These next few days are critical in the budget-making process, and one of the most important issues to be decided is funding for basic education. Legislators will be working over the weekend to craft a budget to meet the June 30 deadline, and the decisions made in these hours could impact your school district greatly.

Your help is needed right now to make sure that all of the work done over the past year by the bi-partisan legislative Basic Education Funding Commission (BEFC) and public school stakeholders to develop a new funding formula is not lost. We need to ensure that every legislator hears from school officials on this issue.

Contact your members of the Senate and House of Representatives and tell them to support the recommendations of the Commission as set under Senate Bill 910 (Sen. Smucker, R-Lancaster) or House Bill 1390 (Rep. Saylor, R- York).

Timing is important! Please take a moment right now to make a phone call, send an email or text message, or use the prepared letter available by clicking on “Take Action” at the top right corner of this alert. When you click on the link, the letter is at the bottom of the web page that appears. After completing the address information required, the letter will automatically be emailed from you to your legislators. Please note: the prepared letter is editable so that you can add information about the impact on your district, if you wish.

What is the new formula?

The new formula will benefit school districts, children and parents by using factors reflecting student and community differences such as poverty, local tax effort and capacity, and rural and small district conditions. The recommendations also maintain hold harmless by distributing new money through the formula using a base year, protecting those affected districts from redistribution of existing funds.

Using the formula with Gov. Wolf’s proposed budget, the administration plans to provide a $410 million increase in 2015-16 for all school districts, and an additional $400 million in 2016-17. It restores cuts to the most at-risk students and levels the field for the poorest districts. The goal is to provide sufficient funding to all school districts.

Click here to read the full report of the BEFC.

Advantages of the new formula

* It meets the needs of all school districts, and every district receives an increase.

* It is fair, predictable and transparent. It allows school districts to plan more accurately for each school year’s budget.

* It will help to close the gap between poor and affluent districts, with the poorest 25% of districts receiving 55% of new funds.

* It considers districts with high enrollments of English language learners, districts with growing enrollments, and those rural and small districts with more sparse populations.

* It takes into account several student-based factors, with weights assigned to each category to help determine the degree to which each factor drives up the cost of educating a student.

* It helps school districts by including a weight for charter school enrollment (students attending both brick and mortar, and cyber charters).

* Poverty will no longer be measured using free and reduced lunch poverty indicators. Instead, it will be measured by federal census data by school district and updated annually. Further, factors for poverty will include separate weights for levels of poverty.

* It considers local tax effort and capacity, and district wealth. It replaces aid ratio as a measure of local wealth with a Median Household Income Index using federal census data.

The recommendations follow months of extensive study and talking with a wide-range of experts and advocates in the education field as well as parents, from urban, suburban and rural school districts throughout the state. The lack of a reliable funding formula in Pennsylvania has led the state’s property owners down a road of enduring tax increases. This new formula will ultimately help the taxpayers. This has been a bi-partisan effort, and it deserves to be enacted.

Thank you for your advocacy efforts — every message sent is important!

Source: PSBA Legislative Alert, June 26, 2015.