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Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup for May 29, 2015:
Calls for fair funding from Erie to Souderton
COMMUNITY MEETING: PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDING
IN BERKS COUNTY
WHYY Newsworks BY KEVIN MCCORRY MAY 29,
2015 MULTIPLE CHOICES: PART 11
Eleventh in an
occasional series of podcasts
For years, many public education advocates
have been howling about the way Pennsylvania
funds cyber charter schools. It works
like this: Say there's a cyber charter with a physical headquarters in Altoona . It can enroll
kids from anywhere in the state, and it gets a percentage of whatever per pupil
funding would have been spent in a student's home district. If a student comes from a wealthy district in
the Philadelphia
suburbs, the cyber charter will get upwards of $20,000. If a student comes from
a poor urban or rural district, the cyber will get much less. "Why should a
cyber charter get $25,000 for one student and $13,000 for another when the
school is doing the same thing for those two students?" said Susan
Dejarnatt, a Temple
University
Pennsylvania Department
of Education
Cyber Charter
School
A score of 70 is considered passing. No cyber charter achieved a
score of 70 in either year. Additionally, most cybers never made AYP
under No Child Left Behind during the period 2005 thru 2012.
Here are the 2013 and 2014 SPP scores for Pennsylvania ’s cyber charter schools:
School 2013
2014
Achievement House
CS
39.7 37.5
Agora Cyber CS 48.3
42.4
ASPIRA Bilingual CS
29.0 39.0
Commonwealth Connections Academy CS 54.6 52.2
Esperanza Cyber CS 32.7 47.7
Solomon Charter School
Inc.
36.9
Susq-Cyber
CS 46.4 42.4
Six School District Leaders Talk Education Funding at
the Jefferson
WSEE Erie By Deedee Sun Posted: May 29, 2015 12:46 AM EDT
Leaders from six
different school districts in NW Pennsylvania met at the Jefferson Educational
Society on Thursday night to talk about Pennsylvania's education funding crisis
and how to to fix it. School board
presidents and superintendents from Conneaut, Corry, Fort
LeBoeuf , Harborcreek, Millcreek , and Wattsburg all sat at one table, making up
the panel for the NW PA education forum organized by the Campaign for Fair
Education Funding. The goal:
"Finding a predictable, fair, equitable formula in funding education in
the commonwealth, and getting something in state law that doesn't take a year
by year approach," said Jay Himes, executive director of the PA
Association of School Business Officials.
"Being a very rural school district, we may not be able to offer
our students some of the opportunities we see our counterparts in smaller
geographical areas give to their students. Yet our students are expected to
compete on that same platform when they graduate from high school. So I think
if we could get a fair funding formula that's the same throughout Pennsylvania,
it would help make it a little more equitable," said Jody Sperry,
Conneaut's school board president.
By Jarreau Freeman, jfreeman@21st-centurymedia.com, @JarreauFreeman on Twitter
POSTED: 05/28/15,
10:01 PM EDT | UPDATED: 2 HRS AGO
FRANCONIA >> Souderton Area School District Pennsylvania . “This board stands behind … this resolution
100 percent,” Board President Scott Jelinski said. “This board has been tasked
with getting more involved with the laws that are in Harrisburg . We really need to keep a tighter
eye on what’s going on and that’s our goal. As a board, I really think we are
pushing through.” Montgomery County
Intermediate Unit Legislative Services and Grants Development Director Tina
Viletto, who spoke at a North Penn School Board meeting in April, said that at
this time there is no “clear, consistent determination as to how a school
district receives its funds (from the state).”
Souderton is joining
North Penn, who passed a similar resolution last month, encouraging legislators
to consider a fair funding formula. The North Penn School Board also expressed
support of the Circuit Riders — a group that is campaigning for fair education
funding in the state by promoting the Campaign for Fair Education Funding. The
campaign is an initiative spearheaded by approximately 50 educational,
religious and business organizations working to develop their own funding
formula proposal to be submitted to legislators for future consideration.
BY FREDERICK C.
JOHNSON Contributing writer28 May
2015 — Erie Times-News
Frederick C. Johnson
is executive director of the Northwest Tri-County Intermediate Unit 5, which
serves 17 public school districts and nonpublic schools in Erie ,
Crawford and Warren
counties. Pennsylvania 's school funding system is broken, and
students in classrooms across the state are paying the consequences. Recent cuts in state funding, combined with
the fact that the state does not have a predictable, sustainable and fair basic
education funding system to distribute dollars where they are needed, have put
our students at a disadvantage. There
should be no question that money matters. Data shows that student performance
in our state has tracked with state funding levels. A study comparing changes
in state test scores with changes in state funding between 2003 and 2011 found
that performance in the 50 lowest-achieving districts increased by 50 percent,
on average, as basic education funding to those districts increased by about 40
percent. By contrast, as state school
funding levels fell between 2011 and 2014, leading many schools to cut
programs, lay off teachers and increase class sizes, student performance lagged
among all students, but particularly for those facing additional challenges.
Fair distribution, not simply
more money, the answer for Pa.
WHYY Newsworks COMMENTARY BY ANDREA C. ANASTASI MAY 29, 2015 ESSAYWORKS
Andrea C.
Anastasi is graduate of the University
of Pennsylvania and Temple University
Beasley School Philadelphia
According to
the National Center
for Education Statistics, Pennsylvania schools are the most inequitably
funded in the entire country, with poorer school districts receiving 33.5
percent less in education funding than more affluent school districts across
the state. The Commonwealth Foundation’s School Spending
Database, which breaks down education expenditures per student by school
district, and School
Tax Database, which breaks down local education revenue by county, support
this data. These discrepancies
have not only garnered negative
attention nationally, embarrassing legislators in Harrisburg, but also have
spurred members of the General Assembly and policymakers in the governor’s
office to address these egregious variations across the state. For the most
part, their efforts have focused on changing the way Pennsylvania finances education, with the
intention of increasing funding for schools. Unfortunately, the current
proposals do not appear to go far enough to redress the current problem. They
seem only to increase funding for education without fully resolving the
spending inequalities.
Democratic Policy Committee hearing highlights
critical need for increased basic education funding
PA House Democratic Policy Committee May 27, 2015
ABINGTON, May 27 –
Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed 2015-16 budget supported by Democrats puts the
commonwealth on the right track toward healthy and balanced education funding,
state Rep. Madeleine Dean said during a House Democratic Policy Committee
hearing in Abington today. The hearing examined
Wolf’s budget proposal, which advocates for increased education funding,
reduced property taxes and a commitment to invest $2 billion in public
education over the next four years under the Education Reinvestment Act. Local-
and state-level education experts also provided insight during the hearing. “As a legislator, I have a moral duty to
advocate for an adequate, equitable and consistent education system that is
excellent for all children in Pennsylvania ,”
said Dean, D-Montgomery. “This year’s budget presents the opportunity to do so
with historic reform that would help Pennsylvania
emerge as a leader in education.”
Presentations
from CORP Symposium May 6, 2015
Center on Regional
Politics May 28, 2015
Find the
presentations from our symposium on lifting student achievement to
grow PA’s economy in Harrisburg
on May 6, 2015.
Key Findings: Pennsylvania could realize up to $5 billion in additional
annual economic growth by closing school performance gaps, according to the
ground-breaking RAND study presented by senior economist Lynn Karoly, but doing
so will require the kinds of dramatic changes that top performing countries
have made and the U.S.
has not. Various methods of estimating the costs of these gaps, or
alternatively, the potential gains from closing them, show that the
Commonwealth could see immediate gains of $1-$3 billion in earnings, or 2%-7%
in state GDP. Each cohort for which gaps were closed could realize gains of
$1-$3 billion in lifetime earnings and $3-$5 billion in overall value to
society. Marc Tucker, President and CEO
of the National Center
on Education and the Economy, said failure to meet the educational challenges
of global competition will continue to depress wages in the the U.S. and Pennsylvania . According
to Tucker, the U.S.
failed to change its education system to match a new global economic system. It
continued training the bulk of public school students for low-skill, routine
jobs that were rapidly disappearing due to outsourcing and automation. The old
system sorted for quality, and then provided higher education access to the
most qualified. That worked in an economy dominated by blue collar jobs, but it
does not work anymore.
"Carroll said this
provision of his pending bill complements an effort by state Sen. Andy
Dinniman, D-Chester, Democratic chairman of the Senate Education Committee."
Carroll to propose moratorium on Keystone Exams as
graduation requirement
Press Release HARRISBURG ,
May 28 – State Rep. Mike
Carroll, D-Luzerne/Lackawanna, will introduce an omnibus Public School Code
bill that would establish a moratorium on Keystone Exams being used as a
requirement for graduation. Carroll said
this suspension would benefit students and their families, while offering
much-needed relief to school districts that face significant financial and
educational obstacles to fully implement the graduation requirement. "It has become ever more apparent to me
that the linkage of Keystone exam passage to graduation is riddled with
problems and that more thought is required to assess students with a wide range
of abilities," said Carroll, a member of the House Education Committee.
"A one-size-fits-all approach seldom works in the real word and the
Keystone exam requirement is no exception."
More than 90 percent of Pa.
By Mary Niederberger
/ Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette May 28, 2015 1:11 PM
Ninety-two percent
of school districts in the state have submitted plans outlining how they would
spend their share of the proposed $400 million increase in basic education
funding that Gov. Tom Wolf wants allocated to schools, according to the
governor's office. Mr. Wolf's 2015-16
budget proposal calls for raising $1 billion for education at all levels
through a natural gas extraction tax -- a proposal that has not been approved
by the Legislature. In March, state
acting education secretary Pedro Rivera sent a letter to the state's 500 school districtsasking
them to formulate plans for how they would spend their increase by choosing
which of 14 evidence-based strategies provided by the state they would use. Republican legislators had balked at issuing the
requirement of schools since Mr. Wolf did not have the funds in hand to
distribute to schools.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf Announces 92 Percent of
School Districts Submitted Plans to Ensure Additional Funding is Invested in
Classroom
PR Newswire HARRISBURG, Pa., May 28,
2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Governor Tom Wolf today announced
that 92 percent ofPennsylvania school districts across the commonwealth
submitted funding impact plans to the state Department of Education, outlining
how the $400 million basic education funding increase proposed in his
2015-2016 budget will be invested directly in classrooms. The governor's
budget provides a $1 billion investment in education at all levels
through a severance tax on natural gas.
"I have
traveled across Pennsylvania and
listened to educators and administrators detail their plans to ensure
additional education funding is invested in the classroom to benefit our
children," said Governor Wolf. "Through a commonsense severance tax
on natural gas, my budget invests $1 billion in education at all levels,
including an additional $400 million in basic education funding. In
turn, my administration asked school districts to submit plans that are tied to
proven strategies for learning and will enable districts to maintain full-day
kindergarten, bring back valuable programs, reduce class sizes, and hire back
educators."
- 197 school districts in
- 98 school districts will apply the funding
toward reducing class sizes in elementary school classes.
- 87 school districts will restore
programs and personnel that districts were forced
to eliminate as a result of massive cuts over the past four
years. Districts will bring back guidance counselors and librarians and
restore extra-curricular programs designed to enhance learning
outside the classroom.
Governor Wolf's
proposal, called the Pennsylvania Education Reinvestment Act, is expected to
generate over a billion dollars by 2017 by enacting a reasonable severance tax
on natural gas extraction.
Borrowing
to Replenish Depleted Pensions
New York Times By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH MAY 27, 2015
HARRISBURG, Pa. —
Facing a shortfall of more than $50 billion in his state’s pensions, and with
no simple solution at hand, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania is proposing to issue $3
billion in bonds, despite the role that such bonds have already played in the
fiscal woes of other places. And he is not alone.
Several states and municipalities are considering similar action as they
struggle with ballooning pension costs. Interest
in so-called pension obligation bonds is expected to intensify in the wake
of a recent Illinois Supreme Court decision that
rejected the state’s attempt to overhaul its severely depleted pension system.
The court ruled unanimously that Illinois
could not legally cut its public workers’retirement benefits to lower
costs, forcing lawmakers to scramble for the billions of dollars it will take
to keep the system intact. While the Illinois ruling is not
binding on other states, analysts think it may influence lawmakers elsewhere to
look to alternatives to cutting public pensions. The Illinois justices offered a list of all the
times since 1917 that state lawmakers had ignored expert warnings and diverted
pension money to other projects. They said, in effect, that the lawmakers had
to restore the money. Since the late
1980s, state and local governments have issued about $105 billion in taxable
pension obligation bonds. Borrowing through such bond deals is being considered
by many states and municipalities this year to help underfunded pensions.
Education Week By Andrew
Ujifusa Published Online:
May 19, 2015
An Illinois Supreme Court ruling this month that
overturned a 2013 law altering pensions for retired teachers has not only
scrambled the state's financial outlook: It's pushed first-year GOP Gov. Bruce
Rauner to seek a constitutional amendment that could clear a path for his own
overhaul of retirement benefits and stop any legal challenge to it. But shoring up the state budget in light of
the ruling won't be easy, in part because lawmakers allowed a statewide tax increase to partially sunset at
the start of this year, a fact the justices noted in their unanimous May 8
ruling. While Gov. Rauner
has a plan that would create a distinction between previously earned benefits
and new, less generous ones in order to boost the pension system's fiscal
health, it's not clear it would pass muster with either the legislature,
controlled by Democrats, or the courts.
Peter Greene: Kevin
Huffman Sells Tennessee Snake Oil in Pennsylvania
Diane Ravitch's Blog
By dianeravitch May
28, 2015
Kevin Huffman,
former state education leader in Tennessee ,
came to Pennslvania to sell the glories of corporate reform as practiced in Tennessee . Peter
Greene recounts his claims here. Huffman wanted
particularly to sell the virtues of the Tennessee Achievement
School District Tennessee has been a bust so far. “So first, strip local school boards and
voters of authority over their own schools. Second, allow a mixture of
innovation and stripping teachers of job security and pay. The stated plan in Tennessee was that the
bottom 5% of schools would move into the top 25% within five years. Doesn’t
that all sound great? But hey– how is it working out in Tennessee ?
OP-ED: Pa.
Last year, the
General Assembly began the process of providing needed reforms to PlanCon,
which is the commonwealth's program for reimbursing school districts for
construction costs. In October 2012, a moratorium was put in place to allow the
state time to address the timely and costly nature of the current PlanCon
program. This moratorium created a backlog of projects as school districts
across the commonwealth awaited reimbursement for over 350 construction
projects. PlanCon was developed by the
Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) to establish the process by which
the state would reimburse school districts for construction projects. Following
its creation decades ago, PlanCon has grown into a regulatory nightmare
consisting of 11 steps, with the first step alone consisting of 200 pages. Not only was the process long, but PlanCon
was horribly outdated. Some steps require construction plans be sent on
microfilm, which was used as far back as the 1920s. Additionally, the process
lacks transparency as school districts are currently unable to find out where
their project is on the list waiting for reimbursements since PDE lacks a
website providing that information. To
address this problem, I introduced House Bill 2124 (ARC Con) last session to
streamline the program and provide transparency for school districts.
Regrettably, this legislation never made it to the governor's desk, but it was
passed twice by the House.
Allentown schools may see
return of the arts, gym and music
By Sara K. Satullo | For
lehighvalleylive.com Email the author | Follow on Twitter on May 29, 2015 at 6:15 AM
Art, gym and music
are on their way back to the Allentown School District and
taxpayers won't be hit with a tax increase to fund them. The Allentown School Board voted
7-2 Thursday night to pass a $267.4 million 2015-16 proposed final budget that holds the line on taxes and restores 30 elementary and middle school
teaching positions. Directors Michael Welsh and Scott Armstrong
voted against the budget. "A zero
tax increase is important for the citizens of Allentown ," board President Robert E.
Smith Jr. said. The budget projects a 3
percent increase in state basic education funding and relies on $9.2 million of
the district's savings account to balance the budget, less money than the $11.6
million projected two weeks ago.
By Evan Brandt, The Mercury POSTED: 05/27/15, 7:18 PM EDT | UPDATED: 1 HR AGO
LOWER POTTSGROVE
>> The retirement of 11 teachers and the good health of those remaining
is helping the Pottsgrove School Board inch closer to a final budget that won’t
raise taxes next year. In a
meeting Tuesday night devoted entirely to discussion of the 2015-2016
budget draft, a variety of scenarios that can whittle the tax hike as low as
half-a-percent were revealed. That’s a
far cry from the $64.3 million proposed budget the board adopted two weeks
ago which would have raised property taxes by 2.4 percent. Final budget adoption will not occur until
June. The elimination of another
$200,000 in spending (or a revenue increase of equal amount) would put the tax
increase at zero the board was told Tuesday night. Ironically, should the board get to a budget
that does not raise taxes, it could be coming full circle from the preliminary budget it adopted in February, which also
called for no tax increase, but carried a $2.5 million deficit between revenues
and expenses. The plan now under
consideration by the board, which does not carry a deficit, has evolved
significantly since then and went through a rough period last month when the public objected to planned reductions in the music,
art and business teaching staff.
AIU vote to cut 20 special education jobs draws
criticism
By Mary Niederberger
/ Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette May 27, 2015 11:36 PM
In front of a crowd
of about 130 that included special education teachers, paraprofessionals,
parents and students, the Allegheny Intermediate Unit board voted to eliminate
20.4 positions from its special education staff. The cuts made at the Wednesday meeting
represent furloughs. They are in addition to 11.4 positions eliminated last
month, largely through attrition. The cuts take effect in the 2015-16 school
year. The cuts come from the staffs of
the three special education centers the AIU operates — Sunrise in Monroeville,
Mon Valley in Jefferson Hills and Pathfinder in Bethel Park — and among the
staff of professionals who serve the 42 suburban school districts in Allegheny
County.
Report: Philly per-pupil
spending below 2007 level
SOLOMON
LEACH, DAILY NEWS STAFF
WRITER LEACHS@PHILLYNEWS.COM,
215-854-5903 POSTED: Friday, May 29, 2015, 12:16 AM
City schools: This is why
we need more money
Inquirer by Kristen
Graham POSTED: THURSDAY, MAY 28, 2015, 1:31 PM
In the face of steep
revenue cuts, the city school system is now spending less to educate each
student than it has since 2008, and benefits are costing it nearly $8,000 more
per teacher than they did three years ago. Mix lower revenues with rising fixed
costs and the result is fewer dollars spent in Philadelphia School District
classrooms, an outside analysis of district finances released Thursday found. Chief Financial Officer Matthew Stanski said
the analysis underscored the points officials were trying to make this week to
a skeptical, frustrated City Council: they keep coming back for more money year
after year because the money they receive isn’t enough to cover their fixed
costs. “It’s not mismanagement or not
knowing where the money is or where it’s spent,” Stanski said. “It’s this
continued structural problem.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/school_files/City-schools-this-is-why-we-need-more-money.html#CxdLDLVScx5vBY1q.99
Letters: Schools want to
stick together
Philly Daily News Letter POSTED: Friday, May 29, 2015, 12:16 AM
By Nadia Watson, Kensington International Business
High School
PHILADELPHIANS ARE
passionate about fighting for quality public education. We have marched in the
streets countless times. We deserve high quality public neighborhood schools
and a school district that listens to us as students, parents and community
leaders - and we are willing to fight for it. Unfortunately, the school
district has shown again that it is unwilling to take our voices into account
and is pushing through a school-closure plan in Kensington. As Kensington
students, parents and community leaders we are deeply concerned about the
school district's plan to close and merge Kensington
Urban Education
High School and Kensington International
Business High
School
Key numbers from a report
to Congress on US education
Philly.com by KIMBERLY
HEFLING, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS POSTED: Thursday,
May 28, 2015, 2:27 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) -
The American education landscape is shifting.
More U.S. school-age kids live in poverty and need
English-language services, according to a report released Thursday by the National Center
"According to Education
Week, a magazine published by Editorial Projects in Education, a nonprofit that
produces K-12 educational content in print and online, more than 60 percent of
philanthropic donations funneled into education young people in the United
States went to charter and contract schools in 2010. Less than 25 percent of
funding went to those programs about 15 years ago. “What would actually be revolutionary, brand
new, and fresh is if community wisdom was listened to and [corporations] worked
with the people who are directly impacted by the institutions that they have to
live with everyday,” said Brown."
Newswire : A call to curb expansion of Charter Schools
in Black Communities
WASHINGTON (NNPA) –
Parents, students and advocates for strong neighborhood schools continue to
pressure civic leaders to end the expansion of charter and contract schools in
Black and Latino communities across the nation.
Jitu Brown, the national director of Journey for Justice Alliance, a
coalition of community, youth and parent-led grassroots organizations in 21
cities, said that the fight for public education – which suffers with the
expansion of charter and contract schools –is a human and a civil rights issue. As voices from the community were
increasingly drowned out by philanthropic groups seeking wholesale educational
reform, the state takeover of schools, corporate charters and appointed school
boards have become the status quo, Brown said.
"Those who argue that
annual accountability testing of every child is essential for the advancement
of poor and minority children ought to be able to show that poor and minority
children perform better in education systems that have such requirements and
worse in systems that don't have them. But that is simply not the case.
Many nations that have no annual accountability testing requirements have
higher average performance for poor and minority students and smaller gaps
between their performance and the performance of majority students than we do
here in the United States. How can annual testing be a civil right if
that is so? "
Annual Accountability
Testing: Time for the Civil Rights Community to Reconsider
Education Week
Opinion By Marc Tucker on May 28,
2015 6:50 AM
So we now have the
civil rights community accusing those who oppose annual accountability testing
of deliberately undermining the civil rights of minority
children. The No Child Left Behind Act required not only that
students be tested each year in grades three through eight and one additional
year in high school, but it also required that the scores for students in each
minority group be published separately. Take this requirement away, the
civil rights groups say, and we will go back to the era in which schools were
able to conceal the poor performance of poor and minority children behind high
average scores for the schools. Once that happens, the schools will have
no incentive to work hard to improve those scores and the performance of poor
and minority kids will languish once again. None of this is true, though I am quite sure
the civil rights community believes it is true. First of all, the data
show that, although the performance of poor and minority students improved
after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, it was actually improving at a
faster rate before the passage of the No Child Left
Behind Act. Over the 15-year history of the No Child Left
Behind Act, there is no data to show that it contributed to improved student performance for poor and minority
students at the high school level, which is where it counts.
Christie disavows Common
Core, eyes developing N.J. standards
ANDREW
SEIDMAN, INQUIRER TRENTON BUREAU LAST
UPDATED:May 29, 2015, 1:08 AM
Gov. Christie on
Thursday disavowed the controversial Common Core education standards he once
supported and directed his education commissioner to consider developing New
Jersey-specific goals. Christie, a
Republican considering running for president in 2016, had warned for months
that he had "grave" concerns about the standards, which conservatives
denounce as federal encroachment on the classroom. "We have to reject federal control of New Jersey 's education," Christie told an audience
of about 150 at Burlington
County College Washington , D.C. New Jersey ."
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Sign up to support fair funding »
Campaign for Fair
Education Funding website
Our goal is to
ensure that every student has access to a quality education no matter where
they live. To make that happen, we need to fundamentally change how public
schools are funded. The current system is not fair to students or taxpayers and
our campaign partners – more than 50 organizations from across Pennsylvania -
agree that it has to be changed now. Student performance is stagnating. School
districts are in crisis. Lawmakers have the ability to change this formula but
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NAACP PA STATE CONFERENCE YOUTH & COLLEGE
DIVISION:
FAIR SCHOOL FUNDING MOBLIZATION WORKSHOP
Saturday, May 30, 2015 9:00 am
St. Bernard Hall, Friendship
Circle Senior Center - First Floor
1515 Lansdowne
Avenue Darby, PA 19023.
East Campus of Mercy
Fitzgerald Hospital
Please RSVP to
panaacpyc@gmail.com by May 25
COMMUNITY MEETING: PUBLIC
SCHOOL FUNDING IN BERKS
COUNTY
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2015 Time:7:00 – 8:30 p.m. | Registration begins
at 6:30 p.m.
Location: Berks
County 1111 Commons Boulevard ,
Reading , PA 19605
Local school district leaders will discuss how state funding issues are
impacting our children’s education opportunities, our local taxes, and our
communities. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and learn how you
can support fair and adequate state funding for public schools in Berks County Berks County
PILCOP: Adequately and
Fairly Funding Pennsylvania Schools: What are the Needs and Where Does the
Money Come From? (Live Webinar)
June 8, 2015, 12:00 — 2:00 P.M.
June 8, 2015, 12:00 — 2:00 P.M.
Staff attorney
Michael Churchill will speak about what schools need and where the money comes
from in this Pennsylvania Bar Institute (PBI) webinar on June
8. Click here to register.
Governor Wolf has
proposed $500 million in new funding for public schools starting this July. He
has proposed as shale extraction tax and increases in personal income and sales
taxes to pay for this. This Philadelphia
Bar Association Education Law Section and PBI are hosting a webinar that will
focus on how much public schools need and differing proposals on how state
funds should be distributed this year and in the future. Other focuses will
include the current local tax burdens for public schools and issues concerning
how the state should raise revenues to pay for these programs. The program will also provide information
about the components of a good funding formula and look at the work of the
Basic Education Funding Commission and the state-wide Campaign for Fair
Education Funding, of which we are a leading member.
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