Thursday, the board approved the non-renewals without comment. Only one board member cast a vote in favor of Universal: Julia Danzy voted to leave Bluford open. The vote to close Daroff was unanimous.

Universal alleges ‘bias’

Universal officials have questioned the objectivity of District assessments. Before Thursday’s vote, Universal superintendent Penny Nixon testified that “bias” on the part of the Charter Schools Office may have skewed its findings. Nixon did not elaborate on her allegation, but requested a postponement of the non-renewal vote, saying that the schools deserved more time to craft an answer to concerns.

“The schools were granted five days to respond,” Nixon said. “Given the current conditions, a response in five days is not fair.”

The board also heard from several Universal staff members and supporters, including Francisco Echevarria, a former parent and current teacher who praised the schools’ ability to build relationships with students and help them “muscle through” problems, even during the coronavirus shutdown.

“Even in this rough time, we’ve been able to maintain our relationships,” said Echevarria.

However, others urged the board to close the schools. Tomea Sippio-Smith of Public Citizens for Children & Youth called the Universal schools’ performance “abysmal” and urged the board to spend its money on more effective options.

“Now, more than ever, the district must consider whether the investments it makes are wise, given its projected $1 billion dollar deficit,” said Sippio-Smith in a statement. “The district cannot afford to pay tuition bills for schools that consistently fail its students.”

After voting to start the non-renewal process, District officials discussed potentially “retiring” the Renaissance program under which Bluford, Daroff, and other District schools that were converted to charters for “turnaround” are required to serve as neighborhood schools, taking students by catchment instead of lottery. The District counts 21 Renaissance schools in an initiative that dates to 2011. Departing board member Chris McGinley said that the District should consider ending the Renaissance program entirely.

“For me, the model represents an abandonment … of the neediest parts of the city,” said McGinley. “It was a bad idea to begin with,” he said, with no mechanism for ensuring that the charters would consistently meet high standards. “There was no accountability built in.”

On Thursday, McGinley said, he’d hoped to introduce a resolution to formally “retire” the Renaissance program, but after discussion, the board agreed that due to procedural obstacles – such as the need to take public testimony – the proposal should be set aside for now. But board member Mallory Fix-Lopez promised to re-introduce a resolution to end the Renaissance program “within six months,” and board President Joyce Wilkerson said she’d support that effort.

“I’d like to see it considered before the end of the year,” said Wilkerson, who added that the District is studying the “validity” of the work being done by Renaissance charters.

Board pushes charter reform, stimulus spending

The board also approved two resolutions on budget issues, one calling for charter school funding reform and the other reiterating the need for full state funding during the coming budget crisis.

The charter resolution says that state law sends a “disproportionate amount of money to charter schools,” including cyber charters, whose funding formula is identical to that of brick-and-mortar schools. It states that “charter school students make up approximately 37.3% of public school enrollment in Philadelphia” but “have received nearly 51% of all new education dollars since 2015.”

The board’s resolution called on state officials to “meaningfully revise the existing inequitable charter school funding systems.”

A proposal from Gov. Wolf to do just that has faced stiff opposition from charter advocates.

On Thursday, Jessica Hickernell, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, chided the board for taking up the question of charter funding when it is still trying to get laptops to students.

“At this point, we are not surprised that the Philadelphia school board is considering this resolution, but we do believe it is distasteful that they are choosing to spend their time attacking charters when so many of their students still aren’t receiving robust continuity of education,” said Hickernell. “It is clear that the board’s priorities are misplaced.”

The board also approved a last-minute “walk-on” resolution calling for more stimulus funding from the federal government and a commitment from the state to use that stimulus to “supplement, not supplant” its own funding.

The stimulus resolution calls for “an additional $200 billion in federal relief for public schools nationwide,” and calls on state lawmakers to avoid a repeat of the post-recession spending cuts made under Gov. Tom Corbett, which gutted school district budgets statewide.

“Pennsylvania school districts have not fully recovered from state cuts to education during the Great Recession,” the stimulus resolution read. “State and federal officials need to prioritize funding for education to avoid a similar school district funding crisis.”

Wilkerson used her introductory comments to highlight the District’s financial concerns and urge action.

“In the span of one month, we have gone from a position of financial stability to one of deep uncertainty,” Wilkerson said, urging Philadelphians to contact federal and state and legislators and ask them to pass a federal stimulus and commit to healthy spending at the state level.

“The budget must keep public education whole,” Wilkerson said. “We need you to reach out now. Tell them, keep education funding at the 2020 level. … if funding from the state falls, the District will face a budget crisis even greater than what we’ve lived through for the last 10 years.”

Protections for transgender students

District officials say they’re taking steps to protect transgender students who do not want their parents to see that they are using a new name.

The problem arose when trans students and teachers discovered the challenge of getting Google Classroom to allow students to change their name in the computer system without exposing the change to parents or others who may not support the student’s choice. Correcting the issue means the District can remain in compliance with Policy 252, meant to “ensure safety, equity, and justice for all students regardless of gender identity or gender expression.”

“We’ve solved the technical problem,” said Superintendent William Hite. “Now we’re trying to make sure we don’t create an additional problem … for the child who did not want their parent to know that they’re using a different name.”

Board member Mallory Fix-Lopez said that ensuring that students see the name they want to see is no small matter; students do better academically and socially when their preferred names and pronouns are used, she said.

“This is something that has been eating at me,” said Fix-Lopez, thanking Hite and his team for tackling the problem. “If I’m feeling this way, I can only imagine how a student might feel.”

But teacher Maddie Luebbert said the District isn’t doing enough for LGTBQ staff and students. Policy 252 lacks a clear complaint process or enforcement mechanism, Luebbert said, and staff members need better training in LGBTQ issues. “Please enforce Policy 252. Strengthen your commitment to queer people in our schools.”

Classroom modernization

Officials approved $18.2 million for “classroom modernization” to be done over the summer. The project will upgrade 147 classrooms in 11 elementary schools: Gompers, Cayuga, Key, Sharswood, Ellwood, Fox Chase, Welsh, Pollock, Kelly, Marshall, and the Overbrook Educational Center. The work is to advance the District’s goal of improving literacy-based learning for young students.

Several board members expressed concern about the District’s capacity to manage the work, including Fix-Lopez, who worried that projects started this summer may not be finished by September, forcing the District to shuffle students through various “swing spaces,” as it did during the Ben Franklin High/Science Leadership Academy fiasco.

“I think it’d be irresponsible for us to put ourselves in that situation,” said Fix-Lopez. “For me, it’s not an issue of modernization … it’s an issue of capacity at this time.”

But others countered that now is a good time to show students that the District can make progress.

“It’s almost irresponsible … to back off anything that promotes academic achievement,” said board member Maria McColgan. “I’d like to see it go forward … in a safe way.”

Hite said that the District’s new project management firm will help ensure that the summer’s work goes smoothly. His team has assessed its own capacity, and “we have found that it is possible to deliver this project,” said Hite. Among other things, he said, the work will include cleaning up lead and asbestos where needed.

“Of all the things we do, these types of modernizations become the most transformational, educationally,” Hite said.

The modernization project was approved 6-3, with Fix-Lopez, Wayne Walker, and Angela McIver opposing. Funds will come from the District’s recent bond issue, not its operating budget.

City Council to have hearing and vote on Board of Ed nominees Friday

2020-04-29T13:26:14+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s City Council will hold a virtual hearing Friday morning on Mayor Kenney’s nominations to the Board of Education before voting on them at Council’s scheduled 11 a.m. meeting.

The mayor renominated eight of the current nine members and chose Ameen Akbar to replace Board Vice President Wayne Walker, who is stepping down for personal reasons.

Under the City Charter, a new board must be seated on May 1. This year marks the first time that City Council will have a chance to weigh in on the mayor’s choices. That change was made when the local board was reconstituted in 2018 after the District spent nearly two decades being governed by the state-dominated School Reform Commission.

After the mayor selected Akbar, board member Christopher McGinley announced that he also would step down on April 30. Kenney has not yet chosen a replacement for McGinley and has asked the Education Nominating Panel to reconvene and submit a new list of names.

The panel is charged with vetting candidates and giving the mayor three names for each vacancy, which it did in February when it submitted the names of the eight current members who wanted at that point to return, including McGinley, plus 19 others.

Sarah Peterson, communications director for the city’s Office of Education, said the mayor was seeking new names because the panel “did not know about Chris McGinley’s resignation when they considered candidates and made their recommendations … and the mayor wants to make sure they can select nominees with that knowledge by reconvening when practical.”

McGinley has said he will not stay on past April 30, so the board will most likely operate for a time with a vacancy.

The hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. At the regular meeting at 11 a.m, Council members are scheduled to vote on resolutions regarding the board nominees.

But the main item of business for the morning is to consider a revised budget proposal from Mayor Kenney, which is expected to show a sharp decline in expected revenues that will affect city services and the School District. The District has no taxing power of its own and gets most of its revenue from the city and the state. District officials have already announced that its once balanced budget is now anticipating a shortfall of $38 million by fiscal 2022 and $1 billion by fiscal 2025 due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on city and state revenue.

The hearing and meeting will be held virtually and aired on Channels 64 or 40 and live-streamed at www.PHLCouncil.com/watch. Speakers interested in making public comment must call 215-686-3406 by 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, and submit their name, a call-back number, and say whether they are for or against any specific bill or resolution on the agenda. They will be called during the session and will have up to three minutes to speak.

The Board of Education has a full agenda for its scheduled meeting on Thursday evening, including votes on the renewals of several charter schools and a resolution calling for an overhaul of the state’s charter school funding formula.

District to state: Stop austerity before it starts

2020-04-24T04:23:27+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

UPDATED with a statement from Universal Companies on the recommendations not to renew two of their charters

The unprecedented coronavirus crisis could soon put Philadelphia school officials in a familiar position: begging Harrisburg legislators for money.

But District officials say they don’t want that to happen, even as the prospect of a billion-dollar deficit has demolished what had been a balanced budget. On Thursday, the Board of Education used its first budget hearing since the arrival of the global pandemic to urge Pennsylvania officials to keep state education spending robust even as revenues fall and to keep federal stimulus dollars flowing to local school districts.

The pandemic’s hit to the state education budget “has the potential to erase all of the progress we have made over the last eight years,” said Superintendent William Hite.

During Thursday’s hearing, conducted virtually over Zoom and streamed live over the internet and public access channels, officials laid out a raft of unpleasant fiscal projections based on the economic shutdown that the pandemic has triggered. This year’s District budget took a modest hit but is still in the black, they said. But next year’s budget gap could approach $40 million, officials said, and within five years, the District could face a shortfall of as much as a billion dollars.

The looming revenue shortfall could undermine not just the District’s finances but also its fragile gains in academics, staffing levels, and school climate, officials said.

“This is not just about a budget, dollars and cents,” said Board President Joyce Wilkerson. “There are real children’s futures on the line.”

The depth of the fiscal damage to the District will depend in part on whether Pennsylvania legislators choose to maintain the state’s own financial efforts and resist the temptation to use federal education stimulus dollars for state deficit reduction, board members said.

In theory, federal stimulus dollars are meant to supplement state spending, keeping school district budgets at their historic levels even as state revenues fall. But the stimulus law passed in March allows states to use the federal dollars to replace state spending, with the approval of a waiver by the federal Department of Education.

Such a move means lawmakers can balance state budgets, but leaves school districts without new revenues, forcing them to either cut spending or run deficits of their own.

Board asks residents to lobby

During Thursday’s hearing, board members called on Philadelphia residents to immediately start lobbying state officials to use stimulus dollars to “supplement, not supplant” state spending.

“Our public schools have made tremendous strides. … We cannot afford to take steps back,” said student board member Doha Ibrahim, a senior at Lincoln High.

Ibrahim said that she remembers well the hallmarks of the District’s austerity years under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who served from 2011 to 2014: crowded classrooms, deferred maintenance, and schools struggling to provide even the most basic supports. Corbett took office just as two years of post-2008 stimulus money ran out; Pennsylvania had used that money to replace its own spending, and when it disappeared, Corbett made no effort to fill the gap. As a result, state aid to districts plummeted, and to make ends meet, Philadelphia took steps that included laying off all school nurses and counselors.

Students citywide felt the pain of those cuts, Ibrahim said, and she urged the board to avoid repeating those lean years at all costs.

“We have spent much of our time in classrooms with too many students … under leaky roofs,” Ibrahim said. “Honor the class of 2020 by safeguarding the education of all future classes. … Tell them not to send our schools backwards.”

Board members echoed the point. “We need that state money as promised,” said board member Mallory Fix-Lopez.

Board member Julia Danzy urged “every person in Philadelphia” to tell state officials to maintain their education spending.

“If we do not raise our voices now, the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis will be devastating to public education in Philadelphia. We have already lived through this, and we can’t afford to do it again,” said Danzy.

“Our state officials cannot be allowed to use these [federal stimulus] dollars to replace state spending,” she said.

CARES Act stimulus

Right now, under the stimulus bill known as the CARES Act, Pennsylvania is in line to receive more than $524 million in federal K-12 education stimulus funds. It also includes $104 million from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, which can be used at all education levels.

The CARES Act calls for those funds to be distributed to school districts statewide by formula, based on a mix of demographics and historic spending. Philadelphia is due for at least $116 million of that money.

But although the CARES Act nominally requires states to maintain their own spending, it also includes a critical clause allowing states to reduce it. Under this act, any state with a “precipitous decline in financial resources” – a category that in 2021 will surely include all 50 states – can apply to the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver that relieves it of any obligation to maintain state financial efforts.

Whether Pennsylvania will seek such a waiver is unclear, District officials and advocates said. Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said the District had reached out to Harrisburg repeatedly but had failed to get a clear sense of the state’s plans for handling fiscal issues.

“We made several attempts to find out,” Monson said. “We’re on our own.”

But local advocates, mindful of Pennsylvania Republicans’ reaction to the 2008 recession, are girding for battle.

Under GOP leadership, the state’s response to the 2008 economic slowdown was to cut taxes and slash spending on education of all kinds. Reynelle Brown Staley of the Education Law Center said her group believes that the austerity-driven strategies of the Corbett years should not be repeated.

“We definitely do not want to repeat the mistakes of the last recession, when federal funds were used to supplant state aid and education funding was slashed for every district across the state,” said Staley. “It took nearly a full decade to recover from those cuts.”

Staley said ELC will be pushing to stop Pennsylvania from using federal dollars to reduce its own spending.

“We want to ensure that Pennsylvania does not request such a waiver,” Staley said in a statement. “The state and the federal government should be combining their resources so that more money – not less – is available to under-resourced school districts.”

National advocates are taking a similar tack. A coalition of major organizations brought together under the banner of the National Education Association – including heavy hitters representing teachers, principals, and superintendents – has been calling for an additional $200 billion in federal education stimulus. The coalition is worried by the CARES Act’s lack of what are known as “maintenance of effort” protections.

Among the NEA’s requests: “Any [new] funding must include strict protections related to ‘supplement, not supplant’ and ensure that a high percentage … end up at the local level.”

After Thursday’s budget hearing, City Councilwoman Helen Gym released a statement vowing to avoid a repeat of the Corbett years.

“Following the Great Recession, school districts across the Commonwealth suffered drastic and draconian cuts,” Gym wrote. This time around, the pandemic’s “inevitable” budget impact “must not compromise the strides we have made. Any state budget that does not fully fund each and every district is unacceptable.”

And earlier this week, a statewide coalition of dozens of advocacy groups and educators’ organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and the Urban League of Philadelphia issued a letter to Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, endorsing the NEA’s call for a major new education stimulus package.

“A $200 billion emergency response for K-12 schools, as recently recommended by a coalition of national educational organizations, is critical,” said the letter, co-authored by the Education Law Center.

“The COVID-19 school closures revealed the inequities in the state’s education system, as some districts have been able to transition to full online instruction seamlessly, while other districts lack the resources to do so,” the group wrote. “These inequities will only worsen without a strong federal response.”

Growing deficits expected

The short-term impact of the coronavirus shutdown on the current District budget appears relatively modest so far, officials said. The shutdown has reduced some 2019-20 revenue, but also some costs, such as those of cleaning buildings or transporting students.

Some additional revenue information for the current fiscal year is still forthcoming, Monson said, including estimates of this year’s city school tax revenue.

But for now, Monson said, the District anticipates losing about $64 million in 2019-20 revenue, mostly from lost business taxes. But it also anticipates saving about $51 million in costs. Overall, Monson said the District expects to end the 2019-20 budget year with about $13.2 million less than expected, but with a healthy fund balance of about $140 million.

From there, projected deficits rise steeply, with costs increasing and tax revenues expected to decline dramatically for the city and state alike as a result of the pandemic. Monson said the District’s budget gap could be $38 million in 2020-21, $240 million the year after that, and $1 billion by 2025.

That’s in sharp contrast with the District’s pre-corona fiscal outlook, which as recently as March – “one brief, shining moment,” Monson said ruefully – anticipated surpluses around $160 million in each of the next five years.

Hite said that his message to Harrisburg will be that it is essential to protect “the financial stability we’ve created.” When Hite arrived in 2012, the District was already in a fiscal crisis triggered by Gov. Corbett’s 2011 budget cuts, which took $1 billion out of K-12 public education statewide. Philadelphia absorbed about a quarter of that hit.

This time around, Hite said, District supporters can try to stop the looming financial crisis before it forces the District to make painful cuts to academic programs or student supports.

“We’re still in a space to advocate before making lots of hard decisions,” Hite said.

District officials have a few modest options for saving revenue, such as looking for ways to take advantage of the current low oil prices, Monson said. He said the District is reviewing all manner of contracts and spending plans to determine what’s “mission critical” and what can be cut.

But the District will also be facing new and rising costs in other areas.

“Our two largest labor contracts expire in August,” Monson said; negotiations are underway with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union 32BJ, but their new deals are on the list of unknown costs ahead.

To fill gaps, member Angela McIver called on the board to explore “non-traditional” revenues, such as requiring major nonprofits to make the large “payments in lieu of taxes” known as PILOTS. About $794 million in Philadelphia real estate is exempt from property taxes by virtue of being owned by nonprofits, including universities and government. For years, local advocates – including, at times, Mayor Kenney – have argued that these organizations should pay more, but without success.

McIver said the board should consider putting its shoulder to that wheel.

“I would love to encourage the District and the board to have really open conversation with the community [about revenue],” McIver said. “We may be thinking very narrowly about how we move forward …. PILOTS should be put back on the table.”

But the biggest financial boost for the state and the District alike, officials and advocates say, would be more federal stimulus.

Additional stimulus is being debated in Washington, D.C., as are various adjustments to statutory requirements for special education spending and career and technical training. But so far, the total amount of education stimulus provided nationwide is $13.5 billion, a fraction of the $79 billion in education stimulus provided by the Obama administration in 2009.

ELC’s Staley said that the state and its school districts deserve a stimulus plan that fully addresses student and school district needs and doesn’t force administrators to make painful budget cuts in the name of austerity.

“The one sure way of preventing [a fiscal disaster] is with a robust Phase 4 package of aid to states and to schools from the federal government,” Staley said. “We and our allies have been urging Pennsylvania’s elected officials to send a unified message to Washington that a larger round of federal aid is desperately needed to ensure students don’t suffer immeasurable losses.”

Contention over charter costs

After the budget hearing, the board held a joint meeting of its committees on academics and on facilities and operations to preview and discuss items that it will vote on April 30.

On the agenda for next week are votes on the renewals of six charter schools and the relocation of another. But the board has also scheduled a resolution that calls for an overhaul in state charter funding, saying that the current formula “requires districts to send more money to charter schools than is needed to operate their programs.”

Before the pandemic hit, there was a growing statewide movement among districts seeking charter funding reform, and many school boards had adopted such resolutions. Gov. Wolf laid out a charter reform agenda last summer that included a formula overhaul and backed it up in his budget address in February.

Monson’s pre-pandemic budget assumptions for the next five years were that Wolf’s proposal would be adopted, which helped account for his prediction of robust ongoing fund balances for the next five years.

Such a massive change in the charter law was always a long shot in the Republican-dominated state legislature, but the pandemic-induced crisis has pretty much pulled any hope for action on that issue off the table. Monson’s new projections assume that the Wolf administration’s attempts at charter reform will not succeed and that charter payments, particularly for special education, will continue to rise.

Reflecting the acrimony over this issue – with charters and districts fighting over inadequate education dollars – Laurada Byers, founder of the Russell Byers Charter School, urged the board to drop the resolution.

“I urge you to immediately withdraw this resolution,” she said. “In this moment of unprecedented pain and calamity, it is inappropriate and absurd that the school board of Philadelphia would propose on its agenda the passage of this divisive resolution.”

Board member Maria McColgan, whose children attend charter schools, had urged that the resolution be toned down.

“I agree there are major issues with the law … but we don’t need inflammatory language,” she said.

Amid the controversy and the crisis, the board plans to vote on the futures of six charter schools at its April 30 meeting.

The Charter Schools Office is recommending five-year renewals, with conditions, of Northwood Academy, Community Academy, Imhotep Academy, and People for People Charter School. It is recommending that the board not renew two schools run by Universal Companies – Universal Daroff and Universal Bluford.

Christina Grant, head of the CSO, said that Community and Northwood mostly met or approached academic standards, as well as metrics for organization and financial stability. Imhotep, she said, which the board granted a one-year extension in 2019 to turn itself around, has done well since it was taken over by the Sankofa Management Team.

Citing low academic achievement, it wants People for People to drop its high school and operate as a K-8 school.

The two Universal schools, Grant said, suffer from inconsistent academics and myriad operational and fiscal problems.

The charter office has recommended nonrenewals for other Universal schools as far back as 2016, including Vare Middle and Audenried High schools. But they remain open.

UPDATE On Friday, Universal issued a statement about the nonrenewal recommendations, saying it didn’t receive the recommendations before they were made public and calling them “inequitable.”

“We will address and defend vigorously our academic growth and improvement, organizational structure and stability as an Education Management Organization against the Charter’s office recommendation for Universal Bluford and Universal Daroff.” END UPDATE The office is also recommending approval of a proposed relocation of the Laboratory Charter School from three sites in Northern Liberties and Overbrook to two locations, one in North Philadelphia and one in East Falls, which would house grades 6-8.

Last year, Lab Charter proposed relocating its entire K-8 operation to East Falls. After stiff opposition from the community, the board decided then to postpone its consideration of the move “indefinitely.”

This new proposal would limit the East Falls campus to grades 6-8, but local residents are still opposed.

Carla Lewandowski told the board that the charter school potentially could pull students from Thomas Mifflin, the neighborhood elementary school, which is under capacity but has been steadily increasing its enrollment. If Lab Charter cuts into that trend, “this can result in stranded costs to the School District of $3.7 million,” Lewandowski said. “Continuing to grow and improve District-managed schools and attracting students back to great schools near where they live would also mitigate these fiscal challenges for the District.”

The Board’s action meeting will take place virtually at 5 p.m next Thursday, April 30.

Board of Education to hold virtual committee meeting and a budget hearing this week

2020-04-20T22:13:14+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

UPDATE: The Board now says that, at the budget hearing, as many speakers as can be accommodated by 4:45 will be allowed to speak. (The budget hearing will start at 3 p.m. with a presentation by Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, so more than 30 minutes might be available for live testimony.) At the joint committee meeting, 30 minutes will be allotted for speakers. All speakers at both sessions are asked to limit remarks to 2 minutes.

The Board of Education will hold one joint meeting for its Finance & Facilities and Student Achievement & Support committees on Thursday, April 23, beginning at 5 p.m. Prior to that meeting, a budget hearing will be held at 3 p.m.

Fifteen slots will be available at each meeting for members of the public to join via the videoconferencing app Zoom. An unlimited number can submit written testimony, which will be summarized and read by board members, according to a board press release.

People who wish to speak at the budget hearing must register by 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 22, by submitting a form found here, emailing schoolboard@philasd.org, or leaving a voicemail at 215-400-5959.

People who wish to speak at the committee meeting must register by 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 22, by submitting a form found here, or emailing, or leaving a voicemail as above.

Written testimony for both meetings will be accepted through the email and voicemail until 5 p.m. Wednesday.

The meeting will be livestreamed to the public at https://www.philasd.org/schoolboard/action-meetings/live-stream and on Comcast Channel 52 and Verizon FIOS Channel 20. It also will be recorded and posted later on the District’s website.

At the budget hearing, Chief Finance Officer Uri Monson will provide an update on the District’s fiscal position and how it has been affected by the loss of revenue from both the city and the state due to the pandemic. Under the CARES Act, the District is also due for federal aid of at least $116 million, based on the amount coming to Pennsylvania that is due to be distributed under the Title I formula.

But it is unknown whether that or any other forthcoming federal money would be enough to offset the potential losses.

The agenda at the joint committee meeting includes a discussion of the Charter Schools Office’s recommendations on whether to renew several charters. It also will vote on a proposal to relocate Laboratory Charter to East Falls; the neighborhood opposed a similar proposal last year.

“Knowing how essential public participation in board meetings is, the board is trying out Zoom meetings, which allows us to comply with public health guidelines and to simultaneously give community members an opportunity to communicate in real time during meetings,” said Board President Joyce Wilkerson. “We appreciate the support of our families and communities, as we find new ways to conduct the essential business of the School District in these challenging times.”

Two board members, Mallory Fix-Lopez and Julia Danzy, have written an op-ed urging public participation, which is available here.

More information is at https://www.philasd.org/schoolboard/.

Philly charters say Wolf’s budget proposals would devastate them

2020-02-05T11:42:39+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Gov. Wolf’s budget proposals for revamping how charters are reimbursed for special education would be “devastating” for their students, charter operators say, and would especially disadvantage those in Philadelphia, where half the state’s charters are located.

At the same time, traditional public school advocates who support Wolf’s proposed charter formula revisions nevertheless say that his overall revenue increases for education, while a positive step, fall far short of what is fair and what is needed.

Wolf, declining to ask for a tax increase that the Republican legislature has repeatedly shot down in past years, wants to increase the basic education funding formula by $100 million and special education aid by $25 million. In addition to changing the special education reimbursement formula for charters, Wolf also proposes to reduce payments to cyber charters to a flat $9,500 per student statewide. Now, districts pay cyber charters, which are authorized by the state, the same as they do brick-and-mortar charters.

These changes, if accepted, would save districts $280 million. Together with the increases the governor proposed in basic education funding and special ed funding, that would add up to $405 million in additional K-12 funds for school districts.

While supporting the proposed charter reforms, education advocates say they would also like to see a bigger boost in direct state education aid.

“Adopting the governor’s reforms and appropriations would mean that school districts across the state, especially those educating the most impoverished students, will still be forced to make cuts or increase property taxes or both,” said Donna Cooper of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

Education Voters of PA, which also advocates for adequate and equitable education funding, called Wolf’s proposals welcome but insufficient.

“Gov. Wolf’s proposed investments of an additional $100 million in basic education and $25 million in special education funding through the state funding formulas are welcome,” said executive director Susan Spicka. “But alone, they are insufficient to take pressure off of local property taxes to fund education and to ensure that students have the resources in their classrooms that they need to succeed.”

Wolf also proposed an outlay of $1 billion to help repair school buildings across the Commonwealth, partly in response to Philadelphia’s escalating asbestos cleanup and testing crisis that has temporarily closed seven schools this year.

Closing a ‘loophole’

In the charter funding formula, Wolf is proposing to close what many education advocates call a “loophole” that has long been a subject of contention. The charter law and its funding formula have not been significantly revised since enacted in 1997.

While districts receive per-pupil special education allocations from the state in three “tiers” based on the severity and cost of the disability, charter schools get one set amount that is calculated for each district using the district’s actual expenditures. That amount, often three times what districts get for regular education students, is generally far more than the cost of providing services to students with mild disabilities such as speech impediments.

This creates what districts and advocates have called a “perverse incentive” for charters to enroll more special education students with less costly disabilities and pocket, in the case of for-profit management companies, or otherwise divert much of the special education subsidy.

If the change was adopted, Philadelphia would save $80 million to $90 million on its payments to charters, according to Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson. By his calculation, charter schools in the city currently receive that much more money than they need for – or spend on – serving their special education students.

Wolf’s proposal “is an attempt to rightsize the charter reimbursement formula to be based on expenditures and not on an artificial revenue formula,” Monson said.

Philadelphia, he said, spends anywhere from $12,000 to more than $100,000 per student to serve special education students, whose needs range from speech problems to severe mental and physical disabilities that require constant care and placement in private schools. So one reimbursement rate, he said, doesn’t make sense.

The overwhelming majority of special education students in all schools are in the least-expensive tier, he said. But in Philadelphia charters, that tier covers 94% of students in special education, and in the Philadelphia School District, that tier covers 80% of its special ed students. He said 4.5% of charter students in special education are in the second tier and just 1.5% – 163 students – are in the most expensive category.

On average, the District spends $18,000 to $21,000 each to serve its students with mild disabilities. But under the current formula, the charter reimbursement for special education students is $29,000.

“Assume charters spend the same amount [as the District] for those [least-expensive tier] students. … They are making $9,000 to $12,000 per child,” he said.

Although the $29,000 reimbursement doesn’t completely cover the cost of the upper two tiers of disabilities – which average $40,000 and $70,000 per pupil, he said – the excess money for the 94% of charter special ed students in the least-expensive tier more than compensates for that difference, Monson explained.

Wolf’s proposal would send money to charters in three tiers, as is now done for traditional district schools, and “more closely aligns with what the district provides and what the actual costs are,” he said. “That should be the goal.”

He added: “There are [charter] schools that see this as a profit center.”

But Philadelphia Charters For Excellence (PCE), which represents about 40 Philadelphia charter schools, is crying foul. They say Wolf’s proposal takes badly needed money from charters and leaves them with less than what District schools are spending per pupil for their special needs students.

“This proposal from the governor is a heartbreaking attack,” said Amy Hollister, CEO of Northwood Academy Charter School and chair of PCE’s board. “Slashing funds for our most vulnerable students to appease the power brokers is never an effective, ethical or equitable plan. Bottom line, this funding cut would be devastating to tens of thousands of families across Philadelphia and the commonwealth.”

Scott Gordon, head of the Mastery Schools charter network, which is well-regarded for its special education services, said this analysis shows that Philadelphia charter schools would be especially disadvantaged. This is partly because Philadelphia’s special education costs are “dramatically higher than the state average” and the governor’s proposal doesn’t correct for that. Mastery operates more than 20 charters in Philadelphia, most of them converted District schools.

As it stands now, he said, charters would receive between one-half and two-thirds of what District schools get from the state for special education students.

Wolf’s formula “creates two classes of students in the city of students with disabilities and those who attend a charter school would become second-class citizens,” he said.

Monson disagrees with Gordon’s analysis regarding Philadelphia, saying it focuses on their revenues and doesn’t deal with what providing the services actually costs.

“If they were really concerned about funding special education, they would push for a system where they submit costs and we give them money based on that,” he said. That would be complicated to do fairly, he said, but it is preferable to the current system.

The PCE news release pointed out that statewide, public schools as a whole spend just under $5 billion annually on special education, but that only about 22% of this amount, slightly more than $1 billion, is reimbursed by the state.

On this point, the charter and traditional sectors agree – special education costs are rising faster than the state is increasing its aid. Advocates said Wolf’s $25 million proposed increase in special education funding statewide would barely make a dent in helping districts meet escalating costs in that area.

“None of us are spending enough,” Monson said. “There’s no question that there’s not enough money for District or charter schools in Philadelphia. We way underspend for the educational needs of all students, I don’t care what sector.”

Several advocacy organizations, representing six districts and some individual parents, are pressing a fair funding lawsuit against the state to overhaul its entire system for funding education, William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al. Arguments in Commonwealth Court are expected to begin later this year.

“At the end of the day, the legislature is underfunding public education, and we should be together asking it to allocate and appropriate more funding for basic education, for special education, to be able to meet the needs of students across the Commonwealth,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, one of the organizations behind the lawsuit. “Charters and districts are in the same boat of not getting what they need from the state.”

Spicka, from Education Voters for PA, said that Wolf was doing his best “with a legislature that is unwilling to provide the funding that schools need. If they don’t want to raise taxes, they should at least reform the charter law to rightsize money charters get” to better align with their actual expenditures.

PA Schools Work, an umbrella coalition of organizations representing educators and communities, said that even if the charter reforms do not materialize, the governor and legislature should commit to at least a $405 million increase in state aid for school districts. They said that districts are facing at least $455 million in mandated cost increases, including payment into the state pension funds, charter school reimbursements, and fulfilling special education needs.

“Students and communities around Pennsylvania cannot afford budgetary maneuvers that may appear to boost funding but mean no material change in the condition of the Commonwealth’s public education system,” its statement said.

Pension costs put huge burden on District’s budget, report says

2019-11-14T21:21:54+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has released a study showing that pension costs for the Philadelphia School District have increased nearly sixfold in less than a decade, from $28 million in 2010 to $154 million, significantly adding to the District’s financial woes.

The District’s payments into the plan, once they were offset by partial state reimbursements, now account for 15% of its payroll costs and 5% of its total budget.

School District payments to the state pension system, known as the Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS), are mandated under state law. And the amounts needed to keep the fund solvent are affected by economic conditions and legislative decisions.

The high payments, the report said, are “making up for years of low funding levels, investment returns that failed to meet expectations, and unfunded benefit increases.” Due to the higher payments, the system is “on a path to improved funding, but the district faces some tough budget decisions as a result.”

In the report, which focused on Philadelphia, District Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said: “Pension costs affect every investment we make, and the vast majority of the investments you want to make are in people.” Each hiring decision, he said, “is that much more expensive.”

Although costs will continue to rise over the next several years, the rate of increase is expected to slow considerably.

For public school employees, the state and school districts both put money into the fund at about a 1:1 ratio, and the amount of a school district’s contribution is determined by state laws as a factor of each employee’s salary. The money in each fund is managed by the state, and their performance and investment portfolios are available to the public.

Between 2002 and 2003, pension debt started to become positive. Pension debt is the difference between the amount that would be needed to cover all of the pension payments and the current value of the pension fund.

Pension debt is reasonably stable when it reaches $0, meaning that the plan is able to cover all future expenses. The amount in the pension fund can withstand some fluctuations. It is not a crisis to build up some pension debt, but too much could become a problem. Pension debt for the PSERS rose to more than $40 billion by 2016.

The author of the report, Seth Budick, said, “The pension system does not have the funds on hand to cover all of the future payments as of now, but that situation is changing.” It is changing because of major adjustments in the last few years at the state level to require school districts to make higher payments to the pension plan.

In 2000, the ratio of assets to liabilities was greater than 100%, so the pension was reasonably secure. Because there was so much money, the state legislature decided to alter the plan and allow school employees to take more out of the system.

They passed Act 9 in 2001, which increased pension benefits for PSERS beneficiaries retroactively. It states: “The increase in benefits for state and school employees provided herein will in effect allow them for the first time to share in the outstanding investment performance of the funds.”

But that “outstanding performance” would not last for long. The dot.com bubble burst, and then the Great Recession hit, decreasing the value of the pension plan by billions of dollars.

In 2015, Greg Mennis from Pew Charitable Trusts testified before the Pennsylvania Senate Finance Committee, saying: “Our research indicates that lower than expected investment returns account for about $25 billion of the increase in unfunded liabilities between 2000 and 2013.”

Mennis also said that funding shortfalls and unfunded benefits had been two other causes for the rapidly increasingly pension debt. “We estimate that these two factors – which reflected choices made by policymakers – account for more than half and approximately $41 billion of the recent increase in the state’s pension debt,” he said.

The graph below was provided with his public testimony, and it shows the four causes of unfunded liability or pension debt.

In the midst of the Great Recession, the state legislature had to act to maintain the security of the pension fund. Between 2005 and 2011, school districts across the Commonwealth were only making 20%-40% of the necessary payments, and the pension debt increased dramatically.

In light of this problem, Pennsylvania legislators passed Act 120 in 2010, which reduced pension benefits for newly hired employees. As is evident from the graph, payments into the plan also started to increase significantly.

Additionally, in July 2019, the state restructured the pension plans for new employees “with a view towards lowering costs and reducing risks,” according to the report. Under the new structure, employees choose between three different plan options.

“The school district’s pension payments are at historically high levels now, exerting a large impact on the overall budget for the school district and are projected to continue to increase gradually in coming years,” said Budick.

The School District addressed the issue of pension payments in its 2018-2019 budget (page 27), calling it “a major cost driver” and saying “retirement contributions are a State-mandated expenditure over which the School District has no control. The employer contribution rate for PSERS, which is set forth in State law, has been growing drastically in recent years, causing a drain on District resources.”

Seven big takeaways for education in the new Pa. budget

2019-06-29T00:36:55+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

As Pennsylvania lawmakers finalized this year’s budget, a flurry of hotly-debated education proposals have been decided.

Below are the latest updates on seven major education issues — from funding to charters, school security to teacher evaluations — that made headlines in Harrisburg over the last few months.

No bump for the lowest-paid teachers

In Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget address, he called for a salary increase for the lowest-paid public school teachers in the state, saying they “have too often been getting the short end of the stick.”

Wolf wanted to raise the minimum annual salary for teachers from $18,500 — which was set in the 1980s — to $45,000.

Across the state, 180 out of 500 Pennsylvania school districts would have received money.

The Wolf administration estimated the change would affect about 3,200 teachers, school nurses, counselors and other professional staff members — many in rural parts of the state. It did not include charter school teachers. The cost was estimated at nearly $14 million — a relatively small amount in the state’s education budget.

But Republican leaders and the Pennsylvania School Boards Association warned that bumping up the minimum salary could lead to a ripple effect and higher salaries for all teachers, which would be funded by local taxpayers.

And some lawmakers expressed concern about how the salary money wouldn’t follow the state’s new student-weighted formula. Still, the proposal did receive some bipartisan support. And the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, plans to advocate for the proposal in the fall.

“We are disappointed, but we are not defeated,” said PSEA spokesman Chris Lilienthal, adding that the salary push is relatively new in Pennsylvania. “Sometimes it takes a little bit longer for really big ideas to get across the finish line.”

During a new conference on Friday afternoon in the Capitol rotunda, Wolf echoed that idea.

Status: Not part of the budget package; could return in the fall.

More years in schools

Pennsylvania will raise the number of years that students are required to spend in schools.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

Dissent among school board members over potential sale of Belmont charter school

2019-05-31T04:43:32+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated (6/3/19): The conditions that Belmont Elementary Charter School signed in order to renew its charter are now included at the bottom of this article.

The Philadelphia Board of Education denied the revised charter school application from American Paradigm schools on Thursday night and unanimously renewed three other charters.

Another charter, Belmont Elementary Charter School, was approved with conditions, but with strong dissent from some board members. The school has proposed to buy the District building it is now renting. Belmont has been operating without a signed charter agreement since 2017 due to disagreements with the District over the conditions it has now agreed to.

“I object,” said school board member Chris McGinley, referring to Belmont’s renewal. “And I’ll be voting no, because the terms and conditions, while they don’t specifically refer to the sale of the building, this is all part of a deal that will obligate the board later to sell that building.”

The school, run by the Belmont Charter Network, would use a nonprofit to buy the building from the District. It’s valued at $2.4 million, and Belmont will buy it for $2.8 million. In the process, the District will unload the remaining debt on the building’s construction – roughly $1 million. Financially, it seems like a fine deal for the District.

Board member Lee Huang, who voted in favor of the renewal, said, “It is my understanding that the transaction is contingent on the renewal.”

But the charter has a catchment area, so it functions like a neighborhood school. If it were to lose its charter, the District would lose that neighborhood school and have to buy or rent the building back – or take on millions in debt to build a new school.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to sell that building, but further, I don’t think it’s ever appropriate to sell a neighborhood,” McGinley said. “By selling the building, we are permanently removing our presence in that neighborhood.”

McGinley and Mallory Fix-Lopez voted against the renewal.

Joyce Wilkerson called the sale “problematic” before voting for the renewal. She said it’s “essential” to ensure that if the charter closes, “the School District have the ability to get the school back.”

“We have any number of charters that could come before us making the same kind of demand,” Wilkerson said, referring to charters renting District buildings. “We should consider a policy that we will not be selling District buildings with catchment areas.”

The charters renewed unanimously were Ad Prima, Esperanza Academy, and Mariana Bracetti Academy.

Members of the watchdog group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools testified against the sale of Belmont’s building to a charter management organization that has Michael Karp on its board. Karp is a longtime University City real estate developer and treasurer of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority – a state oversight body that holds Philadelphia’s purse strings in that it must approve or reject the city’s five-year financial plans. Karp sat on the old Philadelphia school board, though he was removed in 1999 by Mayor John Street, who called him a “destructive force.”

At the meeting, the board also unanimously approved a fiscal 2020 budget of $3.4 billion, representing a 7.1 percent increase over this year. Most of the increase is due to higher charter school payment costs and negotiated salary increases for members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. But there were several new expenses, including additional teachers for English learners and school nurses and a push to give students more math support in the early grades along the lines of the literacy initiative.

The District will end the fiscal year with a small surplus, but expects to begin falling behind after that. By 2023, without additional revenue sources, officials anticipate a $262 million shortfall. Two bills pending in City Council are aimed at reducing the property tax burden on homeowners. If passed, they could cost the District $500 million of expected revenue in the next five years.

Under law, the board must approve a budget by the end of May.

American Paradigm’s proposed new charter denied

Tacony Academy at St. Vincent’s reapplication by American Paradigm was voted down unanimously after an evaluation by the Charter Schools Office, citing a revised budget that contains “inconsistencies” in the cost of staff, fees and benefits.

The reapplication added to the instructional and assessment methods but did not “comprehensively” show how the academic model will succeed in improving test scores, according to the Charter Schools Office. Although the school submitted curricula for many classes that were missing in the original application, the social studies curriculum was still not aligned to several state standards.

The staffing levels remained insufficient, the charter office said. And they cited concerns that American Paradigm Schools, the charter management company, has too much power over the new school’s board when the dynamic should be the other way around. American Paradigm can terminate the management contract if the school’s board hires a principal without the company’s approval or if it does not fire a principal that the company wants out.

Half the charters in the state are located in Philadelphia. Two bills now under consideration in Harrisburg would weaken districts’ ability to regulate charter schools. Board President Joyce Wilkerson urged the audience to oppose the bills, SB 356 and 357.

Superintendent William Hite, who traveled to Harrisburg recently with other urban superintendents to plead for more state revenue and rally against the legislation, agreed.

“We implore members of the General Assembly to reject these bills,” Hite said.

School Board President Joyce Wilkerson and Superintendent William Hite joke during introductory remarks (Photo: Greg Windle)

Controversy over professional development contracts

The board added dollars to contracts with the colleges of education at Temple University, Drexel University, and the University of Pennsylvania to run teacher residency programs. It also expanded a contract with the Relay Graduate School of Education, though Relay is not an accredited graduate school of education in Pennsylvania. Collectively, these contracts will provide residencies for up to 75 teachers at a cost of $637,500, an increase from the current $425,000.

Danika Nieves is a first-year teacher at Edison High School – one of a cohort of 20 teacher residents under Relay. Nieves testified about her problems with Relay’s residency and demanded that the school board deny them another contract. She said “nearly all” of her instructors are Teach for America alumni “with little classroom experience” and all have a “charter school background.”

“The program is geared toward training teachers to deliver pre-packaged lessons in privatized schools with top-down, scripted curriculums,” Nieves said. “Throughout the year, Relay instructors had us spend hours giving instructions to the wall or calculating the number of hours lost if kids don’t move around the classroom in perfect boot-camp formation. And even doing teacher aerobics set to music, where we practiced standing on our tiptoes, crouching down to help a student and popping up like a groundhog to monitor the rest of the class.

“I found myself wondering when the gimmicks would end.”

Alaina Harper, Relay’s dean, told the board that her school’s program produces “quality, diverse teachers who are committed to our schools and are entering and staying in our profession.” The District has also said that Relay has helped to recruit and retain more minority teachers. Harper said that’s part of Relay’s model, and they do it “consistently.”

“We ask you to support and continue this partnership, because it’s important that all teachers understand the cultural needs of our students,” Harper told the school board.

Nieves found other Relay practices “troubling” for socioeconomic reasons.

“We were shown many videos of ideal teaching that included a lot of test-prep drills, chanting, boot-camp-esque classroom management, and telling kids to track the speaker as though we would be training dogs rather than children,” Nieves said. “I couldn’t help but wonder whether these tactics would be acceptable at schools on the Main Line.

“They wouldn’t. So they shouldn’t be acceptable for kids in Philadelphia.”

“When I questioned Relay’s obsessive focus on data collection at the expense of a more holistic teaching practice, a Relay instructor told me that I might want to consider a different career,” Nieves said. “I love my students, and I don’t want to consider a different career, but I do hope the board will reconsider Relay.”

Neubauer Foundation funding professional development

The District will now fund nine new principals entering the PhillyPLUS Residency, awarding $90,000 to The New Teacher Project (TNTP) for the work. The District’s costs are lower because most costs are covered by the Neubauer Family Foundation, which also funds TNTP.

The foundation is also covering most of the costs of another contract providing professional development to new assistant superintendents provided by New Leaders Inc. McGinley was the lone dissenting vote. It will cost the District up to $295,000 and will “include Communities of Practice sessions, learning walks, school visits, one-on-one coaching and sustainability action planning.”

Neubauer also gave the school board a grant of $24,000 to train board members in the Accelerate Board Capacity Summer Institute run by the Harvard Business School and developed by the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS), of which the District is a member.

Membership in the Council of Great City Schools

The District is now authorized to pay its annual membership fee of $50,000 to the Council of Great City Schools – a national organization that provides a forum for urban school districts to share promising practices and address common concerns while providing “legislation, communications, research, and technical assistance.”

The organization shares Hite’s three anchor goals; its fourth goal has not been stated explicitly by the District: Never run a deficit.

“Staff with responsibilities for curricula, research and testing, finance, operations personnel, technology, legislation, communication, and other areas confer regularly under the auspices of CGCS to share concerns and solutions and discuss what works in boosting achievement and managing operations,” the board resolution reads.

Contracts galore

The District will add the law offices of Joel Kofsky, a local personal injury attorney, to the already long list of outside law firms it has retained to work on an “as-needed basis” for an unspecified amount. The board hired Lyneer Staffing Solutions to provide secretaries, clerks, and paralegals to the Office of General Counsel for an annual payment of $70,000. And the board approved payment of more than $10 million to hire PMA Management Corp. through 2027 to audit workers’ compensation claims – work that PMA has been doing for the past seven years for the District.

A few local nonprofits and universities got contracts to provide programming for homeless students over the summer and to pregnant and parenting students throughout the school year.

The board added CherryRoad Technologies to the 10-year, $49 million contract to implement the new Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning by 2028. CherryRoad will be paid nearly $5 million, bringing the new total to $54 million.

Foundations Inc. was hired for $190,00 to provide professional development on “support culture, climate, and instruction” at Roosevelt Elementary School, located on East Washington Lane, near Chew Avenue. The company was hired because over the last three school years, the school has made only “incremental” gains on the School Performance Review, moving from 2 percent up to 16 percent. The school’s principal will be trained in “distributive leadership” while the teachers will be trained “in the creation of high-quality assessments.”

Hobsons was awarded a five-year $2.7 million contract for Naviance, an online college and career readiness platform already in use throughout the District. It can send transcripts and letters of recommendation to the over 2,000 colleges and universities involved, along with providing “career exploration, academic planning and college preparation.” The District said its use has led to an increase in the number of black and Latino students applying to college.

The board also approved smaller contracts for repairs and renovations in various schools. And it purchased $530,000 in furniture for the three schools, all serving K-8, that have most recently been placed into the new turnaround program, called the System of Great Schools: Avery Harrington Elementary, Alain Locke Elementary, and Robert Lamberton Elementary.

Belmont’s conditions

The following list of conditions is excerpted from the school board’s resolution to renew Belmont Elementary Charter School:

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Charter School has agreed to comply with certain performance requirements (“Performance Requirements”) as set forth below. Failure to comply with the Performance Requirements may be a basis for revocation or nonrenewal of the Charter School’sCharter.

1. The Board of Trustees shall ensure that all trustees, officers, administrators, and the immediate family of trustees, officers and administrators of the Charter School comply with the Ethics Act and the Pennsylvania Nonprofit Corporation Law of 1988(“Nonprofit Law”). The Board of Trustees shall adopt a Conflicts of Interest policy thatcomplies with the Ethics Act and the Nonprofit Law.

2. The Board of Trustees shall elect Board officers, shall hold Board members to established term lengths and limits, shall ensure that the Board has the minimum required number of Board members, and shall fill open Board seats in a timely fashion, in accordance with the Charter School’s Bylaws.

3. The Board of Trustees shall use its best efforts to meet at least once during each full month when the Charter School is in session during the Term of the Charter. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Board of Trustees shall meet to take action in a timely manner in accordance with the Charter, Applicable Laws (as defined in Article II, Section A.1), and the Charter School’s Student Code of Conduct, but no less frequently than necessary to act on student discipline matters within forty-five (45) days after any infraction or hearing as required by Applicable Laws (as defined in Article II, Section A.1).

4. The Board of Trustees shall adopt an Admissions Policy and Process which complies with the Public School Code and Charter School Law. Additionally, the Admissions Policy and Process:

a. shall include provisions on: (i) application deadlines; (ii) enrollment preferences, order and allocation of preferences, and methods by which preferences would be identified; (iii) student recruitment procedures and communications, including details on methods to be used to recruit students Citywide or in an applicable attendance zone, and to monitor any specified enrollment targets; (iv) lottery dates, and (v) communication of lottery results, in a form and with provisions that are acceptable to the Charter Schools Office;

b. shall provide that the application will be made clearly and plainly available on the Charter School’s website in English, Spanish, and any additional language the Charter School deems appropriate without any barriers to enrollment requiring technology;

c. shall provide that families have at least four (4) weeks to complete and return enrollment packets post-lottery acceptance; with exceptions made for extenuating circumstances for families with language barriers;

d. shall provide that an ordered, up-to-date waitlist be continuously maintained, reflecting at any given time the next eligible student to be offered admission in each grade served by the Charter School, identifying any applicable preference(s) for each student, and indicating the date any student is removed from the waitlist with the reason for removal;

e. shall provide that if seats open during the school year for any grade served by the school or between school years for grades served other than the initial grade, the Charter School shall accept new students from the waiting list in appropriate order for particular grades or new applicants if there are no applicants for that grade on the waiting list; and

f. shall provide that the Charter School shall provide a copy of its current waiting list at any time during the Term of the Charter within ten (10) business days after request by the Charter Schools Office.

5. The Board of Trustees shall submit to the School District by August 1st of each year during the Term of the Charter as part of the Charter School’s Annual Report, or separately if not included in the Charter School’s Annual Report, evidence that all professional staff providing educational services at the Charter School have all necessary licenses, certifications, qualifications and credentials required by the Charter and Applicable Laws, including without limitation the seventy-five percent (75%) certification requirement in accordance with the Charter School Law, and identify the number of all certified special education and English as a Second Language personnel with direct instruction responsibilities.

6. The Board of Trustees shall ensure that (i) all employees have required federal and state criminal and child abuse background checks during the Term of the Charter;and (ii) copies of such background checks are kept in each employee’s personnel file. Preferably, the Charter School’s annual financial audit will include an annual review of a sample of employee files for appropriate clearances and background checks in any amount repeatedly shall result in the issuance of a Notice of Deficiency to the Charter School.

7. The Board of Trustees shall ensure that required payments to the Public School Employees’ Retirement System (“PSERS”) are made timely. If the Charter School fails to make timely payments to PSERS and that results in a reduction of the School District’s basic education subsidy, the School District shall withhold such reduction in a future monthly per-pupil payment to the Charter School.

8. The Board of Trustees shall submit to the Charter Schools Office signed, complete Statements of Financial Interest, pursuant to guidelines established by the Charter Schools Office. These documents are required by the Ethics Act and the Charter School Law to be completed annually for each trustee on the Board’s roster for that school year.

9. The Board of Trustees shall ensure that the dates, times, and locations of scheduled Board meetings are posted on the Charter School’s website and that any updates to the Board meeting schedule are posted timely. Furthermore, minutes from Board meetings shall be posted on the Charter School’s website within two weeks of approval by the Board of Trustees, but not later than after the conclusion of a second consecutive board meeting after each meeting, and shall remain posted for a minimum of one year from date of Board meeting.

10. The Board of Trustees agree that the Charter School shall participate in the School District’s charter school performance framework and monitoring system (“Charter School Performance Framework”) as set forth in Article X of the Charter;

and be it

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Charter School has agreed to comply with certain conditions for renewal (“Conditions for Renewal”) based on the comprehensive renewal review by the [Charter Schools Office] as set forth below. Failure to comply with the Conditions for Renewal as set forth below may be a basis for revocation or nonrenewal of the Charter School’s Charter.

1. Prior to the execution of the Charter by the School District, the Charter School shall submit to the Charter Schools Office for review and approval the executed lease or sublease and information about renovations, maintenance, and financial responsibilities related to the Charter School’s use of the facilities at 1301 Belmont Avenue, Philadelphia, PA.

2. Prior to the execution of the Charter by the School District, the Charter School shall submit to the Charter Schools Office for review and approval the contract between the Charter School and the Charter School’s management company that accurately reflects all of the duties, services, obligations and liabilities of each party to the other with respect to the operation of the Charter School or services to be provided to the Charter School, including specific provisions on management fees, which shall be approved by the respective governing boards of each entity.

3. Prior to the execution of the Charter by the School District, the Charter School shall submit to the Charter Schools Office a list of the names and addresses of the board members of the Charter School which demonstrates that none of the voting board members of the Charter School serve on the board of Community Education Alliance of Pennsylvania or on the board of any entity with which the Charter School has a contractual agreement.

4. Prior to the execution of the Charter by the School District, the Charter School shall submit to the Charter Schools Office for review and approval evidence of alignment of all of the Charter School’s curricula for K-Grade 12 to Pennsylvania Core Standards;

and be it

FURTHER RESOLVED, the School District and Belmont acknowledge and agree that the Charter School will enroll a maximum of 780 students in Kindergarten through Grade 8 and a maximum of 500 students in Grade 9 through Grade 12 during the Term of the Charter, unless the parties agree in writing to other terms. Under no circumstances will the Charter School request payment from the School District or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for more students than set forth herein nor enroll students in different grades including Kindergarten, without Board of Education approval by action item; and be it

FURTHER RESOLVED, that Belmont has agreed to the following provisions related to the School District’s Charter School Performance Framework:

1. The Charter School agrees to participate in the School District’s Charter School Performance Framework. The Charter School Performance Framework includes an annual assessment of the Charter School’s academic, financial, and organizational performance as well as compliance with Applicable Laws. Organizational performance includes, but is not limited to, a

2. The Charter School agrees to provide or allow to be provided to the School District and the Charter Schools Office all records, including student level academic performance, necessary to properly assess the academic success, organizational compliance and viability, and financial health and sustainability of the Charter School under the Charter School Performance Framework, timely and pursuant to Charter Schools Office procedures.

and be it

FURTHER RESOLVED, that Belmont has agreed to the following provisions related to the School District’s Charter School Performance Framework:

3. The Charter School acknowledges that achieving the performance objectives identified in the Charter School Performance Framework is critical to meeting the needs of public school students in Philadelphia. The Charter School shall actively monitor its own progress towards achieving objectives identified in the Charter School Performance Framework. The Charter Schools Office may also evaluate any or all of the performance domains – academic, organizational and financial – on an annual basis formally. If the Charter School continues to fail to meet standards for academic success, organizational compliance and viability, and/or financial health and sustainability, the Charter School Office review of the Charter School’s admissions and enrollment policies and practices, student discipline practices, special education programming, ELL programming, and Board of Trustees governance in order to assess compliance with the Charter and Applicable Laws, federal, state and local guidance, policies, and Charter Schools Office procedures. Financial performance includes, but is not limited to, a review of the Charter School’s financial health and long-term sustainability, and generally accepted standards of fiscal management. Office may recommend that the Board of Education commence revocation or nonrenewal proceedings against the Charter School.

4. During the Term of the Charter, the Charter Schools Office will limit changes to the Charter School Performance Framework applicable to the Charter School to those required by changes in Applicable Laws or by changes to charter school data availability. The Charter Schools Office will provide notice to charter schools in Philadelphia of any change to the Charter School Performance Framework prior to implementation of such change. The Charter Schools Office would use its best efforts to solicit feedback on changes from Philadelphia charter schools in advance of implementation of changes.

Hite says new budget represents stability, progress, and good fiscal stewardship

2019-03-28T21:11:29+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Update: At tonight’s meeting, the Board of Education called a recess after a raucous protest by the Philadelphia Student Union prompted by a board decision to mandate metal detectors in all District high schools. The school board reconvened privately in a committee room, where they passed the 2019-20 budget.

Public education activist Lisa Haver said the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools would challenge the vote as a Sunshine Act violation. “Governing bodies cannot recess in public and reconvene in private,” she tweeted after the meeting. “Votes have to be cast in public.”

The School District of Philadelphia’s proposed 2019-20 budget, benefiting from additional revenue from both the city and state, includes new investments such as more nurses, 30 additional teachers for English learners, 10 new college and career readiness coordinators, more behavioral health staff and counselors, and an extension of the early literacy initiative to the 5th grade.

Superintendent William Hite and Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson touted the nearly $3.4 billion “lump sum” budget presented Thursday to the Board of Education as representing “fiscal stability” as the District continues to recover after a long stretch of austerity and cutbacks. The 2019-20 fiscal year will end with a fund balance of nearly $130 million, and five-year projections show that a funding shortfall is not anticipated until fiscal 2022.

“When all we talk about are deficits and what to cut and what to close, and what to do without, that creates a … brand that speaks to more people than just us,” Hite said at a briefing for reporters. “We want the message to be the investments we are making in schools, the progress we are having in schools, and being good stewards of taxpayer money.”

Citing still-grim statistics – just 7 in 10 District students graduate high school, low percentages of students perform at proficient levels on reading and math PSSAs, and one-fifth of schools are at the lowest performance level, according to the District’s metrics – Hite said: “We still have a long way to go … but we are seeing progress in those things.”

Hite emphasized how the District is moving to his “anchor goals” from his Action Plan 3.0, which include 100 percent graduation rate, 100 percent of students reading proficiently by grade 3, 100 percent of positions filled by great teachers, and adequate funding with zero deficit. The graduation rate has steadily increased since 2014-15, from 65 percent to 69 percent for students in the District, including its alternative schools, which are second-chance schools for would-be dropouts. Among students who attend neighborhood and selective admission schools, not alternative schools, the graduation rate has increased from 74 percent to 79 percent during that period.

Literacy and math proficiency rates for 3rd through 8th graders are rising at a faster rate than for the state as a whole, in most grades. But overall, they are still low – in the 30s for most grades in reading and ranging between 17 and 25 percent for math.

Hite said that the District’s early literacy initiative, in which every K-3 teacher was specially trained and each classroom got a library of books geared to different reading levels, would be extended up to 5th grade. The District is also embarking on a similar initiative for math, “building a strong foundation to improve math teaching and learning,” Hite said, and providing more support for teachers and more math resources.

He also outlined plans to concentrate more services on children with special needs.

“When I talk about children with needs, I’m talking about children … who may be learning English, children who may be impacted with trauma, children who are transitioning into the [School District] who have been [Department of Human Services] system-involved … it is both a process-improvement strategy and a resource strategy.”

He acknowledged that “we have heard from advocates that we have children that are learning [English] that don’t have the supports in the schools that are needed. We have children that have education improvement plans or IEPs that … are not being implemented. We have to ensure that, regardless of where those children are, we have the resources to do those things.”

And he plans to reduce the number of classrooms affected by “leveling” by half. This is the longstanding, but unpopular process of shuffling around teachers in October after actual school-by-school enrollment figures have settled in. Its main purpose is to save money by using teachers most efficiently, adding teachers where needed but also taking them away from other schools.

On the issue of the condition of school facilities, Hite highlighted some building upgrades designed to “inspire creativity, collaboration, and hands-on learning,” and lead paint stabilization in 27 high-priority elementary schools that will be completed by the fall. Larger building repair and stabilization projects are generally done with money from the capital, not the operating, budget.

Hite said he doesn’t anticipate or plan any school closings, citing the District’s infrastructure dilemma: In addition to the sometimes dangerous conditions of many of the aging buildings, some neighborhood schools are bursting at the seams, while others, like Strawberry Mansion, have been losing population, but remain important anchors for residents and students.

He said that in general, the District underestimated overall enrollment growth and is now analyzing the demographics and looking at what it needs to do to accommodate what is happening. Options include building schools, changing school boundaries, combining programs, altering grade configurations in schools, and re-purposing buildings.

Neighborhoods seeing explosive growth include parts of the Northeast, as well as Center City, South Center City, and parts of South Philadelphia.

“For a school to go from 900 to 2,150 in a period of three years is pretty extraordinary,” Hite said, speaking of Mayfair Elementary in the Northeast. Nearby elementary schools, including Pollock and Holme, are also seeing enrollment spurts, he said.

“If you look at that growth, demographers will tell you they wouldn’t have estimated they would have that type of growth,” he said.

According to the five-year plan, which matches anticipated expenditures with expected revenue, the District will maintain small surpluses in 2020 and 2021, but then will see shortfalls – a projected $76 million in 2022, which is expected to balloon to $296 million in 2024.

Monson, however, wasn’t alarmed by those numbers. “There is a reason most other school districts don’t do a five-year plan,” he said. “Almost any other district would look like this.”

And they don’t want to signal a need to raise taxes.

“This is the reality,” he said, “Given what we know today, this is what we want everyone to be aware of so there are no surprises.”

Every other district in Pennsylvania, besides Philadelphia, has its own taxing authority. Philadelphia must rely on City Council and the state government for its revenue.

Under Gov. Wolf, education spending has steadily gone up since the severe cuts under Gov. Tom Corbett. And the city has significantly increased the amount of money it sends to the District, primarily through property taxes, but also through other sources, such as the cigarette and liquor-by-the-drink tax. Monson said that the District “continues to approach” a structurally balanced budget, one in which annual revenues match annual expenditures. He said that expenditures are growing at a 3.4 percent rate while anticipated revenues are going up by 3.1 percent.

Much of the spending, and the increases, however, go to fixed costs such as charter school reimbursements (up by $96 million, largely due to a substantial increase in the per pupil payment rate), pension costs, and debt service, leaving a limited amount for initiatives in schools and classrooms. Salaries and benefits are increasing $68 million over last year.

Pennsylvania continues to have the largest gaps in the country between its wealthiest and poorest districts, with more of the tax burden put on localities than on the state. A little more than one-third of the money spent on schools comes from Harrisburg, compared to a national average of close to half. This has put a greater burden on local communities.

Source: Public Interest Law Center

Lower Merion, just across City Line Avenue, spends more than $25,000 per student, while Philadelphia spends less than $15,000.

A fair funding lawsuit – in which Philadelphia was not a plaintiff but stands to benefit – is challenging Pennsylvania’s system, saying it violates both the state and federal constitutions by not providing all students with an adequate education. It has progressed further in the courts than any previous suit; a trial on the merits is scheduled in Commonwealth Court for summer 2020.

The Board of Education will hold a hearing on the budget on April 25, and District officials will appear before City Council on May 14. The full budget must be adopted by the end of May.

Sorting out the education numbers in Mayor Kenney’s budget

2019-03-09T00:05:01+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In his budget address on Thursday, Mayor Kenney wanted to make it clear that he puts a high priority on education funding, now and in the future.

The mayor announced that he wants the city to contribute $214 million to the School District from its general fund – on top of the local revenue the District gets through taxes the city raises specifically for its needs. Those include the property tax, of which the District gets 55 percent; the use and occupancy tax; the liquor-by-the-drink tax; the school income tax; the cigarette tax; and the 1 percent sales tax surcharge that was enacted in 2014.

Compared to $180 million from the general fund last year, the $214 million is an increase of more than $33 million. The five-year plan anticipates steady increases each year after that.

Altogether, nearly half the District’s annual $3 billion general operating budget comes from local sources, or close to $1.5 billion a year. The rest comes from the state. Revenue sources for the District’s Fiscal Year 2018 are on page 40 of this document.

In total, Kenney said, the city was pledging to give $1.2 billion to the District over the next five years from its own general fund, which is $700 million more than the city had planned to contribute from the general fund as recently as 2018.

“This mayor has made school funding his main priority,” said City Budget Director Anna Adams. “It’s one of the main things the city has invested in.”

But such a city contribution, which can vary from year to year, is a relatively new addition to the city’s school funding repertoire. It was made a regular feature of the city’s share of District spending during the reign of the School Reform Commission, when the District was effectively under state control.

Last year, just after initiating the District’s return to local control and pledging to significantly increase its financial commitment, Kenney tried a different tack – raising the rate of the property tax. That is the city’s largest and steadiest source of funding for the District, accounting for more than half of its local revenue. He wanted to raise the property tax by 6 percent, which he said would have raised an additional $475 million for the District over five years.

But that idea was shot down in City Council, which said reassessments had already resulted in property tax hikes for many homeowners and instead found other ways to make up an anticipated District shortfall starting in fiscal 2022.

Nobody expected Kenney to suggest a property tax rate hike in an election year. So he has instead turned to making a larger contribution to the District from the general fund.

Although Kenney has every intention of fulfilling the promise of his latest five-year plan, that method is less reliable, subject more to political whims than a regular source of dedicated revenue.

Adams said that any funding source, for the District or otherwise, is subject to change by City Council or any mayor.

“Technically, they could … reduce property taxes,” she said. “If you’re making that argument, they could come in and completely wipe out School District funding. It’s highly unlikely; that’s part of why we do a five-year plan.”

Kenney has not been a supporter of another funding source for the District favored by education advocates – ending the 10-year tax abatement for developers. A recent study by Our City Our Schools estimated that the District loses $61 million in revenue a year from the abatement, which most heavily affects the District because it is far more reliant on the property tax than the city government is.

The District’s latest budget documents warn that without significant new funding sources, it will start running a shortfall in 2023.

In a statement, Superintendent Willian Hite called Kenney’s budget plan “bold” and said it “would allow the District to continue the progress we have made to improve facilities, strengthen our hard-fought fiscal stability, and expand access to valuable learning opportunities to all students.”

School board members hear criticism of leveling process

2018-10-04T22:20:29+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The school board’s Finance & Facilities Committee met with the public for the second time on Thursday and got a mouthful of indignation from parents and teachers about the leveling process, which happens at the beginning of October. That’s when teachers and special education assistants are moved between schools based on enrollment needs.

In other words, staff in under-enrolled schools are forced to move to positions at over-enrolled schools. Teachers are notified a week before their move.

The meeting also featured an update on the District’s facilities plan, which includes raises for workers in janitorial services to help the District hire more cleaners in the coming months.

The leveling process eliminated a potential 93 vacancies, leaving the District with roughly 100 vacancies instead of nearly 200. But it’s also used to save money, this year $11 million. That’s 0.4 percent of the District’s annual budget. Teachers and parents alike said this cost-savings was not worth the level of disruption that leveling brought to schools and classrooms.

Efforts to reduce the impact of leveling

The leveling process is managed by the District’s Finance Department, but it has input from several other departments. It adjusts enrollment needs based on a school’s demographics, such as special education students and English learners.

Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, who is in charge of the leveling process, said the District has been gathering more data to predict enrollment more accurately so that vacancies aren’t filled at schools where enrollment is projected to decline. Monson said this reduced the number of positions that had to be leveled after the school year started.

That’s the primary complaint coming from parents and teachers: the leveling occurs after the school year has already begun, often resulting in combined classes, whole new rosters for high school students, and young children meeting a new teacher after they had formed a bond with their first one.

Hannah Sassaman, the parent of a 2nd grader at Penn Alexander, called for an end to the longstanding practice entirely.

“As a mom, investment in a teacher is an investment in the most important relationships and the culture inside a school, which doesn’t form within days, let alone months, and disturbing that culture can be brutal,” Sassaman said. “Leveling drains commitment and predictability in a school, and that lessens parent and family commitment. … It feels like that school is not a place we can rely on.

“As parents, we understand the hard trade-offs, but we also want to prioritize teachers as the most important investment.”

Monson said that the District draws up an initial list of the teachers that they would like to transfer based on actual enrollment in a school, as opposed to predictions, and on student demographics. Then the school’s principals, assistant superintendents, and various administrative offices are given a chance to weigh in on the list. The District then draws up a new list based on those recommendations.

This adjustment process closed a few additional vacancies this year and resulted in 73 fewer teachers having to leave their classrooms.

In the end, 62 schools gained staff and 56 lost staff, for a total of 118 schools that went through some disruption. Ninety-four schools saw no change.

“We’ve been doing this a long time,” said school board member Chris McGinley. “When I was in high school, I lost my English teacher through leveling – and that was the 1970s.”

“This year,” Monson said, “we’ve created a teacher position that’s available to be plugged in where we need them, and we were able to do that in some cases to reduce the impact.”

Educators on the board oppose leveling

School board member Angela McIver, who used to work for Mastery Charter Schools, agreed that leveling is a disruptive process that should be avoided whenever possible.

“I’ve been in schools where leveling has happened,” McIver said, “and I think it’s highly disruptive, especially on the elementary school level. As a teacher, you literally just try to get through that year. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t taught in a classroom understands how disruptive that is. I know this is an incredibly complicated issue, but I feel like we’ve been doing it this way for so long that we’re not willing to think about another way to handle this.”

McIver asked Monson to estimate the academic impacts of leveling, as well as the financial impacts. Monson said he wasn’t sure exactly how to do that, but he would try. He acknowledged that the academic impacts are very real, just difficult to measure.

The board’s other career educator, Chris McGinley, agreed with McIver, pointing out that “we’re the only school district in the state of Pennsylvania that does this.” McGinley served as superintendent in Cheltenham and Lower Merion.

Monson countered by saying that the other districts in Pennsylvania are not as large as Philadelphia and that leveling is common in large cities around the country, though they don’t all use that term for it.

The District has been working in recent years to reduce the number of teachers that are leveled. Monson said that only four schools had gained three or more teachers: Mitchell, Cooke, and Lowell Elementaries, and George Washington High. The schools that lost more than three teachers included Martin Luther King High, Overbrook High, Mastbaum High, and Lamberton Elementary.

Monson added that some teachers were moved for reasons of seniority.

“There are requirements [in the teachers’ contract] that teacher seniority takes precedence,” Monson said. “So if a 5th grade is smaller than anticipated, but the 5th-grade teacher has more seniority than the 2nd-grade teacher, their seniority takes priority and the 2nd-grade teacher gets moved.”

That results in more shuffling around of teachers and can affect more grades.

Board President Joyce Wilkerson wanted to know what makes student enrollment so unpredictable.

Monson gave three reasons: Kindergarten enrollment is not mandatory, so parents tend to find a school relatively late in the process. He said the biggest factor is school choice in general and charter schools in particular. There is also “a general transience in Philadelphia,” he said.

As some parents pointed out, that transience is class-based and benefits those who can afford to move at the expense of those who cannot. Transience also results from families moving because they have been evicted or otherwise need to move due to reasons tied to poverty.

Gentrification and overcrowding

Kieko Glover, who has a daughter at Kearny Elementary School, spent the hour before her testimony rocking her youngest child’s baby carriage back and forth in the audience.

Glover’s eldest child was affected by the leveling, and she says gentrification in her neighborhood, Northern Liberties, has led to more parents choosing charter schools or private schools. And that process has driven “segregation” of the schools in her neighborhood, a concept confirmed by recent studies of school choice systems.

“I’m here because my 1st-grade daughter lost her teacher this week, Ms. Booker, taken away from her classroom through leveling,” Glover said. “I’m here because Kearny has lost teachers every year for the last three years. At the same time, Kearny has made progress — but we are in danger of losing those gains.”

She said that two 2nd-grade classrooms were merged into one to cope with losing the teacher.

“The middle-class, mostly white people who are moving into our neighborhood — they find other options,” Glover said. “These other [charter and private] schools don’t have to deal with teachers being snatched away during the school year. Every year, the District has no problem disrupting our students at Kearny, and then they blame our school when we don’t make enough gains [on standardized tests].

“It’s not fair. These students’ lives are not just numbers on a balance sheet.”

Monson said the District takes changing demographics into account, but many of the things driving those demographics are out of the District’s control. Glover invited Monson and school board members to visit her neighborhood and see just how “plain” the segregation is.

Boris Clouden was not signed up to speak, but he had similar concerns. The informal structure of the committee meetings allowed the audience members to raise their hands and ask questions of District staffers — unheard-of in the days of the School Reform Commission. Clouden was concerned about over-enrollment.

“Around 2013, in the Northeast, they had 21 schools with overcrowding, ranging from 100-900 children,” Clouden said. “But at the same time, the District is closing schools in other areas. In Germantown, you probably closed five schools.”

Clouden did not understand why under-enrolled schools had to be closed while other schools were over-enrolled. He wanted an update on schools that were over-enrolled, and Monson assured him that he would get those numbers.

Hiring more facilities staff

Danielle Floyd, the District’s chief operating officer, gave a presentation on the District’s progress in remediating lead, mold, and asbestos.

The lead paint stabilization program is underway at six schools, and 34 others have been assessed, leaving only four that still need assessments, she said. The project has spent $2.7 million, with $5 million more to go. Work will start in two new schools shortly.

“We established an advisory group to assist with project oversight and monitoring and advise how our work around paint stabilization can evolve,” Floyd said. “One thing that came up was to have a more robust selection matrix to determine what schools we work in next.”

Based on feedback from the District’s advisory group, Floyd is prioritizing elementary schools because they serve the youngest and therefore most vulnerable students. In addition, schools are assessed based on rates of asthma, custodial staff levels, the severity of paint damage, total enrollment, and the availability of extra space within the building.

The Board of Education will vote on an increase to the salaries of cleaners and school bus attendants at the next action meeting. If approved, the new salary would be $13.32 an hour for cleaners and $13.87 an hour for bus attendants, costing $2.9 million annually and giving raises to 383 employees.

The new salary is at the same level that cleaners used to collect before their union agreed to a pay reduction after budget cuts under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. The raise will restore what was previously cut.

The District has budgeted for several dozen new cleaning staff but has not been able to fill all the vacancies. Floyd expects the new salary will go a long way in helping their hiring efforts, because, she said, the old salary is simply “not competitive” with other local cleaning positions.

The District also had the owner of Creedon Management Associates present the findings of his company’s study on how the District can improve their maintenance and repair of school buildings.

Creedon was blunt: It could not be done without spending more money.

First he noted that the District simply does not have enough building engineers, saying that many larger buildings should have two but only have one. He added that while they must hire more building engineers, they also needed to “dramatically” increase the number of cleaning staff by January. Floyd said the District has budgeted for this increase and hopes to make the new hires in January.

McGinley said he would like to spend the budgeted money as soon as possible.

“This is a situation of pay now or pay more later,” he said. “If we don’t get those cleaners in now, we’ll have more lead and more mold. I’d rather spend the money now.”

And that is the District’s goal, though it remains to be seen whether the salary increase will be enough to attract all the new cleaners that the District budgeted for.

The District is in the middle of 48 active construction projects, valued at $180 million. It embarked on nine new construction projects last month, which have been assigned to designers. Four others are open for competitive bidding and will require approval by the school board.

Those larger projects open to bidders include the construction of a new school on Ryan Avenue, paint and plaster repairs, façade inspection services, and a study of attendance zones and the corresponding demographics.

Last summer, the District hired outside environmental workers to remove asbestos-containing material such as flooring and pipe insulation from seven schools. That work is finished, and reports are now available online and in the main office of each school.

A look at Superintendent Hite’s record on meeting his anchor goals

2018-07-10T20:35:34+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated 7/16/18: this article now uses per-pupil spending and revenue data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, adjusted for local inflation and presented in 2018 dollars.

In the summer of 2012, Superintendent William Hite took charge of the Philadelphia School District. It was a year after Mayor Michael Nutter asked Superintendent Arlene Ackerman to resign after complaints about a lack of accountability over school violence and unethical contracting practices.

When Hite took over, he created Action Plans that set goals for the District. Action Plan 2.0, released in 2014, outlined a series of ambitious “anchor goals,” and in most areas, the District has made at least some progress: More high school students are graduating, more 8-year-olds are reading at grade level, and the District has balanced its budget.

But this was at the tail end of the term of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett (2011-14), who cut roughly $1 billion in state funding for public schools, with hundreds of millions coming out of the District’s operating budget. So where did the District get the money it used to fund these goals and balance the budget?

Some came from the city, and when Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, was elected, he restored part of the state funding lost during the Corbett years. But it wasn’t until this year that Wolf even proposed enough additional education funding to restore the amount lost under Corbett.

Data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

While the District invested more in an effort to increase high school graduation and promote early childhood literacy, it was saving millions on labor costs in a contract stalemate with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers that resulted in its members getting no raises for five years. The District also saved money when it outsourced substitutes, although the original contract with the company Source4Teachers turned out to be a disaster that left schools far more in need of substitutes then under the old unionized system. The District has since hired another company, Kelly Services, which has improved the substitute fill-rate.

In the final year of the contract stalemate, the District said it had relatively few teacher vacancies. But the union pointed out that there were also 181 vacancies in support positions and conducted a survey finding that there were 613 classes with more students than the contractual limit, which depressed the actual teacher-vacancy count.

These practices made it hard, if not impossible, to reach another of the anchor goals: All schools having great principals and teachers. That’s not to disparage the teachers themselves, but working conditions depressed recruitment and affected the quality of instruction teachers could provide.

And these savings on labor costs came after the District closed a deficit in 2012, caused by Corbett’s state aid reductions. Nearly 5,000 positions were slashed, which was 25 percent of total staff positions at the time. This resulted in roughly 3,800 layoffs.

The same 2014 District document that outlines these layoffs, the Financial Supplement to Action Plan 2.0, describes saving money on labor costs as “paramount” to accomplishing the action plan’s goals. It took three years after that document was released for the teachers’ contract to be settled.

The goals related to labor, however subjective, do not seem to have been prioritized. Considering the lack of a teachers’ contract, it’s hard to imagine that the District was able to “improve recruitment and hiring practices to attract the highest quality candidates,” let alone “strengthen the principal and teacher pipelines.” The District did not “retain and promote high-performing staff,” because the lack of a contract made teachers unable to earn raises at all, let alone the promotions they were owed for earning higher credentials.

But Action Plan 2.0 had far more objectives than the ones labeled anchor goals. Most are vague and hard to quantify. But some can be measured objectively.

There are some that the District undoubtedly accomplished: improving student nutrition, reducing violent incidents in schools, promoting project-based learning and Career and Technical Education, creating and launching new school models, and implementing a new school evaluation measure in the form of School Progress Reports.

As the accompanying charts show, progress on standardized test scores increased under Gov. Ed Rendell (2002-10), roughly correlating with increases in state funding. These positive trends on the PSSAs reversed by 2012, roughly correlating to when Corbett began cutting state funding. The numbers seem to continue to decline, though some of this is because of the higher PSSA standards, implemented between 2013 and 2015, that made it more difficult to score proficient and easier to score below basic.

Since 2015, the year the standards were finalized and newly elected Gov. Wolf began restoring Philly’s education funding, PSSA scores either leveled off or improved slightly, depending on the grade and subject. Eleventh-grade reading and math scores improved the most.

For a handful of goals, the District’s progress is debatable. One example is using the Renaissance school turnaround program to “make poor-performing schools better” by turning them over to charter operators while keeping their neighborhood catchment areas. The Renaissance program has not technically been abandoned, but it has been two years since the District used it.

Many of the Renaissance schools made initial gains, but then leveled off. In 2016, the SRC overruled Hite and awarded Wister Elementary in Germantown to Mastery Charter Schools, despite the fact that the school had made enough academic improvement that it did not qualify for turnaround. Wister’s School Progress Report rating under Mastery declined slightly the next year.

The SRC turned over 21 schools to charter operators through the Renaissance initiative, though since 2016 it has voted to close two of those schools due to questionable financial practices: Stetson and Olney, run by Aspira. The charter office also recommended the closure of Universal Vare, but the SRC last month renewed the school’s charter with conditions that include automatic charter surrender if it doesn’t meet stringent conditions after four years. Universal’s Audenried High School has also been recommended for non-renewal by the Charter Schools Office, but the SRC declined to take a vote.

Since 2016, the District has relied instead on internal turnaround models that don’t involve charter operators.

Another goal was to “ensure all charters are good school options.” Although the District has some high-performing charters, the SRC has lagged in pursuing closure recommendations from its charter office for any but the most egregiously poor-performing schools. A minority of Philadelphia’s charters received a passing academic score from the state, a point mentioned in the District’s Action Plan 2.0.

The explanation of that goal states the District will “actively seek the non-renewal and revocation of the lowest-performing charter schools.” The included financial document states that the District will “aggressively seek to close the lowest-performing charter schools.”

But the District has only closed a few charter schools in the years since. And dozens of charters are operating under expired contracts — a situation that would cause any other contractor receiving taxpayer dollars to cease operating.

These schools are allowed to continue collecting state funds as their dispute with the District over the terms of their operation remains unresolved. At its last meeting, the SRC only voted to close one charter school. Some others signed agreements after initially balking, but 25 continue to hold out.

In fact, another part of that goal was to “ensure all charter schools have signed charter agreements” – something that has clearly not been achieved.

Another goal was to “implement effective, aligned business processes.” But the District was recently sued by a bidder for arbitrarily awarding a contract to a favored company, and the District’s response to the lawsuit was to maintain that it has no obligation to follow city or state law or its own procurement procedures. The bidder has also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education.

Another goal was to “provide a clean and comfortable building environment in all schools,” which would include “executing a more aggressive preventative maintenance plan.” The action plan cited research finding that students did better academically in buildings in “standard” rather than “poor” condition.

But since then, the District has found unsafe lead levels in at least one drinking water outlet at 53 percent of schools. After pushback from activists and community groups, the District arrived at a remediation process that involved faster testing, more thorough methodology, and the installation of filtered water fountains in every school. City Councilwoman Helen Gym’s office organized public hearings in Council on the issue and authored the legislation that Council ultimately passed.

The District also had mold outbreaks last summer, largely due to malfunctioning HVAC systems that caused excess humidity in school buildings, including Munoz-Marin and J.B. Kelly Elementary Schools.

All this prompted the Philly Healthy Schools Coalition, along with City Councilman Derek Green, to demand that the District publicly disclose its school-level environmental data on matters concerning public health.

Earlier this year, the District had to reboot a lead-paint stabilization project after the union’s environmental scientist found that workers were not fully cleaning up the dust left behind after sanding down the flaking paint. The project was started after a 6-year-old at Comly Elementary was found eating lead paint chips. The shoddy work wasn’t discovered until parents invited the union’s environmental scientist to inspect rooms at Jackson School. At that point, work was already underway in 16 other schools.

“Whether it’s lead paint or mold or asbestos, every month it feels like there’s another incident. Munoz-Marin in August, and then J.B. Kelly closes for a week, but those schools had problems for many years and the reaction was only triggered when some teacher posted something on Facebook,” said David Masur, director of Penn Environment that organizes the Health Schools Coalition. “Then you get Comly, and now Jackson. We shouldn’t be dealing with this like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dam. We don’t have to live our lives this way.”

As a result, the District was called before City Council to explain how they would reform the process going forward to be more thorough in the scope of work and involve the community in advance as the project continues in the 46 schools needing stabilization.

A bill in City Council would require the District to make environmental test results publicly available and inform parents and community members in advance of such projects — the very thing that the Healthy Schools Coalition is demanding. It was introduced by Councilman Mark Squilla and is co-sponsored by Council members Derek Green, Helen Gym, Cindy Bass and Bobby Henon.

Wolf proposed that the state will split the cost of a $15 million emergency cleanup measure this summer that will remove asbestos, lead, mold, and other environmental hazards in 57 schools.

The District had a specific goal in skimping on maintenance. It ran up the deferred maintenance list to nearly $5 billion – though former City Controller Alan Butkovitz told City Council that his office found the real number to be $10 billion.

The District repairs its buildings by issuing bonds. But bond issues under Hite have been relatively austere, because one of the District’s highest priorities has been to earn a higher credit rating. It worked, saving the District money. The District did this by keeping annual debt service payments below 10 percent – in other words, by issuing fewer bonds each year to make repairs than were issued under previous administrations.

“We have to continue to balance the needs the District has for facilities investment with the need to not have our annual debt service cost eat up our annual operating [budget],” Uri Monson, chief financial officer for the District, told the Notebook last year.

Click for the full list of graphs and sources

Notebook interns Hannah Mellville, Sam Haut, and Alyssa Biederman compiled the data and graphs for this article.

More Pa. school districts feeling the crunch of mandated expenses, according to survey

2018-06-08T19:00:14+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Most of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts plan to ask for tax hikes this fiscal year and about half expect their finances to get worse, according to an annual census conducted by school administrators and business officials.

The survey results suggest that districts, on the whole, are more pessimistic this year than they were the year prior, indicating that many feel pinched by the continued growth of pension, health-care, special education, and charter costs.

“School districts across Pennsylvania continue to struggle to make ends meet and balance their budgets without negatively impacting their educational programming,” according to the annual School District Budget Report, which is compiled jointly by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials (PASBO) and the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators (PASA).

Seventy-seven percent of districts plan to seek tax increases, up from about 70 percent last year. The percentage who anticipate their district’s financial position will worsen is also up, from 43 percent to 48 percent. About the same number of districts, 45 percent, think their financial position will remain the same. Only 7 percent forecast a sunnier outlook in the year ahead.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

Mayor to Council: Your budget is not enough for schools

2018-06-08T00:53:01+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Mayor Kenney has sent a letter to City Council saying that its budget plan – which avoids a property tax increase – does not solve the School District’s longstanding structural budget problems and won’t allow the acceleration or expansion of efforts to improve sometimes dangerous building conditions.

In a morning briefing, his aides thanked Council for supporting measures that will send more money to the District, most prominently a halt in planned reductions to the wage tax, while reiterating that it falls short of what is needed.

“The long-term fiscal stability of the School District, that issue really hasn’t been resolved,” said City Finance Director Rob Dubow. “At some point, we are going to have to come back to that issue.”

Kenney’s budget includes a 4.1 percent property tax rate hike and an overall increase in revenue to the District of $770 million over five years, a sum that would balance its books and eliminate through 2023 the threat of cuts that cause instability in schools. In the recent past, largely due to steep reductions in state subsidies, the District was forced to temporarily eliminate counselors, nurses, and other personnel, while struggling to keep up with increasingly dire maintenance and facilities issues.

Without additional revenue, the District was projecting a $630 million shortfall over the next five years. Kenney was determined to eliminate that shortfall and then some, coinciding with an initiative to reclaim control of the city’s schools from the state after 17 years.

“We are … very concerned that while Council supplied over $530 million in funds to the District, the gap in funding between Council’s and the Administration’s proposal for the District is roughly $240 million,” Kenney’s letter said.

The additional funds will allow for “a portion of needed investments in early literacy, classroom supports, and [Career and Technical Education] and other high school programming,” Kenney said. But it will also prevent quicker building improvements and result in “budget shortfalls within several years.”

Of Council’s $530 million, $340 million comes from the wage tax freeze. But some of the other funds in the plan are based on shaky assumptions, said Dubow and other top city officials, particularly $69 million earmarked from so-called “sequestration,” or enhanced collection of delinquent property taxes.

“We just don’t think the amount of revenue generated is supportable enough to put in the budget for that,” Dubow said.

Council also plans to divert savings to the schools from reductions in the allocation for prisons. But the mayor’s staff said that would cut into the administration’s plans to upgrade services for prisoners and those transitioning out, including behavioral health services and other programs designed to better manage inmate care and reduce recidivism.

“Our proposal was to reinvest a portion of that savings into the criminal justice system to permit the continuation of reforms,” said City Budget Director Anna Adams. “Unfortunately, the bill that moved out of committee will not allow us to make all those investments we were planning to do.”

Previewing Kenney’s letter, the School District issued a statement on Wednesday night saying that Council’s budget would not allow the District to borrow $150 million next year that it needs for facilities improvements, including immediate lead abatement, site renovations, and upgrades to playgrounds, mechanical and electrical systems.

“We will not be able to expand or accelerate lead paint abatement efforts, start planned building improvements sooner, or add projects to [the] five-year capital plan,” the District’s statement said.

Recent media coverage has highlighted deteriorating and sometimes dangerous conditions in many school buildings. Last year, the District itself did a comprehensive Facilities Assessment, which scored every building based on the urgency of its needs. According to that assessment, it would cost $5 billion to repair, renovate, and upgrade its more than 300 sites.

Right after the briefing by the mayor’s staff, City Council leaders released a letter that they sent to Superintendent William Hite last month asking for detailed information on the District’s capital program, including how it prioritizes projects and “why the District believes it is prudent or necessary to initiate an additional $150 million in borrowing in the next fiscal year, in addition to borrowing $275 million this fiscal year.” It also wants to know “the amount of funds that will not be dedicated to urgent health-related improvements and explain how they will be spent.”

According to that letter, Council recently authorized the establishment of a School Building and Facilities Task Force “to review and assess the capital needs and priorities of the District.”

Council President Darrell Clarke said he’s not sure the District’s Facilities Assessment is accurate.

At their press conference, City Council leaders doubled down in their opposition to any increase in the property tax rate, saying that homeowners are already staggering under too-high taxes. They have hired a firm to audit the Office of Property Assessments, saying that they’ve heard too many stories this year about huge jumps in homeowners’ tax bills due to increases in their assessments.

There’s been a “long history of inaccuracies at OPA,” Clarke said.

“The process is so inconsistent,” he said. “We don’t want to move forward with a process that’s flawed.” The audit will cost $160,000 and Council will get a report in September.

The assessments are “flawed, clearly,” said Councilman Allan Domb.

Councilman Kenyatta Johnson said that in his district, soaring property tax bills caused more than sticker shock. It was like “an atomic bomb,” he said. Some homeowners saw bills “double, triple, quadruple.”

In 2014, the city completed an Actual Value Initiative, which reassessed all 540,000 properties in the city and taxed them at 100 percent of their value while reducing the tax rate to keep the overall amount collected relatively the same. Before that, assessments had been all over the place, and most properties were taxed on only a fraction of their real value. Some neighborhoods had not seen reassessments in years.

The intent of AVI was to usher in annual reassessments to keep up – and this year, Council members say, they’ve heard stories that some of these assessments have shot up to the point where homeowners may lose their homes. That’s why they authorized the audit.

Since 2014, “what we’ve been doing is looking at areas where we think the first assessment may have been off a little,” Dubow said later in an interview, places that may have been “out of whack.”

Although taxes have fluctuated since 2014, “This is the first year we really sent out changes and notices to all properties.”

Dubow said that of the 540,000 properties, 20,000 had no change, 130,000 saw decreases, and 400,000 – about 75 percent – had increases. Overall, the increases were 11 percent.

“Because a lot of concern has been raised by Council and property owners, we are fully supportive of the idea of an audit done by a reputable firm, and if they find any places we can improve the process, we’ll implement the improvements,” he said.

Of the total property taxes collected, 55 percent goes to the District and 45 percent to the city. Local property taxes make up 19.3 percent of the city’s budget and close to a quarter of the District’s.

While declining to say whether the mayor would veto the budget if that is what Council ultimately sends to him, Deputy Mayor Jim Engler said: “The School District just wouldn’t be able to move forward if there isn’t a change in the funding package.”

While the mayor’s proposal would leave the District with fund balances through 2023, Council’s would result in a shortfall – assuming all its revenue projections, including sequestration, hold up – of about $26 million in that year.

Clarke reiterated at the press conference his belief – which puts him at odds with Kenney – that the state has the primary responsibility for funding the schools.

“We have voted over billion dollars for schools over the last decade. People are always asking for more,” Clarke said. “At the end of the day, the taxpayers cannot endure a significant increase in their taxes. At some point, you have to say no.”

Councilwoman Cindy Bass agreed. She said that she admired Mayor Kenney for “stepping up and taking responsibility” for education in the city, but that even his proposal “will only put a Band-Aid on a gunshot.” A bigger state commitment to Philadelphia is needed, she said.

“The state has a responsibility to fund schools,” she said. “This is something we should not let them off the hook on. City Council, our residents, we have done what we need to do time and time again and will continue to do so, but that doesn’t mean we should allow the Commonwealth to shirk their obligation.”

Bass has proposed more cuts to the city budget, something that Clarke indicated he is open to. Council’s final budget was actually $27 million larger than the one proposed by Kenney. Council’s last meeting is June 21, and the deadline for finalizing a budget is June 30.

Councilwoman Helen Gym, so far, has been the only member willing to go on record in favor of a property tax rate increase. Gym has also proposed reducing the 10-year tax abatement for new construction and other measures as a way to raise more revenue for schools.

“We’ve seen what drastic budget cuts and financial uncertainty have meant for our schools and for our children: schools with skeleton staff, outdated textbooks, and crumbling facilities,” she said in a statement. “We’ve worked hard for years to bring our public schools to the turning point we’re at today. Now, we have the opportunity to guarantee a stable, long term financial future for our schools for the next five years — something we haven’t seen in over a generation,” she said in a statement. “Our schools have urgent needs, and the young people of our city cannot wait.”

Council moves package to raise more than $600 million for District

2018-06-06T15:02:17+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated Wednesday 8 p.m. with further District reaction and comments from the mayor.

City Council on Tuesday moved a budget plan that includes more than $600 million in additional funds for the School District over five years while avoiding a property tax hike.

Mayor Kenney had proposed a package that would raise $770 million over five years that included a 4.1 percent jump in property tax rates. His plan would close a projected $660 million shortfall while leaving about $110 million for additional education investments.

According to calculations, Council’s package, which was voted out of committee, would leave the District with a $26.5 million budget hole in fiscal 2023 and assumes the same level of spending.

The $600-plus million will come from:

$340 million from slowing down the planned cuts to the wage tax.
$100 million from doubling – from $20 million to $40 million a year – a grant from the city’s general fund.
$95 million from savings on prison spending
$69 million to $93 million from better collection of delinquent taxes

City Council President Darrell Clarke said there is “very strong potential” that the gap will be closed by increases in future property assessments and stepped-up collections and reiterated that much of the burden for adequately funding schools in Philadelphia falls on Harrisburg.

“At the end of the day, the state has a constitutional mandate to fund public schools,” said Clarke. “And this notion that we should be all by ourselves is unfortunate. We continue to ask the state to step up, reach its mandate and its requirement to fund public schools.”

That position is at odds with Kenney’s. When the mayor initiated the process last fall to take back control of the District from the state, after 17 years, he also vowed to increase the city’s financial investment.

“I explain to people who get angry about paying for public school, I say, well, you’re paying for opioid addiction treatment, you’re paying for gun violence, you’re paying for incarceration, you’re paying for prosecutions, you’re paying for lots of stuff you shouldn’t be paying for if we could put that money, theoretically, into education,” he said at the time.

As of Wednesday morning, Kenney’s office had not released a reaction to Council’s action, although he told WHYY reporter Tom McDonald that that it will will hold over the District for a few years, but questioned some of the assumptions in the package and said that more predictable, recurring revenue will be needed later. He added that next year is not likely to see a tax increase because it is an election year.

Late Wednesday the District issued a statement thanking Council for its efforts and saying that “it appears” that its proposal will provide a majority of the funding requested by the mayor and allow for expanded investments and continued progress.

“It appears, however, the Council proposal does not provide for the full amount that would allow us to borrow an additional $150 million next spring. As a result, we will not be able to expand or accelerate lead paint abatement efforts, start planned building improvements sooner, or add project to [the] five-year capital plan.”

The biggest local contribution to the District comes from the property tax, of which the District gets 55 percent and the city 45 percent. But Clarke and other Council members were resistant to increasing the burden on homeowners, especially after an update in property assessments resulted in higher taxes for many. Council members and the mayor face elections next year.

In a statement, Councilwoman Helen Gym, who was elected largely on her education activism, called the action “a major step forward to guarantee years of stability for Philadelphia school kids,” but added that it is “not sufficient.”

Gym had introduced legislation that would have eliminated the District’s portion of the 10-year tax abatement on new construction, yielding about $60 million a year. She had also proposed, in lieu of a property tax hike, giving the District a larger share of it. She had proposed changing the District’s share from 55 percent to 59 percent and the city’s share from 45 percent to 41 percent.

Neither proposal was considered yesterday. In her statement after the vote, she again proposed to “lock in” the additional contributions to the District that Council cobbled together “through a reasonable millage shift and to ensure that multiple – and equitable – options remain on the table for further school funding.”

On Wednesday morning, the proposal to end the District portion of the tax abatement was debated and tabled by Council.

The property tax is by far the largest single piece of the city’s contribution to the District, whose governing body – whether it’s the School Reform Commission or the Board of Education – has no taxing power of its own and must rely entirely on the city and the state.

Just before the committee hearing, the Our City Our Schools coalition held a demonstration where about 50 teachers, advocates, and students filed in chanting “Fund our schools! Tax the rich!” Many of them wore biohazard suits and gas masks to reflect the unhealthy conditions of some of the District’s schools.

“The kids and staff of the school are working with lead paint and asbestos and rodents on a daily basis,” said Thomas Quinn, a teacher in the District, “so we wanted to bring some to City Council so they can see what kind of materials we’re dealing with every day.”

Some of the changes the coalition is pushing for include getting rid of the city’s 10-year tax abatement and imposing PILOTs (Payments-in-Lieu-of-Taxes) on large nonprofit institutions, such as universities, to collect revenue that would go toward city schools.

A proposed funding report released by the coalition estimates that its proposed changes would bring in $191 million to $301 million to city schools.

The new budget still has to go through two more readings on the floor on June 7 and June 14 before final approval and has until June 21 to pass, unless more sessions are added. However, it could pass as soon as June 14.

Council considering revenue-raising measures for the District

2018-06-05T18:46:06+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

City Council is getting ready today to consider how to raise additional money for the School District, with last-minute maneuvering to find a politically palatable package that will yield close to the $770 million that Mayor Kenney has proposed.

That sum would allow the District to close a looming $660 million shortfall by 2023 and leave $110 million for new investments, including more money for upgrades and repairs on school buildings, many with dangerous conditions that could expose children to mold, asbestos fibers, and lead.

Groups across the political spectrum are weighing in, and each has different priorities. The Our City Our Schools Coalition opposes Kenney’s proposed 4.1 percent property tax rate hike, which would raise about $143 million over five years. They want an end to the city’s 10-year tax abatement for new construction, which largely benefits developers and wealthier homeowners, and they want mega-nonprofits such as universities and hospitals to make payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOTs). They say these measures will raise sufficient funds – although others dispute this – and shift the burden from working people to well-heeled people and institutions.

The Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, supports the property tax rate hike and opposes all the other measures in the mayor’s package, including one that would slow down a planned rollback of the wage tax and raise $340 million, and another that would increase the realty transfer tax. In a letter to Council members, chamber president Rob Wonderling said he also opposes a proposed 1 percent tax on construction citywide, which is also under consideration by Council.

The chamber is also against reducing the tax abatement.

Last week City Council members voted to move along the slowdown of the wage-tax reduction and the realty transfer tax. It has not taken a vote so far on the proposed property tax rate increase.

Alternative measures likely to be introduced at Tuesday’s meeting include a shift in how much of the property tax revenue goes to the School District and how much to the city. Now, the District gets 55 percent of property tax, which is its largest contribution from the city. One proposal under consideration would shift that percentage to 59 percent-41 percent, which would yield $60 million more annually for the District, more than the 4.1 percent rate hike would raise. However, that means that the city budget would have to make up for that money.

Other measures could include a slowdown in a planned reduction in the business income receipts tax and a marginal increase in the use and occupancy tax.

Councilwoman Helen Gym has also proposed legislation that would shield the District from taking a hit from the tax abatement by reducing it going forward.

Our City Our Schools led the campaign to end 17 years of state control of the District by dissolving the School Reform Commission and replacing it with a local Board of Education. But the new board, which will assume governance of the District on July 1, will not have taxing power – like the SRC and the city’s predecessor school board. The District must rely on the city and the state for most of its revenue.

Now, the state funds just over half of the $3 billion budget, and the city just under half. When Mayor Kenney decided last fall to initiate the return to local control, he promised that the city would “step up” and contribute more money to the District.

The state takeover was undertaken due to “academic and fiscal distress.” The return to local control was only made possible because the District was able to maintain balanced budgets for several years; under the takeover law, the SRC could only vote itself out of existence if fiscal stability had been achieved.

Now, however, some City Council members are using the District’s balanced budget to argue that because it is not in immediate distress, there is no need to give it more money, or at least no need to increase property taxes to find the additional dollars.

Council must act before the end of June. The SRC approved a fiscal 2018-19 budget that assumes that the District will receive the amount of additional city funds proposed by the mayor.

Tuesday’s Notebook fundraiser comes on a busy day for education activism

2018-06-04T22:32:06+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, the Notebook is holding its annual fundraiser at 4:30 p.m. at the National Museum of American Jewish History on Independence Mall, on what is turning out to be a packed afternoon of activities for educators and advocates.

Our City Our Schools, a coalition of education advocacy groups, will be honored at the event. The group pushed successfully for the dissolution of the School Reform Commission and returning the District to local control after 17 years.

Although the coalition consistently demands more revenue for the District, it has broken with the mayor on how best to raise the money, to the consternation of some other advocates.

Mayor Kenney has requested $770 million in new revenue over five years for the schools, primarily through a combination of a property tax rate hike and a slowdown in the planned reduction of the wage tax. An increase in the real estate transfer tax is expected to offset any reduction in tax revenue that results from raising the homestead exemption from $40,000 to $50,000.

Council is on board with the wage tax changes, as well as the tradeoff between the homestead exemption and transfer tax. But many members have been lukewarm to the idea of raising property tax rates, especially on top of a reassessment that is causing many homeowners’ tax bills to go up.

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, Public Citizens for Children & Youth and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, along with a few Council members, will hold a press conference citing a need for the city to step up.

At 4 p.m., Our City Our Schools will demonstrate in favor of more city revenue for the District, but against the mayor’s property tax hike. Instead, they propose an increase in payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOTs) from mega-nonprofits, including hospitals and universities, and an end to the property tax abatement for new construction, which primarily benefits developers and wealthy homeowners.

They are urging supporters to bring debris from schools, take pictures of deplorable classroom conditions, and wear face masks to illustrate the dangers of lead and other ongoing environmental hazards in the schools that have been highlighted in recent media reports.

“Our schools need significant investments … but we can’t just increase taxes on working people without looking at the developers, corporations, and universities who have evaded taxes for decades in our city. We’re demanding the end of the 10-year tax abatement once and for all,” said Antione Little, chair of the coalition.

Donna Cooper, executive director of PCCY, supports the property tax hike and disagrees with the coalition’s strategy.

“I think it is a strategy that doesn’t generate enough money for our schools and is likely to result in cuts,” said Cooper. Schools get 55 percent of property tax revenue, making it the single largest source of city money for the District. The proposed 4 percent hike would raise $143 million of Kenney’s $770 million package. The money will close a budget hole of $660 million and allow about $110 million for new investments.

Cooper said the coalition’s proposals would not raise the needed funds. Ending the property tax abatement, for instance, would take years to kick in. And the last time the city had PILOTs, it only raised $22 million a year, she said. The coalition put out a report citing much higher revenue figures.

Council members are especially reluctant to vote for a property tax hike because the District is forecasting slight fund balances for the next two years. It expects to achieve this, however, largely because of carryover funds from the past several years, not because its annual expected revenues are equal to its annual cost obligations. That “structural deficit,” for the most part, remains, although it will come into closer balance under Kenney’s plan.

Several Council members plan to appear at the PCCY and union event, including Helen Gym, Curtis Jones, Kenyatta Johnson, Cherelle Parker, and Cindy Bass.

“I think what [the Council members] are going to say is, we’re in there working hard and looking for a reasonable solution. We have only three weeks left [before Council must pass a budget],” Cooper said. “We’ve got to make a decision how we will come up with $143 million. That’s where all the education advocates should be, not this tax vs. that tax.”

Gym has introduced legislation that would end the School District’s portion of the tax abatements, which Cooper said was “good policy,” shielding it from bearing the brunt of the lost revenue.

“I think the issues of the abatements and the PILOTs are legitimate and still need conversation,” Cooper said. “There is no question we should be rolling back the scale of the abatements. Million-dollar homes with abatements is criminal, and we should fight that, but we shouldn’t hold the School District hostage in that fight.”

Meanwhile, the School District is holding events at different schools around the city to highlight ongoing and planned school renovations. Also tomorrow, Superintendent William Hite and Mayor Kenney will visit Solis-Cohen Elementary School in the Northeast, due for a new $50 million building.

The Our City Our Schools activists plan to leave the demonstration to receive an honor from the Notebook for their work on behalf of Philadelphia’s schoolchildren.

Also being honored at the Notebook event are longtime education supporters Debra Weiner and Mary Goldman. Student journalists from several city high schools will also receive awards for exemplary work during the year.

The Notebook’s fundraising event will be at the National Museum of American Jewish History, at Fifth and Market Streets. You can still buy tickets here.

SRC approves $3 billion FY19 budget with fund balance, counting on more money from city

2018-05-25T02:35:53+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In what was likely its penultimate meeting, the School Reform Commission (SRC) approved the Philadelphia School District’s $3 billion budget for fiscal year 2019 on Thursday and debated, in candid terms, whether Mayor Kenney could deliver a promised tax increase that would firm up District finances.

Three of the four remaining commissioners approved the budget, noting that it was only for next year and that the District is on solid financial footing for at least that long, regardless of the city’s actions.

Commissioner Bill Green voted no, arguing that it was irresponsible to approve a financial plan while City Council continues to debate raising property tax rates. He noted that many of the investments in the 2018-19 budget are attached to a five-year plan that assumes that City Council will approve Kenney’s proposed tax hike.

“I believe this budget is an illusion built on shifting sands,” said Green, a former City Council member.

Kenney has vowed to raise property tax rates as part of a revenue package that would nearly eliminate the District’s structural deficit and leave it with at least five consecutive years of positive fund balances. The mayor pledged more money to the city’s financially beleaguered school system as part of a return to local control. The state-controlled SRC will likely meet just one more time before it dissolves on June 30, turning over District governance to a nine-member Board of Education that Kenney appointed.

Council members, however, have expressed skepticism about a 4.1 percent property tax rate increase requested by Kenney, which would raise about $193 million over five years.

On Wednesday, sitting as Committee of the Whole, council members advanced tax bills on other parts of the revenue package: a $20 million additional direct contribution to the District in each of the next five years, an increase in the local part of the real estate transfer tax to raise $136 million, and the move that would raise the biggest chunk of the new money – a slowdown of scheduled wage-tax reductions that would raise $340 million for the District. With the property tax rate increase, the package would total $770 million over five years.

Green doesn’t think that money will come through, and he laid out the political calculus that he believes will leave Philadelphia’s school system in the lurch. City Council will reject the plan, he said, which will allow Kenney to blame the failure on Council members and allow Council members to tell their constituents that they stonewalled a proposed tax hike.

SRC Chair Estelle Richman, herself a veteran of city and state politics, blanched at Green’s prediction.

“Don’t undersell the voters in Philadelphia,” she said.

As City Council deliberates, there’s a lot at stake for the schools.

Uri Monson, the district’s chief financial officer, told the SRC that revised projections show that the District will end the 2018 fiscal year with a $148 million fund balance and that he is projecting a $194 million fund balance in fiscal 2019.

And he presented a vastly changed five-year budget picture to the SRC than he did last year, when he said the District would end fiscal 2022 with a shortfall of $701 million without additional revenue and assuming no new investments.

Under his new projections, which include the new city revenues proposed by Kenney but not yet approved by Council, he is forecasting a fund balance that year of $112 million.

Though the financial conversation has the longest-term implications, the SRC still had some lingering charter business to tie up as it prepares to disband.

The commission approved one charter, rejected another, renewed a charter once threatened with closure, and approved the relocation of a fourth charter.

The approval went to Philadelphia Hebrew Public Charter, though it wasn’t an enthusiastic yes. The SRC imposed conditions on the school that will limit its enrollment, and two commissioners said they were only approving the school because they were afraid that the state appeals board would overrule them if they issued a denial.

“To preserve our control, I will vote to approve this charter,” said Richman.

The chairwoman added that she didn’t think Philadelphia Hebrew was the type of charter that the District should be prioritizing and argued that its addition would hurt the school system’s already precarious financial position.

Philadelphia Hebrew is based on a model out of New York City and includes Hebrew language instruction for all students. The school, to be located in East Falls, will open in the fall of 2019 and serve a maximum of 468 students in grades K-5.

“We have a national model of success that we are excited to bring to Philadelphia,” said president and CEO Jon Rosenberg in a statement.

The SRC voted to renew Laboratory Charter School of Communication & Languages one year after it began a process that could have eventually closed the school. In its initial evaluation, the SRC’s charter office highlighted organizational and financial concerns that overshadowed the school’s academic strength. In an updated memo, the charter office noted several areas where school leaders had addressed deficiencies.

And in a move that helped two other charter schools, the SRC permitted Kensington’s Ad Prima Charter School to move to the Cedarbrook section of Northwest Philadelphia. Ad Prima says the move will allow it to expand enrollment. Deep Roots Charter School, which was approved a year ago to open this fall, plans to occupy the Kensington building vacated by Ad Prima.

The only charter applicant left disappointed was APM Community Charter School, which would have been run by the nonprofit Asociacion Puertorriquenos en Marcha Inc. (APM) and located in the Olney section of North Philadelphia. Former mayoral candidate Nelson Diaz testified on the applicant’s behalf, to no avail.

During the public comment portion of the meeting, several community activists continued pressuring the District over its plan to phase out Strawberry Mansion High School and use the building for what it has been calling a “complex” of alternative secondary school options.

Strawberry Mansion has a dwindling student body, but protesters say District leaders stripped the long-troubled high school of money and programs. They vowed to fight on, even as the SRC’s candle burns low. And they scoffed at the District’s announced intentions to install options in the building starting in 2019, such as a project-based high school, that District officials said are more suited to the neighborhood’s students.

Several speakers said there was no real consultation with the community over what the students need.

“There is no plan,” said former Strawberry Mansion principal Linda Cliatt-Wayman in an impassioned statement. “Let your final act be on the side of the children.”

The school has accepted no new 9th graders for September as part of the phase-out, but neighborhood residents and their supporters are demanding that a 9th-grade class be enrolled so those students don’t have to travel outside the neighborhood.

“This is the last time you will hear words from me,” said Melvin Sharpe. “But you will see action from me.”

Council members wonder: With schools deficit further away, why should we pay?

2018-05-09T18:49:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

City Council members grilled Superintendent William Hite and other School District officials Wednesday, using many different ways to ask the same questions: How do we know whether you are spending money wisely? And why do you need a tax increase now if you don’t expect to run a deficit for another two years?

“If we have two more years of not going negative, why are we dealing with this now?” asked Councilman Allan Domb, reflecting the tone of the District’s annual budget hearing.

In more than four hours of back-and-forth, Council members touched on myriad topics, from the conditions of school facilities, to language translation services, to the recruitment of black male teachers, to efforts to combat truancy. First on the list for Council President Darrell Clarke was an energy- and money-saving initiative in several of the District’s buildings, which he would like to see scaled up.

But most of the questions circled back to this: If I am going to risk voting in favor of raising property taxes –Mayor Kenney is asking for a 4.1 percent increase to send more money to the schools – tell me where the money will be going.

“If there’s one part of your portfolio where you think there’s still efficiencies,” Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez asked District Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, what would he identify them to be?

Monson replied that the District wants to incorporate more principles of “zero-based” budgeting and get away from a mentality where “it’s in the budget, so you just keep doing it.”

Councilwoman Cindy Bass wondered whether she could tell her constituents that after the tax hike, the District would be “competitive” with places like Lower Merion and Cheltenham. If she could give such assurances, her voters would be “all in” on the increase, she said.

“Not yet, but it’s a step,” replied Hite.

Monson pointed out that Lower Merion spends more than twice as much per student as Philadelphia, and the increase in city spending being proposed would not get the city’s per-pupil expenditure anywhere near Lower Merion’s.

Bass said that voters in her district, which covers parts of North and Northwest Philadelphia, are struggling to stay afloat financially and won’t be thrilled about plugging a budget deficit that has not yet materialized.

“We want our schools to be good and to be strong, but at the same time, the deficit is a minute away and folks are paying bills to keep their households going right now,” Bass said.

Replying to those inquiries, Monson returned to the same theme: Even though the District has managed to eke out small budget surpluses for several years, its financial posture remains precarious because it has a “structural deficit.” That means that its expenditures continue to outpace its recurring revenues.

Councilwoman Helen Gym also sought to focus on the bigger picture, citing calculations that she said determined that Philadelphia was due at least $1 billion more annually to assure that all its children, most of whom live in poverty and many of whom speak other languages, receive a high-quality education. Pennsylvania has one of the widest spending gaps between wealthy and poor districts in the country, according to some researchers.

“This is a massive civil rights violation,” she said, adding that although Council should push that issue whenever possible, it should also “do what we can” to help the schools.

When Kenney spearheaded an effort to reassert local control over the city’s public schools after nearly two decades under a state-controlled board, he promised that the move would come with new city money. Kenney has repeatedly argued that the city must steer the destiny of its own school system and not wait on more money from Harrisburg, where the legislature is controlled by spending-shy and Philadelphia-averse Republicans.

Kenney first proposed a property tax hike in March, when the District’s financial situation was considerably shakier. Starting in fiscal year 2019, Monson projected, the District would run a deficit that would balloon to nearly a billion dollars by fiscal year 2023.

The math later changed when the city revealed its latest round of property reassessments, which will provide hundreds of millions more dollars for local schools. Projections released in late March indicate that the District won’t sink into the red until fiscal year 2020 and that the five-year deficit, without any new city investment, would reach $660 million.

In light of the new numbers, Kenney revised his request, lowering the property tax bump to 4.1 percent from 4.6 percent. He also called for an increase in the homestead exemption, which allows homeowners to lower their property tax assessments.

Clearly, though, some council members see the revised calculus as cause for restraint, especially because the tax rate increase on top of the reassessments is a double-whammy for many homeowners.

Council President Clarke, for instance, started the hearing by asking about the percentage of revenue provided to the District by the state and the percentage provided by the city, implying that the state should carry a larger load. The current District budget calls for the state to provide about $1.62 billion and the city to provide about $1.56 billion.

District officials implied that they were agnostic about where the money comes from, so long as they can ensure long-term stability.

“What we’re trying to focus on is the revenue we need to provide children with an adequate education,” said Hite.

He later added, “What we’re asking for now is to maintain the stability that we fought so hard to get to.”

Before this stability, the District lurched from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, firing thousands of staff members and closing two dozen schools along the way. The worst period started in 2011 when Gov. Tom Corbett severely reduced state and federal aid to Philadelphia and other school districts. Among other draconian moves, the District laid off all its counselors and nurses.

Even now, falling enrollment has left many School District buildings half-empty.

Allan Domb wanted to know about utilization of school buildings, asking at one point, “What is the perfect-size high school?”

His question yielded some interesting information: District Facilities Manager Danielle Floyd said that 31 District schools are operating at less than 50 percent capacity.

But closing schools is a touchy and complicated matter, because they serve as anchors in many city neighborhoods, and in some cases, the last vestige of institutional stability.

Hite and Floyd said that the District does ongoing evaluations of building utilization as well as prioritizing maintenance. It has $5 billion in unmet facilities needs, recently dramatized in a series of Inquirer stories on environmental dangers in school buildings and covered during the past year in the Notebook.

The School Reform Commission, which yields control of the School District to a new nine-member Board of Education on July 1, must adopt a budget for next year by the end of this month.

For schools, activists want PILOTs and end to abatements, not property tax hike

2018-05-08T23:25:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

As City Council heard testimony Tuesday about Mayor Kenney’s proposal to generate nearly $800 million in additional funds over five years for schools in part by increasing property tax rates, a coalition of activists demanded measures that instead would raise revenue primarily from the wealthy and large nonprofits such as universities.

The Our City Our Schools Coalition was formed nearly a year ago by groups of activists, advocates, and labor unions who fought to bring an end to the School Reform Commission, which governs the District and is dominated by the state. Last fall, the mayor agreed that the District should return to local control and vowed to raise more city revenue to fund schools adequately and avoid constant cutbacks in programs and services.

But after Kenney announced his tax package in March, the coalition proposed raising funds in ways that don’t burden working and middle-class families. Primarily, it is calling for an end to the 10-year real estate tax abatement on new construction and want large tax-exempt institutions to make “payments in lieu of taxes” (PILOTs) to the city. Along with several other measures, the plan would raise over $250 million annually, the advocates say, more than the mayor’s package.

“We’re constantly told there’s no money for the schools our kids deserve — that there’s no funding to fix lead paint and mold,” said Antione Little, a Philadelphia parent and chair of the coalition. “But there’s plenty of money — it’s being hoarded by corporations, universities, and real estate developers. We’re calling on the mayor and City Council to force the wealthy of our city to truly pay up for our schools. Our schools can’t wait — and the working class of this city can’t afford yet another tax hike while the 1 percent remain protected by our elected officials.”

Red T-shirts dotted the crowd, worn by teachers with the Working Educators’ Caucus, which joined the coalition.

“Our schools are chronically underfunded and under-resourced, and there just aren’t enough staff to provide the support and guidance that our students deserve,” said Katrina Clark, a teacher at the Workshop School in Philadelphia. “At one school in my neighborhood, the kindergartners don’t have recess because there aren’t enough staff. We are sending our students to sit in rooms with active leaks, mold, rodents, and asbestos for seven hours a day. These schools are poisoning our children, and it’s time we do something about it.”

The thrust of the coalition’s ideas had support from former City Controller Alan Butkovitz, who testified during the hearing. Like the coalition, Butkovitz called out the new property tax increase and the existing tax abatement on new construction.

“In Philadelphia, consideration has been given to people who live in new construction to have 10-year tax abatements,” Butkovitz said. “And yet the people who live near new construction get hit with the burden of massive increases in [property] taxes.”

He was also “sickened” that Superintendent William Hite waited so long to ask the city for more money to repair facilities.

“When I was city controller – in conjunction with the teachers’ union – for 10 years, we pointed out the dangerous conditions of school buildings,” Butkovitz said. “At the time, we knew it would be a $7 billion rebuild.”

In an effort to make a start, his office and the union prioritized $50 million in emergency repairs and $1 million in “super emergency repairs” that required immediate attention, Butkovitz said.

“And we were met with the answer that they couldn’t find $1 million,” he said. “Now that we’re reading front-page articles about kids eating paint chips and losing the ability to do math in their head, now the School District says this is an emergency.”

Butkovitz called for the city controller to have the power to audit the School District, “just like they do with City Council.” The coalition is calling for an independent audit of District spending.

Earlier that day, Carla Pagan, executive director of the city’s Board of Revision of Taxes, mentioned that the District has begun appealing the property values of their buildings. These appeals assert that the current values of certain buildings are too low, indicating that the District intends to sell some property if the prices increase.

City Finance Director Rob Dubow outlined Kenney’s proposed changes to the city’s tax structure, which would raise $770 million over the next five fiscal years (2019-2023). This would cover the $660 million in additional funds the District needs over that time span to maintain current services and meet recurring obligations, while leaving an extra $110 million for new investments.

The money would be raised through an increase in the property tax, a cut in the rate at which the city is reducing the wage tax, and an increase in the tax on property sales.

“These new investments include expanding early literacy and providing more individualized student attention, putting greater resources in classrooms, and increasing resources for 21st-century high schools and [Career and Technical Education],” Dubow said. “While no one likes tax increases, the administration believes the investments in our future that this package would permit are worth the sacrifice.”

The coalition doesn’t oppose the entire tax package, but staunchly opposes the residential property tax increase, which Dubow said would generate nearly $200 million over five years. Instead, they said, their proposals would raise over $1 billion during the same time period.

The proposal would require massive nonprofits like universities and hospitals to make payments to the city in exchange for their tax-exempt status — something done by all Ivy League universities except the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia in New York City. It would also end the 10-year tax abatement on value generated through new construction or renovation, stop a coming decrease in the city’s business tax rate, and increase the Use and Occupancy Tax that applies to landlords of businesses.

It also calls for the creation of a public bank, which could provide an influx of cash to help with more than $4 billion in deferred maintenance costs across more than 200 District buildings.

“There are plenty of ways to fund our schools,” said Tonya Bah, a parent who was nominated for the nine-member Board of Education that will take over for the SRC in July, but not among the mayor’s final choices. She stood alongside fellow members of the coalition as she spoke. “We want City Council and the Mayor’s Office to know that it’s time for the rich to pay up, and we are done taxing working people.”

Shakeda Gaines, president of the Philadelphia Home & School Council and a member of the coalition, spoke about the stress of being a parent and the associated costs.

“Now imagine what it’s doing to our teachers who are paying for pencils and crayons,” she said, adding that the schools themselves are falling apart. “They expect them to teach under those conditions. … You expect our children to learn under those conditions and then wonder why they act like they act.”

Clark, the Workshop School teacher and member of the Working Educators’ Caucus, also spoke about those conditions.

“Imagine knowingly sending your child to sit in a room with active leaks, mold, rodents, and asbestos,” she said, adding that the temperature reaches 90 degrees on hot days and that there isn’t any money to replace the HVAC system in her building. “This means we have to wait for the money to have it replaced. When will this money come? When a child gets sick? When a child dies? When more students are chased out of the District into charter schools?

“What color should my students’ skin be in order to deserve a school free from leaks and mold? How much money should my students’ families make before they have a right not to breathe in air filled with roach feces?”

In the end, Clark’s message was simple: “Education costs money.”

“It’s past time to show our young people that they are our priority,” she said. “The only conscionable act is to fund our schools. Ethically. Equitably. Fully.”

Their message connected Philadelphia’s perennial shortfalls and Pennsylvania’s history of inadequate and inequitable school funding to statewide teacher strikes in states that, like Pennsylvania, have legislatures under Republican control. Many carried signs reading: #RedForEd.

“Our allies in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Puerto Rico, and Arizona share the same feelings we have,” said Jessica Way, a core organizer with the Caucus and a teacher at Franklin Learning Center. “We have watched as our government starved our schools, then turned around and pointed out how deficient they were. I have also watched as my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, refuses to pay a dime for payment in lieu of taxes while turning around and asking if we would host their students as student teachers and nurses.

“Enough with the freebies and handouts. It is time for big business in Philadelphia to pay up, or it is time for us to force them to.”

District forecasts five years of balanced budgets, citing new city commitment

2018-03-22T16:39:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Buoyed by the promise of nearly a billion new dollars from Mayor Kenney, Philadelphia School District officials are projecting five years of balanced budgets even as they plan to enhance some services for city students.

The new figures were unveiled as District Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson presented a $3.15 billion “lump sum” budget to the School Reform Commission on Thursday, along with a five-year plan.

The SRC approved the budget by a 3-0 vote. Bill Green was absent.

“This is a step away from the years when we made dramatic closures, and that’s exciting,” said SRC Chair Joyce Wilkerson. “It’s been a long haul. There have been some tough years. This puts the city in the position to provide additional funding until the states does.”

Wilkerson was hopeful that Harrisburg can be convinced to provide more funding in the future, since “we’re in the same boat as most everybody across the commonwealth.”

The new projections are in stark contrast to the picture painted late last year, when Monson forecast a $700 million annual shortfall by 2022, due to expenditures far outpacing anticipated revenue. At one time, the deficit projection was as high as a billion dollars.

But that was before Kenney, in his budget presentation on March 1, promised that the city would back up its resumption of local control of the District with a significant infusion of new cash.

He proposed raising the property tax rate by 6 percent and reducing some planned business tax cuts, plus several other measures to raise the $980 million in additional dollars for the District over the next five years.

“Now, we are in a moment of truth. It’s time to write a new chapter in the history of Philadelphia’s schools,” said Kenney, declaring the end to an era of massive District budget cuts – largely state-imposed – and devastating consequences, such as the elimination of school counselors and nurses.

On Thursday, the mayor’s budget director revised that number downward to $966 million over five years, mostly by decreasing the percentage of the proposed property tax increase to 4.1 percent. But the total revenue raised will still approach the prior total because the Office of Property Assessment has concluded that most city homes are worth more than originally projected.

Last fall, Kenney began the process of returning the District to local control after 17 years under the state-dominated SRC. Pennsylvania assumed control of the District in 2001, declaring it fiscally and academically distressed.

Kenney said he had finally concluded that the state, which has the legal responsibility to make sure all students have access to a quality education, would not come through for Philadelphia any time soon.

“These are our kids,” the mayor said. “They are not anybody else’s kids.”

Now, with Kenney’s commitment, the picture has changed.

“Before expenditures were growing twice as fast as revenues, but now they are almost equalized,” said Monson. “That’s mostly due to the city’s proposals to provide recurring naturally growing revenues.”

In last year’s presentation, the forecast was that expenditures were increasing by 4 percent and revenue by just 2 percent. Now, Monson said, expenditures are increasing by 3.5 percent, while revenues will increase by 3.1 percent.

This will allow for additional investments, including the elimination of all “split” grades in grades 1 and 2. Those are classrooms in which students from both grade levels are combined to save on the cost of a teacher. This scenario happens when enrollment in each grade is well below the contracted maximum of 30 students, so students are put together. Now, the classes will be kept separate and class size adjusted.

In remarks before the SRC, Superintendent William Hite cited improved graduation rates and successful early literacy work – this year marked a 5 percent increase in the number of 3rd-grade students reading on grade level – to 4th and 5th grade. Other new investments include significant capital improvements and classroom modernization; 30 additional teachers for English learners; funds for more itinerant instrumental music teachers and art and music supplies; additional emotional support programs and special education vocational teachers; and increased financial support for the lowest-performing schools.

“The District is in the strongest academic and financial position it’s been in since I’ve become superintendent,” Hite told SRC members before the vote.

Of course, the City Council must approve the tax increases and other revenue measures that the mayor proposed in order for these budget projections to hold true. And the lump sum budget also assumes that Gov. Wolf’s proposed budget will be approved for FY 2019 as well as, after that, 1.5 percent annual growth rate in state funds.

There are other risks, including changes to the formula for reimbursing charter schools and the possibility that the legislature will approve a bill giving the state the power to authorize charters. These budget projections assume a slowdown in the growth of charters, which is the largest single line item expenditure in the District’s budget at close to a billion dollars. Charters now enroll about a third of the city’s students.

Another risk is the ever-escalating contribution to the state teacher retirement system, or PSERS, which has ballooned since 2011 from $50 million to more than $300 million annually. Another big cost driver is medical benefits.

Most of the annual increases in the budget are accounted for by fixed costs beyond the District’s control, such as pensions and charter payments, not by additional educational investments in District schools. By the fifth year, the total budget would increase $136 million, with $28 million of that due to new investments in schools and classrooms.

The Trump administration could upend federal education funding priorities drastically, which would also change the picture. It has already declared its intention to eliminate Title II, which is used for teacher training and development, and the new budget sets aside $17 million as a contingency fund in case that goes through. However, the much larger Title I, which sends $130 million to Philadelphia, could also be affected.

For the moment, though, Monson’s numbers project a fund balance at the end of fiscal 2018 of $135 million, about 4.5 percent of total revenues, which is smaller than recommended. That fund balance will fluctuate and dwindle to just $61 million in 2023, or 1.7 percent.

The five-year plan does not include plans for closing any schools, Monson said in answer to a question from Wilkerson.

“The city’s proposed new funding plan provides resources to accelerate and further expand progress while ensuring fiscal stability for years to come,” Monson said.

The lump sum budget provides a general summary of expenditures and priorities; more detail is available from budget documents on the District’s website.

Individual schools will be completing their budgets by March 28. There will be a budget hearing before the SRC on April 19 and one before City Council on May 9. The SRC is scheduled to adopt a final budget on May 24.

The District also approved over $250 million in bonds at a relatively low interest rate compared to recent years.

Monson said the District’s interest rate has been declining in recent years, saving over $18 million on the latest bond issue. This helps the District keep their annual debt service payments below 10 percent – one of the primary reasons that credit agencies upgraded the District’s ratings.

Moody’s assigned fairly stable ratings to the bonds, calling the outlook “positive,” but far from perfect due to “the district’s still-strained financial position and narrow reserves, exacerbated by substantial charter enrollment pressures that will persist.”

The District now has a total of roughly $3.2 billion in outstanding debt, according to Moody’s. Passing the new budget may help these bonds get a better rating in the future, which could lower interest rates for the District.

The bonds received a relatively high rating due to “the district’s strong management team,” and the “positive relationship with the City of Philadelphia, stabilized charter enrollment, and a return to investment in district classrooms after years of austerity operations.”

Moody’s also applauded the “move from SRC governance to local control in 2018, and the mayor’s recent budget proposals, which allocate permanent tax increases to the district.”

In other action, the SRC also approved the long-awaited Policy 406, which sets conditions for amending a charter before it is due to expire. Among other things, it specifies when charters must seek approval from the SRC when they make changes in educational programs, location, or name. The policy was designed last year, in collaboration with the Pennsylvania School Board Association, which makes recommendations on best practices for charter school authorizers.

The proposed policy had been amended several times, but the latest revisions still don’t satisfy the charter community, which has been complaining of overregulation. Excellent Schools PA, which represents charter schools, sent a letter to SRC members urging a “no” vote.

“The rush to amend Policy 406 coincides with a series of infringements upon charter schools including greater efforts by the Charter School Office to micromanage charter schools, charter application denials and lingering issues of unsigned charter renewal agreements,” the letter said. Nearly 20 charters have declined to sign charter renewal agreements due to disputes with the District’s charter office over the terms.

The letter said approval will “jeopardize the working relationship of charter schools, education advocates and the School District at a time when we should be coming together.”

Kenney makes school-funding plea; Council reacts

2018-03-01T21:26:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The day his budget proposal went public, Philadelphia’s Mayor Kenney made an impassioned plea for $980 million in new school funding over the next five years.

The mayor’s annual budget address before City Council crescendoed with a 10-minute riff — much of it unscripted — on the critical need to cover the School District’s impending deficit and set it on a course to long-term financial stability.

“These are our kids,” Kenney said. “They’re no one else’s kids. And no one else is coming to their rescue.”

What’s the mayor’s case for a tax hike?

When Kenney called for dissolving the state-controlled School Reform Commission and the restoration of a locally appointed school board in the fall, he also called on the city to make a big investment in public schools.

No one knew exactly how big until Thursday, when the mayor asked for $980 million over the next five years.

Much of that money would come from a 6 percent bump in the city’s real estate tax rate. Kenney also wants the city to increase the real estate transfer tax, scale back planned reductions in the city’s wage tax, and increase the city’s regular contributions to its public schools.

Those are the details, though.

What Kenney did in his Thursday speech was make a moral and civic argument about the importance of the city’s school system, which has flirted with fiscal disaster for decades.

Without committing to education, Kenney said, the city’s high poverty rate will remain high and its social safety net will remain costly.

“We need to pay for our kids’ future,” he said while pounding his fist on the podium. “Because in the end, the 26 percent poverty rate that we have as a city will only be reduced through education.”

Kenney believes the School District’s stability will be more than just a growth proposition, though. He believes it will deliver a psychic boost to a city of students, many of whom have grown accustomed to crises and austerity.

“They’re hungry for one thing that students and families in other parts of this state take for granted: hope,” Kenney said.

Haven’t we been here before?

If some of this seems familiar, that’s probably because this is hardly the first time in recent memory that the School District has asked city officials for more money. Four times during Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration, City Council approved real estate tax increases. Three were smaller than the one Kenney is requesting, but one was significantly larger.

City Council also approved a tax on cigarettes in 2016 to generate more dollars for the public schools.

Some of the hikes followed cuts in state aid. Other came in the wake of a recession that left many government agencies reeling.

But the economy has recovered significantly and state aid has started to increase again under Gov. Wolf. So why does the District still project a $900 million deficit over the next five years?

District officials say the problem is structural. Expenses are simply rising faster than revenues.

The two main drivers of this imbalance are teacher pensions and charter costs. Both are fixed obligations tied to state law and policy.

Pension costs are climbing because the state is trying to dig out of an underfunding hole created by past fiscal decisions. Meanwhile, the District must pay out more and more money to charter schools to keep pace with the growing number of city students who choose them.

After Thursday’s speech, many Council members lauded the mayor’s ambition and general aim.

“Mayor Kenney’s proposed budget is a crucial investment into our public schools, ensuring a long-term commitment toward financial stability for Philadelphia schoolchildren,” said Councilwoman Helen Gym.

But when it came to his specific proposal, there was significant pushback.

Council members’ concerns fell into four major buckets.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

Kenney’s budget calls for tax hikes to cover school deficits

2018-03-01T12:11:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Mayor Kenney promised local investment when he advocated local control of Philadelphia’s school system.

His latest budget proposal delivers just that, raising property taxes and reducing scheduled business-tax reductions to cover the District’s looming deficit.

The mayor’s plan, released Thursday, would send a projected $980 million to the School District of Philadelphia over the next five years. That money would ward off any potential cuts and give the District a long-term financial stability it hasn’t enjoyed in many years.

To make the math work, the mayor is proposing four major revenue streams:

A 6 percent property tax increase that would generate $475 million.
An increase in the real estate transfer tax to add $66 million.
An increase in the city’s annual contribution to the School District that would add $20 million a year and $100 million over the next five.
A slowdown in planned wage tax reductions that would save $340 million. That $340 million would then be diverted to the District.

The mayor will present his plan to City Council on Thursday.

His finance director, Rob Dubow, said the proposal was designed to “share the pain” among homeowners and city businesses.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

Wolf emphasizes education, scales back funding ambitions in last budget address of term

2018-02-07T17:00:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Gov. Wolf asked the Pennsylvania General Assembly on Tuesday for $100 million more in basic education spending and $20 million for special education — his smallest request since taking office in 2015.

Wolf also proposed a $40 million bump in pre-K spending, $15 million more for the state’s system of higher education, and $10 million for career and technical education.

“Rebuilding our schools is the beginning of rebuilding our economy,” Wolf said in his budget address.

The relative modesty of Wolf’s proposal most likely reflects political realities, said education advocates. With the governor and his counterparts in the legislature facing campaigns for the November election, there’s little appetite for raising taxes.

“We’d like to see him be asking for more money for education funding, but we understand the practical realities,” said Marc Stier of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a left-leaning Harrisburg think tank.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

State-related universities fear becoming casualties of Pa.’s budget impasse

2017-10-09T18:45:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The ongoing budget impasse in Harrisburg has been especially frustrating to Pennsylvania’s state-related universities, which have been counting on a roughly $650 million allocation from the state to subsidize lower tuition rates for students who live in the commonwealth.

The allocation is negotiated and approved yearly by lawmakers, and this year, in the midst of a long-overdue budget plan, there is no consensus on how to pay for it.

That’s leading some in Harrisburg to fear that these funds could become a casualty of the negotiation process — a way of helping lawmakers avoid enacting some sort of tax increase.

“There’s just increasing concern that the longer this goes, that that’s the plan to fill the budget hole: to very simply not fund the state-related universities,” said Jennifer Kocher, spokeswoman for Senate Majority leader Jake Corman (R-Centre).

Corman’s district includes Penn State University, which has been counting on $230 million in state aid.

“The absence of an appropriation would result in a direct impact on our students and their families, since these funds are used to keep tuition lower for Pennsylvania students,” said Penn State President Eric J. Barron in a statement. “Without this critical funding from the Commonwealth, we will be unable to run our extension programs that impact Pennsylvanians in all 67 counties. This would be a devastating outcome, but we remain hopeful that our state legislators can come together in support of Penn State, which creates more than $17 billion in economic impact for the state and educates tens of thousands of students annually.”

Read the rest of this story at WHYY’s website

Credit agency praises Philly schools, boosts rating

2017-09-10T00:23:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The first week of school ended with some sunny financial news for the School District of Philadelphia.

The credit-rating agency Moody’s upgraded the district’s bond rating for the first time since 2010 — and shifted its long-term outlook on the district’s financial health from "stable" to "positive."

The district’s new bond rating, Ba2, still qualifies as "non-investment grade," known informally as a junk rating. But the upward revision suggests Moody’s sees hope in the district after years of financial misery.

Analysts praised district leadership in its credit opinion.

"The upgrade of the underlying rating to Ba2 speaks to considerable improvement in the district’s still strained financial position," analysts wrote. "Management is experienced, and though some are new to the district, the team has developed a detailed understanding not only of the district’s finances but also of charter pressures and the complexities of managing a highly dynamic, large, urban school district."

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

District to limit disruptive staffing practices with new city money

2017-04-20T21:31:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Thanks to an unexpected $65 million injection of tax revenue from the city, the School District of Philadelphia plans to hire more teachers and squirrel money away in case of federal budget cuts.

In a budget presentation Thursday night, district Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson proposed hiring 113 new teachers, which would allow the district to reduce its reliance on unpopular and disruptive staffing practices.

Specifically, those additional hires would eliminate the need to combine any first and second grade classes–an austerity measure known as “split classrooms.” The district also plans to eliminate so-called “leveling” for grades K through 3. During the annual leveling process, the district moves teachers at schools with lower-than-expected enrollment to over-enrolled schools.

Under the new proposal, all K-3 teachers would remain at their original schools and teachers would be added to schools in need of overflow relief.

About $17.5 million will also be put aside to counteract a feared cut to federal Title II funds, money that has historically gone toward early literacy programs and professional development for educators. President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would eliminate the Title II program altogether, although congress has yet to act on his suggestions.

That rainy day fund is made possible by Philadelphia’s Actual Value Initiative (AVI), enacted in 2014 to bring assessed values of properties more in line with their real value. But this is the first year that the city has reassessed all commercial properties. The process has yielded an extra $65 million for the district which, like most, relies heavily on local property taxes.

Speakers at the budget presentation urged district officials to sink some or all of the new revenue into a teacher’s contract. It’s been nearly four years since the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the district had a valid labor pact.

“The greatest education investment a school District can make is recruiting and retaining exceptionally qualified, dedicated, highly decorated, teachers,” said Nicole Jackson, a teacher at Bayard Taylor Elementary School.

Multiple district officials suggested after the meeting that the infusion of new money from city real estate has accelerated the pace and intensity of labor talks, hinting at signs of life in a negotiation that has dragged on for years with little indication of progress.

“We have never left the table. We’ve always been there. I do think having additional revenue helps the discussion along,” said Monson.

He did not, however, divulge any new proposal details or say a deal is imminent.

Superintendent William Hite also acknowledged a “renewed energy” around labor talks.

“We’re talking all the time and we remain optimistic,” added district spokesperson Kevin Geary.

The district’s current projections include $192 million over the next five years for both a new teacher’s union contract and a new contract for the union that represents school-level administrators.

Before the $65 million boost was factored in district officials estimated the city’s public schools system would be $138 million in the red by fiscal year 2019 and $905 million under water in fiscal year 2022.

The new budget presented Thursday outlined the same general trend, but with slightly less ghastly figures. Absent any more new money, the district’s shortfalls will be $55 million and $714 million in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

Last month the School Reform Commission also asked district officials to draw up a separate budget to include all investments the district feels it needs to adequately educate its roughly 134,000 students. That alternative budget is not yet ready, however, according to Monson.

After Monson’s presentation on the budget, the commissioners listened to 17 speakers address the budget and its impact on different aspects in city schools.

Leading the list of speakers were students from Vietlead, a grassroots advocacy group for Vietnamese communities based in Philadelphia and New Jersey, and Asian Americans United (AAU) urging the SRC to invest in ESOL support for students.

Eileen Zang, a sophomore at Philadelphia High School for Girls and an AAU youth leader, called for bilingual counseling assistants in schools.

“Immigrant students and families are not receiving support we need to guarantee that we are able to fully participate in our own education,” said Zang. “Bilingual counselors are very important to us student and our parents. Without them non-English speakers are unable to understand or express themselves.”

As of now, there are 57 BCA’s in the District speaking 36 languages including Albanian, Vietnamese, Spanish and Chinese—both Mandarin and Cantonese.

With such a small number serving a growing immigrant and refugee population, some students are underserved at best.

Tanh Danh Luang, a Vietnamese student at Preparatory Charter HIgh School, said through a translator that since his BCA is shared between his school and South Philadelphia High, he only sees them once a week. Some students in the District don’t get to see BCAs at all, he added.

The only speaker who didn’t address the budget was was Jalyssa Ortiz, a senior from Northeast High School and a member of Youth United For Change. Her testimony was on behalf of a new water bottle policy that would allow students to bring reusable transparent or plastic water bottles to school.

She said access to water in the classroom would help students increase their “cognitive skills such as thinking, learning, and ability to focus,” especially in classrooms where there is no air conditioning.

The policy also stated that teacher could only confiscate water bottles from students if they posed a safety hazard in the classroom. If a teacher deems it necessary to confiscate a water bottle from a student, a teacher can ask the student to throw it away or confiscate it for a day, while reusable water bottles can be confiscated but must be returned within a week.

“We need this policy to ensure that teachers and staff are not allowed to criminalize water or make it harder for students to access the hydration station,” she said. “Students should be able to have water bottles in school because water is a basic human right, not a privilege.”

Also, there was confusion about how many speakers were allowed to speak on the budget and accusations that the SRC sought to limit public input. According to SRC policy, only 12 speakers are allowed to speak on a single topic, six in support, six against. But far more sought to sign up. Some were eventually allowed if they spoke on a topic in relation to, but not directly about, the budget.

“What you are doing is creating an adversarial atmosphere when you deny people the right to speak,” said Karel Kiliminik, a member of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

“It’s way past time for this body to recognize and support authentic public engagement, not discourage it.”

What would an adequate budget for city schools actually look like?

2017-03-27T07:59:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The School Reform Commission shocked most everyone Thursday night when it passed a $2.9 billion budget outline for next year, but then declared it inadequate and ordered District finance officials to craft a document that, in the words of chair Joyce Wilkerson, “reflects the real needs of the children of Philadelphia.”

The unforeseen action was instigated by Commissioner Bill Green, who extracted an admission from Superintendent William Hite that the modest increase in the budget from this year to next was due to fixed costs such as pensions and debt service, not because of significant new investments in schools.

Green was the only one of the four commissioners to vote against adopting the so-called “lump sum” budget, so it passed. But the commissioners, Hite, Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, and speakers at the meeting all agreed, tacitly or otherwise, that what they agreed to isn’t adequate for the District to fulfill its mission – making sure that all its students graduate with the skills and knowledge to succeed in college or the workforce.

"We are not receiving adequate funding, but I think it makes sense to spend time to develop what a real budget would look like for the District," Wilkerson said.

But crafting a “real” and “adequate” budget is fraught with peril, political and otherwise. What does “adequate” mean?” What should such a budget include? Smaller class sizes? Social workers in every school? Or more “turnaround” efforts that include the creation of charter schools and outsourcing of services?

And what about teacher salaries? In the throes of an unprecedented four-year stalemate with the teachers union, do you call for salary levels to jump so that they reach suburban levels to help with hiring the best teachers and keeping them in the city? Hite has publicly said he thinks teachers deserve more money, but that the District doesn’t have the money to give it to them.

In a series of town hall meetings Councilwoman Helen Gym held this fall, hundreds came out to complain about what their neighborhood schools, chief among them adequate counselors, sufficient classes in the arts, and support services around school climate and behavioral health.

“We need a clear restoration agenda prioritizing learning, behavioral health, safety in schools,” said Gym. “The District needs to follow what the community is already underway in doing.”

Hite’s “anchor goals” toward fulfilling the District’s mission include insuring that all students can read proficiently by the time they start fourth grade, that all students graduate high school, and that educators are trained properly so all schools “have great principals and teachers.”

The fourth goal is to “have 100 percent of the funding we need for great schools and zero deficit.” The 2017-8 budget outline that passed Thursday has a small fund balance of $33 million, but by the end of fiscal 2019 the forecast is for a shortfall of $138 million – and that is without adding any more services for children.

For too long, the District has been forced to craft budgets within the parameters set by its major funders, the city and the state. As Commissioner Farah Jimenez puts it: “We get an allowance.” The SRC has no taxing power of its own.

Yearly adjustments occur, up or down. But a serious assessment of what is really needed to adequately prepare most students in the country’s poorest big city for successful lives has not really been attempted.

“Often we come forward with as narrow an increase we can put before [elected officials], the only thing we generally ask for are increases precipitated by things over which we have no control,” said Jimenez. “The budget increases every year are the result of rising health care and pension costs and because of a charter school formula that we’re required to follow.”

The charge now, she said, is basically to see whether elected officials are willing to deal with reality.

‘Bad savings’

Ten years ago, the state did a so-called Costing Out Study that tried to determine what it would take to provide a basic education – or one that is “thorough and efficient,” as the state constitution puts it – to all the students in Pennsylvania. It was based on what “successful” districts were spending per student and adjusted for local conditions, including student factors such as poverty and English language status. The study, done by an outside consulting firm, determined that the state needed to invest $3 billion more in schools and that Philadelphia should get about $1 billion in additional funds, or a third of that amount.

This was done during the administration of Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat and former Philadelphia mayor, and he set about trying to make a down payment on achieving this goal by increasing state education funding. He had to goal of eventually getting the state share of spending on education, now among the lowest in the country at about a third, close to the national average of 48 percent.

But Rendell was replaced by Republican Tom Corbett, who made decisions that cut by about $1 billion state and federal education aid that went to districts. Philadelphia alone lost more than a quarter of that, and it still hasn’t recovered the full amount it got from the state in real dollars prior to 2011, when the Corbett cuts took hold.

Last year, after years slashing programs and laying off people to make ends meet, Hite was able to make new investments that will amount to $526 million over six years. But most of those investments, while welcome, largely restored to schools personnel like counselors and nurses that had been decimated or eliminated altogether the wake of the Corbett cuts.

The District’s small fund balance is caused in part by its inability last year to fill all its teaching jobs and by savings from the impasse with the PFT that has resulted in teachers getting no raises during that time. “Bad savings,” as District Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson once put it. Jimenez explained that part of the reason the District couldn’t fill all the vacancies last year was the delay in passage of the state budget, which delayed the transfers of state subsidies to the District and crimped its cash flow.

Class size reductions

Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth and the policy director for Rendell when the costing out study was done, said – and others largely agreed – that the biggest expense in a revised “real” budget would be to hire more personnel. She and several others, including SRC member Chris McGinley, a former suburban superintendent, said a high priority should be to reduce class size and provide more art and music classes, more counselors, social workers, and consistent behavioral supports.

But, by how much should class size be reduced? Cooper said that research shows that the teacher-student ratio for kindergarten through third grade should be 1 to 17. Now, in most District schools, those classes can have as many as 30 students. (This year, despite a citywide push on Read by 4th to make sure all students reach that benchmark, there was some backsliding on fourth grade reading proficiency rates.)

But would reducing to 25 be cost effective? And Jimenez is skeptical about the class size research. She looks at studies that say the skills of the teacher has more of an impact.

So should there be more investment in teacher training? And what kind of teacher training?

Cooper thinks it is pretty straightforward, a simple calculation. “You know how many school buildings you have, and how many students, and how many teachers you need to bring class size to a reasonable level,” Cooper said. She would be happy with K-3 classes at 20, and those above at 25, which matches the ratios in most well-off suburbs.

Then factor in more counselors, because in Philadelphia they have to deal with mental health needs and special education and so much more than college counseling and course selection. And more art and music teachers, not just one per school, but enough so that students can get at least one art class a week. And then enough teachers for Advanced Placement courses in all high schools.

And then maybe add social workers to take the burden off counselors who now must do it all.

Figuring out the proper ratios for all these people “shouldn’t be that hard,” she said. “I’m not talking about a utopian district where every kid gets field trips and violin lessons. I’m talking about rudimentary adequacy, the investments needed to boost student performance. There’s plenty of research on what experience is necessary for students to succeed given the needs of our population.”

Through all this, she said, the District should continue to look for efficiencies, she said, but not shirk from the final number.

“If it turns out that we need a billion more, that’s a messaging challenge in Harrisburg,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know what’s needed.”

‘Restoration agenda’

Commissioner Chris McGinley has served as superintendent of two suburban districts, including Lower Merion, which spends nearly three times per student as Philadelphia.

He agrees that the District needs to determine what is “adequate.” And for him, it also means lower class size, as well as an end to longstanding cost-saving moves to save money on personnel costs that disrupt schools. Those include “split” grades where students in different grades are in the same classroom and the annual “leveling” process where teachers are moved around in October, if enrollment projections were off.

For instance, the class size maximum in the teachers’ contract is 30 for K-3 and 33 above that. So if a school turns out to have 40 first graders, seven of them might be put in an undersized second grade instead of keeping two classes of 20, each with its own teacher, which would be better for education but worse for the budget.

“Eliminating one or two teachers in an elementary school in October could affect hundreds of kids,” McGinley said. But getting rid of leveling alone, he said, “will cost millions of dollars.” Gym said there is absolutely no reason other than cost to maintain this disruptive practice.

Overall teacher attrition rates in the District are about 10 percent, not terrible for a system of this size. But it means hiring about a thousand teachers each year, and many of them leave within a few years of being hired.

A lot of that attrition is due to bad working conditions, like large classes and not enough counselors, exacerbated by the District’s awful relationship with the PFT and the four-year failure to reach an agreement. McGinley says that such turnover makes investments in teacher orientation and training problematic.

“If we could invest in a very good teacher training programs, when 1,000 people need to be replaced each year, who are we training them for?” McGinley asked.

So would such a calculation include competitive teacher salaries? Said McGinley: “Coming to a successful collective bargaining agreement is a critical piece in any puzzle. Anything you’re going to do to improve the quality of instruction begins with a sound, fair agreement.”

Jimenez has a similar outlook.

“You’ve been out there saying we need a fair contract, and we agree, so how much are they willing to put on the table to facilitate that?” she said. “And how much are they willing to facilitate investments in classroom tech, supplemental staff, quality educational materials, and enrichment programs that all our schools are starved of? We are asking the sources of our ‘allowance’ to be part of this exercise.

Cooper said that she realizes the potential import of the District including in any calculation higher compensation for teachers. But, she said, in the long run, that would be a small piece of the overall cost; most of it would go to hiring many, many more people, even with disagreements over just how much class size should be reduced.

“The biggest expenditure is the number of staff you’d need to teach children,” she said.

Councilwoman Gym said that a true “restoration agenda” would be about a lot more than hiring additional teachers. It would convey the message that the system is being reenergized and renewed, and not in a downward spiral of austerity that the current five-year plan lays out. Under the current outlook, it is no wonder teachers and families are bailing for charter schools and suburban districts.

She issued a statement saying that city officials may have to bite the bullet. “Given current budget predictions, we must be prepared to consider further increasing city revenues to our schools as we see the federal and state governments continue their retreat from our public schools," the statement said.

Drama regarding the District’s budget is not new. In fact, one could argue that the SRC exists mostly because of a prior confrontation between Superintendent David Hornbeck and Gov. Tom Ridge in 2000. Hornbeck, who cast the budget issue in moral terms, vowed to spend as much money as he felt was needed and shut down schools in March, or whenever the money ran out. Thatre scenario led to Hornbeck’s resignation, but also to the deal that resulted in the demise of the old Board of Education and its replacement by the SRC.

More recently,at the worst of the crisis after the Corbett cuts and facing school buildings without so much as secretaries, much less counselors and art teachers, the SRC adopted a lump sum budget that counted on receiving $440 million in revenue that it didn’t yet have.

So far, there is no deadline for producing a “real” budget, but presumably it would be before a final budget is adopted by the end of May

“We should know what the superintendent believes it would take to improve instruction, and not just live within our means,” McGinley said. The lump sum budget the SRC adopted, he said, “is minimal. We should know what adequate would look like.”

SRC to city, state leaders: Show us the money

2017-03-24T07:06:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission adopted a lump sum budget Thursday, but not before a surprisingly frisky conversation that forecasted a potential showdown with city and state officials.

The adopted lump sum budget would leave Philadelphia schools with a small fund balance after fiscal year 2018, but does not include any substantial new investments in city schools. By fiscal year 2019, those reserves would evaporate and the city’s public school system would be left $138 million in the red.

The commissioners voted 3-1 to approve the budget, with commissioner Bill Green casting the lone "no" vote.

Green dissented because he believes the budget presented Thursday doesn’t include the money needed to sufficiently fund Philadelphia’s schools and produce needed academic gains. In essence, Green was asking the district to adopt a more aggressive budget that would force its main funders — the city and state governments — to think hard about what the city’s schools truly need.

Green argued that by rejecting the budget, commissioners would send a message that simply maintaining the status quo wasn’t acceptable.

"Why should I approve a budget that doesn’t spend what we need to spend?" Green asked. "Why wouldn’t I just vote ‘no’ and tell the state and city…to step up? Why should I acquiesce to this?"

Though Green’s push to reject the lump sum budget fell short, his argument did find a warm reception among fellow commissioners and members of the public.

Superintendent William Hite conceded that the district’s current investments — which total $526 million over the next five years and help restore much of what was slashed during past periods of austerity — still are not large enough to, as Green put it, "educate the children of Philadelphia."

"I agree with commissioner Green that it is disappointing we have insufficient support from our local and state legislators," commissioner Farah Jimenez said. "I do think the pressure needs to remain."

The state and city are projected to send $1.5 billion and $1.2 billion to the district respectively in the current fiscal year. But the district’s costs are rising at about double the rate of its revenues are.

In a subsequent resolution, the SRC asked district officials to draw up a new budget that, in SRC chair Joyce Wilkerson’s terms, "reflects the real needs of the children of Philadelphia." The SRC approved this second resolution unanimously, meaning the district will now have to craft a more ambitious budget for the SRC’s review.

"We are not receiving adequate funding, but I think it makes sense to spend time to develop what a real budget would look like for the district," said SRC chair Joyce Wilkerson.

All of this activity and agita came with little warning during a hearing many expected to proceed without incident.

The back and forth underscored the fragility of the school district’s budget even in times of relative stability. It also sets a potential collision course between school officials and the lawmakers that fund Philadelphia’s schools.

District officials say right now they don’t have the money needed to offer more than the $150-million deal they’ve already submitted to the teacher’s union for a new contract. Nor, they say, do they have the dollars necessary to properly educate children in a city where more than one quarter of residents live in poverty. Even to simply maintain current spending levels will eventually require more money than the district currently receives.

"It sounds like the only decisions we have available to us are either to secure more from the state and the city in terms of revenue or to cut in painful ways," said Jimenez.

But the district’s funders face their own challenges. Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Philadelphia’s school budget picture remains bleak despite surplus

2017-03-23T17:01:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Despite the expectation of a small balance of $33 million in the next fiscal year, the Philadelphia School District’s financial picture remains bleak, with expenditures far outpacing revenues and an anticipated shortfall of nearly a billion dollars by 2022.

That was the message from Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson as he presented the annual “lump sum” budget to the School Reform Commission Thursday, along with five-year projections that lay out in detail how that cushion quickly curdles into a $138 million “negative fund balance” by 2019, just one year later.

“We’re actually exactly where we were a year ago, we’re just a year closer to that problem and our goal is for all of our funders to understand that and help us find ways to work to fill those gaps in the future,” said Monson. “The time is running out for that future.”

The projections are based on current revenue sources and recent trends in funding from the state and city, on which the district relies for most of its revenue.

They also factor in $150 million in additional compensation costs over five years for teachers, who have worked without a contract and received no raises since 2013 as the district and teachers union continue their protracted stalemate over wages, benefits and work rules.

School closings sought

The five-year plan also discloses the intent of Superintendent William Hite to recommend closing three schools a year starting in 2019 due to declining enrollment, resuming a divisive and controversial policy in response to continued student migration to charter schools.

While such closures don’t show immediate fiscal benefits, they eventually reduce costs and are necessary in the long run to ensure efficiency, Monson said.

“Our point is that, from a fiscal point of view, when enrollment declines happen, it is not cost-effective to operate certain schools,” he said.

Even accounting for those savings, the district expects costs to rise at about twice the rate of revenues between fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2022.

Despite that dire picture, Monson said the district does not plan to ask City Council for additional funding when officials make their annual appearance in May. It can also have an impact on the development of such important industries as pharmaceuticals. Experts predict a sharp decline in the skills of specialists, which threatens the risk of reducing the quality of generics noted on the pharmaceutical resource. The intent is to present the district as a “responsible fiscal steward” doing its best to educate the city’s children in district schools and charters with the money available to it, while not sugarcoating what is coming down the road.

Monson hopes to apply enough pressure so the district can avoid what he calls the “Chicken Little situation,” where school leaders must beg for more cash to plug immediate shortfalls.

“We are making investments where we can. We’re improving our educational program. Our revenues come from the state, come from the city,” Monson said. “And our ask is to sit down with us and explain how and what we can expect in the future so we can remain balanced and retain the proper level of education investments in our schools.”

Still, it is clear that without some major changes in how schools are paid for — additional or higher city taxes, a wider application of a new state funding formula that is tied directly to enrollment and student need, changes in how money is funneled to charters — Pennsylvania’s largest city will soon face the specter of more layoffs and a reduction in crucial services for its mostly low-income student population.

The rising costs of charters

Charters, attended by approximately a third of city students, constitute the largest single fixed expenditure in the district’s budget — more than $800 million next year, rising to nearly $900 million in 2019. Comparable numbers spent in district-run schools are $1.476 billion in 2018 and $1.559 in 2019.

While money is sent to charters based on their enrollment, the money coming into the district is not based on enrollment, Monson pointed out. “There is no correlation between the numbers of students we have and how the funding works,” he said.

The result is a perverse incentive — the more the district spends on its own students, the more money goes out to charter schools, often leaving too little for either to operate the way they would like.

Monson believes this is bad policy. “That should never be a reason for not making investments,” he said. In an ideal world, he said, money should be allocated on a per-pupil basis for all students.

The state education funding formula adopted last year does this, but it only applies to new state education dollars, not the great bulk of it. And efforts to revise the method for driving out funds to charter schools have long stalled in Harrisburg, as districts and charters fight over the details in what Monson sees as an inadequate overall pot.

Philadelphia has about half the charters in the state. There are 125,000 students in district schools and another 70,000 in charters.

Philadelphia’s past fiscal woes have frequently given birth to one-time, nonrecurring fixes and to taxes that rely on bad habits like drinking and smoking. The city’s liquor-by-the-drink and cigarette taxes were enacted mostly to provide money for schools.

For now, though, rather than press Harrisburg for a bigger education investment, the district’s main hope for some fiscal relief is to seek technical changes in the formula for driving out state reimbursements to districts for such fixed expenditures as pension costs, transportation, and payroll taxes.

The formula relies, in part, on a measure of a district’s poverty by looking at its property wealth. The Actual Value Initiative adopted by the city in 2014 tripled the book value of the city’s property, making Philadelphia — with the highest poverty rate of any big city in America — appear to be wealthier than it actually is for purposes of such reimbursement.

An “offset” to the AVI, which could affect other parts of the state as well, would result in $284 million in additional revenue for the district and reduce the projected 2022 shortfall to $605 million, Monson said.

That takes care of “a third of our problem,” Monson said. Harrisburg politicians have been receptive to the change, he added.

Focusing on impending shortfall

Overall, he said, the five-year plan is intended to draw attention to the looming shortfall coming within “the next 24 months,” and to “establish baseline financial projections to enable dialogue among all school district funders identifying pathways to achieving long-term structural balance.”

The district is looking everywhere to find savings and eke out more revenue. It refinanced to save more than $100 million in interest costs, and bring its debt service from 14 percent to below 10 percent of the annual budget. It gets $2 million from taxes on ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft.

The lump sum budget for next year presented to the SRC projects $2.82 billion in revenues and $2.74 billion in expenditures. For the following year, the projection is for revenue to inch up to $2.87 billion while expenditures rise to $2.92 billion.

The projections include a continuation of additional investments made after two years of devastating cuts — closing 24 schools, laying off teachers, eliminating school counselors, decimating the school nurse ranks, and slashing central office resources. In 2016, Hite began $440 million in new spending over five years than is anticipated to grow to $526 million in 2022. Those investments restored many of these cuts and also focused on shoring up early literacy, improving graduation rates, and bolstering teacher and principal training.

In the fall, Moody’s and Fitch upgraded the district’s financial outlook from negative to stable, the first upward revision since 2010. State officials also extended the city’s cigarette tax, preserving a nearly $60-million revenue stream in perpetuity.

But, in the same breath as they trumpet progress, district officials also want to warn of impending pain. It’s a tricky balancing act, one that will play out over the two-month budgeting process that follows Thursday’s announcement.

Principals in district schools are completing their individual school budgets now. The SRC will hold a budget hearing on April 20 and Hite and SRC members will appear before City Council on May 10. The SRC is scheduled to vote on a new budget for next year on May 25.

But neither City Council nor the state is due to finish their budgets until the end of June, resulting in many unknowns. In the past, spats over education funding in Harrisburg have delayed budget adoption for months, leaving the district in the lurch and unable to plan.

Ample warning

Long term, questions over how the district’s budget deficit will be remedied and who will provide the remedy loom large. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney has already vowed not to raise taxes in the coming year. Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed budget includes a $100 million boost to basic education spending, which would represent a smaller increase than the prior year.

Councilwoman Helen Gym blames the district’s structural deficit on Harrisburg lawmakers and said the new projections should spur action.

“We have had ample warning for some time that our public schools would face a fiscal cliff in the next two years,” Gym said in a statement. “We are now just 12 months from having to grapple with a projected deficit of $138 million, largely the result of the state Legislature failing to do its due diligence and adequately fund schools — and this does not even include potential and massive changes at the federal level.”

For instance, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would cut federal aid to schools significantly, including an elimination of Title II, which pays for professional development and some early childhood literacy efforts. Philadelphia would lose an additional $17.2 million if that goes through.

A longstanding lawsuit seeking fair and adequate funding for districts across the state is now before the state Supreme Court.

A representative of state House Speaker Mike Turzai said he wouldn’t comment on the district’s budget until it was formally presented.

District sells, refinances bonds for improvements after Wall Street upgrades risk ratings

2016-10-26T13:48:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

It’s been a good month on Wall Street for the Philadelphia Public School District.

Last Thursday, the School Reform Commission approved resolutions to restructure $1.5 billion in existing bond debt, for a savings of roughly $140 million. The District converted some of its bonds with flexible interest rates into fixed-interest-rate bonds and negotiated lower interest rates for others. The resolutions also authorized the sale of $250 million in new bonds that will be used to pay for school-related capital projects. The actions came just weeks after two Wall Street bond credit rating agencies reevaluated the District’s overall financial stability and changed the outlook from “negative” to “stable.” Uri Monson, the District’s chief financial officer, said the evaluations from the rating agencies make new bonds more attractive to potential investors. “The ultimate goal is not to be fiscally stable; it’s educational achievement,” said Monson. “But you have to be fiscally stable in order to do the kind of investing we need.” The District is particularly dependent on bonds to finance capital projects, such as the maintenance and repair of school buildings and infrastructure. The upcoming projects financed by the $250 million in new bonds will include new school buses, heating and cooling systems, roof repairs, and playground renovations. The District needs to use bonds to fund these projects because of the large price tags, Monson said. “It’s a long-term investment that we pay back over time,” said Monson, “so we don’t overburden the operating budget with huge capital costs.” Monson pointed out that the District hasn’t been able to sell new bonds to repair buildings since before the state budget impasse. Surplus reserves

Both Moody’s and Fitch rating agencies cited the District’s growing cash reserves as a primary reason for the improvement in outlook. Moody’s described the reserves as being at a “healthier, but still narrow level.” They listed the District’s total reserves – the general fund, debt service fund, and intermediate unit — at about $100 million by the end of last fiscal year. One of the reasons for the growth in reserves was the District’s failure to fill more than 100 teacher vacancies last year. In a press release, Fitch cited “expense management” as a primary reason that the District has been able to increase its reserves, although it also mentioned increased revenue from the city and state. Fitch ascribed growing reserves to “structural expense reduction” and “certain short-term budgetary effects." According to the agency, "The short-term effects included difficulty in hiring for a significant number of teacher vacancies.” Fitch also cited “the District providing no healthcare benefits for retirees or dependents,” as another cause of the growing reserves. Another example not mentioned by Fitch or Moody’s is the millions saved on substitute teacher costs after the private substitute-hiring firm, Source 4 Teachers, failed to fulfill its contractual obligations last year. Although Fitch and Moody’s are indirectly rewarding the District for spending less money on labor costs, Fitch also noted that “further expense reductions are likely to directly affect core service delivery.” More specifically, “a difficult labor environment, with the teachers’ union operating without a contract for three years, is a negative factor.” It’s also a factor that could be included in the category of “structural expense reduction” that Fitch acknowledges helped create the District’s larger cash reserves. Furthermore, it is a key reason that the District had so many teacher vacancies, which Fitch listed as one of the “short-term effects” that contributed to growing reserves. The reports also lauded two recent pieces of state legislation that stipulate that bond payments can be made directly by the state treasurer, who is allowed to withhold the bond payment amount from the District’s state funding for the next school year. This prevents the District from skipping bond payments if it finds itself in a precarious financial situation. Enrollment in charter schools

Charter schools also featured prominently in both agencies’ predictions for the future. Fitch said it viewed charter school spending as SDP’s most critical expenditure challenge. Average annual charter school enrollment has grown by 8 percent each year since fiscal year 2012, while average annual enrollment at traditional public schools has declined by 3 percent each year, Fitch reported. Monson said that overall enrollment across the District has begun to plateau, but charters continue to enroll more students each year. Fitch pointed out that the District has to pay charters on a per-pupil basis, but “unlike many other states, the vast majority of local school aid is not distributed on a per-pupil basis and is not directly tied to enrollment.” So the District loses money for the students who leave for charters but does not gain state money for new students enrolled at District schools. Last fiscal year, 30 percent of the District’s budget went to charter schools, and this amount is expected to increase in future years, according to Moody’s credit opinion. Moody’s wrote that “continued loss of students to charter schools” could lead to a downgrade of the District’s rating. It also concluded that the “halting of migration of students to charter schools” could lead to an upgrade, as well as the “attainment of permanent revenue sources,” such as the ability to levy property taxes. The agency’s credit opinion expressed confidence that the District’s most recent five-year-plan was financially sound. It includes “annual growth in charter expenditures, savings from the closing of two schools per year beginning in fiscal 2018, as well as additional funds for potential future labor settlements.” Monson said that closing two schools per year was an estimate made by enrollment trends and that those trends may change in the future. “It’s not a budget determination,” Monson said. “It’s purely a utilization condition and performance decision.” Superintendent William Hite told NewsWorks that the planned closures would be made in response to enrollment declines in a district that expects 10,000 more students to enroll at charters over the next five years, but that the District will only close schools if its declining enrollment estimate turns out to be accurate. Hite said he would rather close schools gradually than be faced with another situation like the one that occurred during the 2012-13 school year, when the District closed 30 schools. Moody’s concludes that “the district will remain challenged over the medium term to offset growing fixed costs, primarily charter school tuition, given its lack of authority over the property tax levy, commonwealth aid, or any of its other major revenue sources.” The 2017 budget also includes $125 million (8.6 percent) increase in state aid and a $117 million (16 percent) increase in local tax revenue, offset by $117 million (16 percent) growth in charter school expenditures and a $44 million (8.5 percent) increase in employee benefits.

Despite challenges, Hite optimistic about future of District

2016-09-28T08:34:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In spite of a significant looming deficit, Superintendent William Hite painted a positive picture of the School District during a panel discussion Tuesday hosted by the Central Philadelphia Development Corp., a membership organization of Center City businesses invested in continuing the economic growth of the area.

Hite and Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson appeared as part of a panel discussion moderated by Paul R. Levy, founding chief executive of the development corporation, to talk about education funding and the future of Philadelphia schools.

Hite touted the start of a $440 million investment plan to improve schools in the District. He also highlighted the hiring of 700 new teachers and the return of art and music teachers to every school.

“We’re really beginning to change the message,” he said, “from having to eliminate, cut, and having to do all of those dramatic things, to making investments in youth regardless of where they live in the city.”

In contrast to Hite’s optimistic tone, Monson told the audience about the financial challenges that the District faces due to inequitable state funding and “piecemeal” local tax revenues.

Nevertheless, Hite said, the District is doing its best to work its way through funding obstacles and to get past the trauma of 2013, when dozens of schools were closed.

“After the start of year five here as superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia,” he said, ”indeed we are in the best shape that we’ve been in since I have been here in Philadelphia. And many of you recall some of the extraordinary steps we had to take just to get to a place of fiscal balance.”

– Darryl Murphy

Why are national civil rights groups calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion?

2016-09-01T08:04:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

As students prepare to head back to school in Philadelphia, the often-contentious public conversation about charter schools has reignited, with calls for a moratorium on their expansion by both the NAACP and the Movement For Black Lives coalition. Both organizations contend that charter schools are part of an effort to privatize education at the expense of poor, urban Black and Latino communities.

The groups complain that charters divert funds from schools that need them, lack transparency, and lack community involvement. This approach, according to the NAACP’s resolution passed in August, “puts students and communities at risk of harm, public funds at risk of being wasted, and further erodes local control of public education.”

To become policy, the resolution would require approval by the NAACP’s national board in the fall.

In recent years, charter schools have become a hot-button issue because they are privately managed, but funded with public dollars. Those looking for reasons for the controversy need to look no further than Philadelphia, where charters and the School District must share a pot of money inadequate to the city’s educational needs.

This fiscal year, Philadelphia will spend about $875 million, close to a third of its education budget, on charters. The District’s eight-person charter office must monitor and evaluate more than 80 charter schools. And the law is murkier on what information charters must disclose. According to the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, many laws and regulations that apply to school districts "do not apply to charter schools."

Inadequate oversight has led to reports of questionable management of funds.

In the spring, the charter management company Scholar Academies pulled out of Kenderton Elementary, a former District school that it had operated under the Renaissance schools turnaround initiative. Scholar Academies cited “fiscal constraints,” blaming the cost of providing special education services. Shortly after, the company announced plans to open another location in Tennessee.

In 2014, Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School, a K-8 school in Northern Liberties, shut down over the winter break, leaving hundreds of students without a school to attend after the break ended. According to reports, the District found numerous “financial irregularities” at the school, totaling close to $6 million owed to the District. A court order to pay $1.5 million of the debt was enough to force the school to close its doors.

Some charter school malfeasance has been found to be criminal. In 2012, two administrators from New Media Technology Charter School were sentenced to prison for fraud and embezzling over $500,000 in taxpayer money from the school.

In addition to questions about financial management, charter schools have been the target of complaints about student discipline tactics.

In March, a study conducted by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, part of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, found that two Philadelphia charter schools were among the nation’s 10 public charter schools with the largest discipline gaps when it comes to suspending students with disabilities.

Looking at the country’s 5,250 charter schools, researchers analyzed disciplinary data, looking for disparities in suspension rates for different racial groups and students with disabilities.

The research, which included 80 charters in Philadelphia, focused on out-of-school suspensions during the 2011-12 school year in elementary and secondary schools. In the study, researchers found that Black students are suspended at higher rates than White students and that students with disabilities are suspended at higher rates than non-disabled students. Black students were more than three times as likely to be suspended compared to their White peers.

A disproportionate level of suspensions was documented at high-performing charter schools, leading researchers to raise the possibility that “some charter schools are artificially boosting their test scores or graduation rates by using harsh discipline to discourage lower-achieving youth from continuing to attend.”

The study also compared suspension rates at traditional public schools with the rates at charter schools. Overall, they found that charters suspended students at a slightly higher rate. The average suspension rate for all charter schools combined was 7.8 percent, and for traditional public schools, it was 6.1 percent.

Not public vs. charter

For Julian Vasquez Heilig, education chair of the California NAACP, a moratorium on charter expansion just makes sense.

“Look, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on charter schools,” said Vasquez Heilig, who is also a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of California in Sacramento. “Seven percent of all schools in the United States are now charter schools. So if we’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, we need to stop and take stock.”

At the beginning of August, days after the NAACP released its resolution, the Movement For Black Lives released its Vision for Black Lives platform, which also took aim at charter schools.

The movement is a coalition of 50 grassroots social justice organizations from across the country that includes #BlackLivesMatter and Journey For Justice, a group that also influenced the NAACP’s resolution.

The platform lists six demands for racial justice, calling for reparations, reallocation of investments, political power, economic justice, an end to the war on Black people, and community control.

In the category of community control, the platform demands “an end to the privatization of education,” and calls for it to be replaced with “real community control by parents, students and community members of schools.”

The platform names philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, the Walton Family, and Eli and Edythe Broad, saying that they have been among the masterminds behind the agenda to privatize education, with help from federal, state and local departments of of education.

“We’re dealing with big philanthropy, we’re dealing with corporate interests that create these charter schools," said Hiram Rivera, executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union and co-author of the platform.

It’s more than just "public schools vs. charter schools. That’s not the fight. … It’s the system."

Philadelphia is one of the most underfunded school districts in the country. The city’s high poverty rate and insufficient property tax base results in less revenue for schools. Add to that Pennsylvania’s inequitable state funding formula, which leaves the School District operating in near-perpetual debt.

Such deficits lead to school closings, downsizing of key staff, and poor building maintenance. Many District teachers, who have yet to renegotiate a new contract after three years, purchase school supplies out of their own pockets. These conditions cause parents and students to seek an alternative to District schools, taking per-pupil funding with them and further exacerbating District schools’ woes.

Are parents being manipulated?

In Philadelphia, almost one-third of the students in taxpayer-funded schools attend charters.

But Rivera said that parents are being "manipulated" by a system that undermines public education.

“Black parents in poor neighborhoods in poor cities like Philadelphia are desperate for good schools,” Rivera said, “and they’re going to make whatever choice they feel they have to make for their children that’s in their best interest.”

The call for a moratorium on charters initially went uncontested by charter proponents. But then black pro-charter advocates mobilized, saying that the NAACP is out of touch with what its supporters want.

“The public charter school moratorium put forward at this year’s NAACP convention does a disservice to communities of color,” said Shavar Jeffries, president of Democrats For Education Reform, in a statement on the group’s website, “particularly the parents and caregivers who seek the best school options available to prepare their children for the demands of the 21st century. This moratorium would contravene the NAACP’s historic legacy as a champion for expanding opportunity for families of color.”

According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 56 percent of the students who attend charter schools are Black and Latino – 29 percent Black and 27 percent Latino.

Charter schools offer education and career opportunities to Black and Latino children that previously weren’t available, Jeffries continued. And “research shows that black children benefit greatly — in terms of academic achievement and college enrollment — from attending high quality charter schools.”

According to a 2015 study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Black charter school students in urban areas outperformed their district peers in math by 36 additional learning days and reading by 26 additional learning days.

CREDO also found that Black students in urban charters outperformed their White peers in urban charters in reading and math. In charters across the nation, they outperformed them in reading.

The study has been lauded by Black pro-charter advocates. It is often used in their arguments in favor of charter schools. However, the study was not peer-reviewed, and academics warn against overstating its results.

In 2013, the National Education Policy Center published a review of CREDO’s 2013 National Charter School Study, which used the same methodology as the 2015 Urban Charter School Study, where the reviewers found “significant reasons for caution in interpreting the study’s results.”

The study compares charter school students to a “virtual twin” created from a collection of test scores and data from traditional public school students. This method, according to reviewers, “may not adequately control for differences between families who select a charter school and those who do not, which could bias the results.”

Among other criticisms, they said that the approach that measured accumulated days of learning was "problematic."

Even if those concerns were set aside, the results produced by the study favoring charters are insignificant, said reviewers, concluding that there is little or no difference between results in charter and traditional schools.

The appeal of charters

Although the empirical evidence of their learning benefits can be debated, charters appeal to parents in urban areas for other reasons.

During a panel discussion presented by Al Dia Media in August, Alfredo Calderón Santini, CEO/founder of ASPIRA Inc., a charter management company, said parents tend to like charters for safety more than education. They view learning as an added bonus, he said.

Charter school growth in the United States shows no signs of slowing down. From 2000 to 2014, close to 6,500 charter schools have been created, at an annual growth rate of 11 percent. As of 2013, 2.5 million students — 5 percent of the total student population in the country, were enrolled in charter schools.

Researchers predict that if this growth continues, by 2035 charter schools will serve between 30 to 40 percent of the country’s public school population.

While the charter debate grows more heated, Sharif El-Mekki, the principal of Mastery Charter School’s Shoemaker Campus, said he wants to focus on what both sides agree on.

“What we all want are better outcomes for our communities, for our students, and for our children,” El-Mekki said. “Whether they’re under our leadership or other people’s leadership, that’s what we’re united on.”