Despite funding increases under Wolf, Pa. school districts still ‘treading water’

Despite funding increases under Wolf, Pa. school districts still ‘treading water’

In announcing a budget plan that included more money for Pennsylvania schools, Gov. Tom Wolf this week trumpeted the growth in state education spending during his tenure.

“The first thing I did when I got to Harrisburg was to draw a line in the sand on education,” Wolf told lawmakers during Tuesday’s budget address, as he declared that investments in schools were paying off.

But the tide of expenses continues to wash over that line, school officials say.

“Districts are still pretty much just treading water,” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, citing increasing costs for pensions, special education, and charter-school payments.

If Wolf’s plan for next year is enacted, it will increase the state’s main pot of money for schools to nearly $6.1 billion, an increase of just under 10 percent since he took office in 2015…

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PENNSYLVANIA: Critics say charter bill shortchanges school districts

PENNSYLVANIA: Critics say charter bill shortchanges school districts

HARRISBURG — A proposed rewrite of the state charter school law would allow public schools to keep almost $30 million by adding deductions for costs that computer-based schools don’t have.

Democrats contend the state could provide five or 10 times as much relief for school districts if it more aggressively linked charter payments to the actual cost of educating their students.

In 2014-15 Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts paid about $1.5 billion in tuition to charter schools, according to Education Department data.

The legislation, authored by state Rep. Mike Reese, R-Westmoreland County, would create a special commission to examine how much districts should be paying to cyber schools.

The legislation would also make changes to the way the state oversees charter schools, how they are approved and how their teachers are rated.

“The reforms embodied in my legislation are critical to improving and strengthening our Charter School Law, which was groundbreaking upon its enactment in 1997 but has become outdated over time,” Reese said in a memo to other lawmakers.

Charter school operators think the deductions proposed by Reese’s bill are too drastic.

“We are happy with some of the provisions” in the legislation, said Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. “However, the cuts for cyber schools are steep.”

Her group hopes the new deductions are eliminated from the bill, Meyers said.

Overall, the legislation has largely shed most of the controversial elements, said Jonathan Cetel, executive director of the Pennsylvania Campaign for Achievement Now, an independent advocacy group lobbying for innovations to improve school performance.

“It reflects years of compromise and negotiation,” he said. “All that remains are commonsense policies that meet the needs of both charter schools and traditional public schools.”

Cetel added that he hopes the proposed commission would resolve the controversy over how much school districts should be paying to charters.

“I used to think a commission is what you did to kill an idea,” he said. But, Pennsylvania’s success with basic education funding and special education funding commissions suggest the approach can generate solutions, Cetel said.

Lobbyists on all sides of the issue agree it’s time the state update the charter law. But there is no consensus on how to do it and whether Reese’s legislation covers all the bases.

The most universally welcomed part of the proposal is the portion that would create the funding commission.

“We’d like to see something happen,” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.

His group would like to see the funding commission created. They have reservations about a plan in the bill that would assess the performance of charter school teachers using a different process than the one used by teachers in conventional public schools.

The school administrators’ group has, thus far, taken a neutral position on the bill. It’s the same stance taken by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials, said Hannah Barrick, director of advocacy for the business officials’ group.

One of the things the business officials’ group likes is that Reese’s proposal includes “immediate relief” for schools, even if it’s short of what school district leaders think they are over-paying to cyber and other charter schools, she said.

Pennsylvania’s current way of paying charter schools is based on the cost of educating each student in the conventional school system. There are now seven deductions intended to reflect that charters may not have all the costs of conventional schools. But those deductions aren’t enough, she said.

Many school districts have begun to run their own computer-based programs to provide an alternative to losing students to outside cyber schools. In those cases, school officials have found that their costs for computerized classes are at least half what they pay in tuition to cyber schools, Barrick said.

A big chunk of those overpayments are tied to special education costs, Democrats said Wednesday morning.

They estimate that charter schools receive almost $200 million a year in special education payments above the cost of teaching the special education students enrolled in their classes.

In Gov. Tom Wolf’s first year in office, he lobbied for reforms that would have saved school districts about $160 million on their charter school tuition bills, state Rep. Mike Sturla, R-Lancaster said. Sturla said charters are getting overpaid by as much as $300 million a year.

The special education overpayments come from two things, said state Rep. Mark Longietti, D-Mercer County.

Charter schools charge the local school district more in tuition for special education students. And local officials complain that students they hadn’t identified as needing special education are classified as special-ed students when they enroll in cyber school.

Second, the special education tuition rate is based on an average of the cost of providing services, and many of the students getting special education services in cyber schools are getting services that cost less than the average, he said.

Longietti was one of eight Democrats who authored bills intended to provide fixes to Reese’s legislation. The Democrats on Wednesday afternoon tried to get their bills amended into Reese’s bill on the House floor. Most of those amendments were rejected, though the House did add language suggested by state Rep. Mike Schlossberg, D-Lehigh County, that would bar charter schools from advertising that they offer free education and require them to say their costs are covered by tax dollars.

His bill now awaits a final House vote, which could happen as soon as next week. If passed in the House it would go to the Senate. Similar measures passed both the House and Senate in 2015, but the two chambers failed to reach a final agreement.

John Finnerty reports from the CNHI Harrisburg Bureau for The Meadville Tribune and other Pennsylvania newspapers owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. Email him at jfinnerty@cnhi.com and follow him on Twitter @cnhipa.

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