HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s public school funding method is unconstitutional, according to the courts. That uncontested ruling last year from the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ordered lawmakers to come up with a solution.
Democratic State Representative Mike Sturla was the prime sponsor of House Bill 2370, a bill that would give schools an additional $1.1 billion in Basic Education Funding this year and more than $5 billion over the next seven years.
The measure passed the Democrat-controlled State House on Monday.
“It gets schools the funding they need,” said Sturla, a representative of Lancaster County and Co-Chair of the Basic Education Funding Commission. “It sets it out in a timely fashion of seven years to keep increasing funding so that schools have time to ramp up and get the appropriate curriculum and teachers.”
Still, the bill could face an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled State Senate.
“My greatest concern with what I saw come out of the House is that it’s a spending plan without a way to pay for it,” said State Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, a Republican representing York County who also served as BEFC Co-Chair.
Phillips-Hill suggests spending more won’t fix the learning gaps in schools.
“We continue to have children [who] are in schools that have zero percent proficiency in math and zero percent proficiency in reading,” she said. “That’s not fair to those kids.”
Sturla argues otherwise.
“The notion that ‘Well, why are you putting money into a failing school?’ We’re putting money into a school that’s been underfunded and as a result, [wasn't] getting the same kind of results [as] a school that was funded,” Sturla said.
Republicans and Democrats agree the way schools are funded needs to change, but they’ll need to find common ground on a method.
“Even in their report, they said schools are underfunded. The question was how much. We ought to fund them fairly,” Sturla said. “How do you do that? We think we came up with a fair way of doing it.”
“They need more predictability, they need more stability in those dollars,” Phillips-Hill explained. “That’s exactly what we both proposed. So let’s take it from there and let’s work forward from where we found that consensus.”
Education was the largest proposed expense in the Governor’s budget plan this year and could be a sticking point in ongoing negotiations.
The budget deadline is June 30th.