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The Pennsylvania House (shown) and Senate voted to adopt a new state budget on Thursday. ELC will continue to call on state officials to finish the job of fixing the state funding system.
On Thursday, after a prolonged debate over education funding, the General Assembly passed an important one-year budget that acknowledges and prioritizes addressing a $4.5 billion adequacy gap with a new stream of adequacy funding.
While we applaud strong increased investments in this year’s budget, we also know this is a missed opportunity to fix our unconstitutional school funding system through a long-term plan to fully close adequacy gaps. While the House proposed such a plan through H.B. 2370, legislators are leaving Harrisburg without any long-term commitment to achieve constitutional compliance.
ELC worked tirelessly to make constitutional compliance a reality this year. The pathway we worked to forge included:
• Our role as co-counsel in the landmark 2023 Commonwealth Court decision, which instructed lawmakers to work with petitioners to “devise a plan to address the constitutional deficiencies identified by the Court.” This new system must provide all students with 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.
• The Basic Education Funding Commission heard our testimony and issued a majority report recommending a 7-year plan to close adequacy gaps.
• We advocated for critical long-term investments, and Gov. Shapiro proposed a historic $1.1 billion one-year increase in basic education funding, targeted to the districts with the greatest need.
• The House passed H.B. 2370 in a bipartisan vote, which we supported, that would have amended the School Code and embedded in law a process to increase state funding to underfunded districts by $5.1 billion over 7 years.
Today, the General Assembly passed an important one-year budget that — for the first time — acknowledges and begins to fill huge adequacy gaps.
This budget includes these increases:
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Adequacy Supplements to underfunded districts: $494 million
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Basic Education Funding: $225 million and $60 million in hold-harmless relief to districts furthest from adequacy
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Special Education Funding: $100 million
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Early Intervention: $33 million, a 9% increase for preschool EI and $9.1 million for infant/toddler EI, up 5%.
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Pre-K Counts: $15 million, a 5% increase
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Tax equity relief: $32 million to districts with 90% or above tax effort rate
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Facilities: $250 million to rebuild and repair school facilities
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Cyber charters: $100 million to reimburse districts for costs
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Mental and Physical Health: $100 million
You can find more budget details and documents in this report and see more coverage here and here.
These investments will provide vitally needed resources to students, with an unprecedented focus on Pennsylvania's most underfunded school districts. But one budget cannot resolve decades of cumulative inequity. The budget passed today only fills 10.9% of an acknowledged $4.5 billion adequacy gap — a target which artificially reduced the size of the state’s funding shortfall by undercounting students in poverty.
The work of our General Assembly is not finished. We must recognize the true depth of adequacy shortfalls and the urgency of the need. As explained in our joint statement, our legislators must adopt a plan to comply with the Court’s directive to ensure constitutional compliance.
We are grateful to each of you for changing the narrative in Pennsylvania to prioritize adequacy, equity, and racial justice in our school funding system. Decades of systemic and structural racism has resulted in Black and Brown students being educated in our most underfunded school districts. We are proud of how far we have come and eager to work together to finish the job.
Students in our underfunded schools are counting on us.
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