If it survives a potential appeal to the state Supreme Court, the landmark decision could transform the way public education is funded.
Laura Boyce, executive director of Teach Plus PA, said the ruling does not prescribe a specific remedy, outline a new distribution system or say how much funding is required but acknowledges and provides evidence that the current system is in need of reform.
The ruling sheds little light on which school districts would benefit most from a fairer funding formula and how that change will come about.
Plaintiffs of the Education Law Center and the Public Interest Law Center have calculated that 277 of the state’s 500 districts need more than $2,000 more per student to adequately support learning needs, based on the state’s own benchmarks. That’s a total of $4.6 billion more in annual funding.
If that funding were to be budgeted, the question would be: How will it be distributed?
Maura McInerney, legal director at the Education Law Center, said the court’s opinion made it clear that school districts with the lowest wealth, such as Sto-Rox or Baldwin-Whitehall, should receive the money that they need to provide a constitutionally compliant education.
The existing funding formula is based on current enrollment numbers, with increased weight for students living in poverty and other factors.
A hold-harmless provision allows school districts to receive at least as much basic education funding as they received before 2014-15, with slight increases to adjust for inflation, protecting them from the fiscal effects of declining populations. Nonetheless, school districts such as the Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS] are seeing a gradual reduction in the rate of increase in state funding, said James Fogarty, executive director of the advocacy group A+ Schools.
As PPS continues to see an enrollment decline, it could gradually see a decrease in money coming from the state, based on the current basic education formula.
If the state eliminated the hold harmless provision, and put all of the money through the current basic education funding formula, “you would see more money going into places like Fox Chapel or Mount Lebanon because they’ve had more students go into their district, even with sort of the level of wealth that exists in those districts,” Fogarty said.
