Scranton’s kids have an issue. While we look at our district’s budget of $166 million and how we constantly experience shortfalls that require cuts and borrowing and tax increases, we are missing the biggest issue when we talk about how to address it: fair funding.
According to the last state budget, a kid from Scranton is worth about $4,300. The proposed budget this year says a kid from Scranton would be worth about $5,400. This is the basic education subsidy from the state. Guess what York, where our Governor and Auditor General come from, gets from the state? $9,000 per kid. This is unconscionable. Every kid from Scranton is equal to kids from York, as far as I’m concerned. Fun fact: even if we get the boost in funding from the state this year, we are STILL the worst funded urban district in Pennsylvania. This is also unconscionable.
Thankfully, Governor Wolf has been helping us. Senator Blake and Representative Flynn have been helping us. Our new crop of representatives will also help us. But after conversations with my fellow Director, Paul Duffy, I realized that it hasn’t been enough, isn’t enough, and won’t be enough.
So we’ve been taking it to a much more powerful force: PTAs.
A few directors have been going to PTAs and speaking to them directly regarding this massive funding disparity. Think about it: we are shorted $18.9 million PER YEAR. And that just gets us to average funding, not even to York levels of funding. If we had that money, there would be ZERO talk of program cuts, librarian cuts, building closures, and on and on. We’d have enough to be expanding our offerings!
What’s truly amazing to me is that despite this massive shortfall, the district’s kids still perform academically! We are so very challenged by this issue, and somehow we hang on.
I’ve enjoyed going to the PTAs because it’s a chance to see faces who don’t go to Board meetings. These are people who live in the district, have kids in the district, and are volunteering to help the district. Hearing the concerns of parents and teachers at these meetings has been amazingly refreshing for me. I tend to leave Board meetings feeling like a piece of living garbage. I leave PTAs feeling like we are accomplishing something good.
And on that note, a petition to fairly fund the district was started by a woman at one of the PTA meetings we went to. Please sign it! Michelle Dempsey was incredulous when we presented a Power Point with all of the numbers. She was inspired to do something about it. And that’s why we’re out there. Almost 1,800 people have signed and that number is growing every day. The Scranton Times has caught on and is giving the issue coverage.
If we don’t speak up, nobody will listen. It’s wonderful to see that every group, every stakeholder can come together on this and maybe change the way the state treats our kids.
Tom,
As noted by many others (and myself) several times before, the state funding formula is a problem, and local legislators need to be held accountable for changing it.
There is, however, a danger that some want the SSD narrative to be about state funding precisely because it takes attention away from the very real issues of fiscal responsibility and basic administrative competence of past SSD Boards. In fact, I’ll go one further: Had state funding been higher, there would have been less scrutiny of SSD practices, such as the twice awarded no-bid busing contract, the mechanic who really wasn’t an employee but still got employee benefits and the blatant nepotism (as evidenced by the recent director appointment) that permeates the SSD.
Yes, the petition is a good idea, and I did sign it, but hold Senator Blake and others accountable for changing the law. Don’t lose focus on changing past fiduciary failure practices that brought the SSD to this point.
Steve
I agree, and we are working on that. The $18.9 shortage (which is what we are due, not a bailout of any kind) means we can barely operate the district. I’m glad to be there and to be working on culture/competence/fiscal responsibility, and I have hope, especially with the coming Recovery Plan. But we are currently DEAD LAST when it comes to urban districts and, guess what, if they give us $10.5 million, we’ll still be DEAD LAST. We are woefully underfunded. Both reform at home and on the state level need to happen, and we can work on both. And we are.
Tom, good to hear, but I think you are missing a piece to this: Where is the accountability among the local legislators? It’s as if they are being “asked” to help solve the problem. THEIR LEGISLATIVE BODY CREATED THE PROBLEM…and…they have known about it for a while. Granted that there are a lot of problems to deal with in the Pennsylvania Legislature, but this needs to be a priority. Senator Blake, in particular, needs to own this problem. I get that he is politically powerful and it’s not a good idea to upset that apple cart, but if this is truly a crisis, then someone in Harrisburg needs to step up and come up with a permanent solution.
Steve