Every Child, Every Community: The Long-Term Plan For Strong Public Schools In Pennsylvania
Check out an interactive map to see how the long-term plan for comprehensive public school funding (HB 2370) would close the adequacy gaps across Pennsylvania.
June 26, 2024 - Here’s a guide to the map and the transformative plan it shows:
New annual adequacy and tax equity funding: For each district, the map shows the additional total annual state funding per student after a seven-year investment to address unconstitutionally inadequate funding and provide property tax equity.
Adequacy funding: State funding to fill each district’s adequacy gap—the difference between the resources students have currently and the median spending by successful Pennsylvania schools.
Tax equity funding: Additional state funding for communities where taxpayers have paid the highest local property tax rates to make up for insufficient state funding.
Under the plan, no district will ever receive less state funding than they do this year, updating the state’s “hold harmless” baseline and thereby ensuring stable and predictable resources. All districts are eligible for annual increases distributed through the fair funding formula.
View a spreadsheet of the impact of the HB 2370 plan for every school district.
UPDATE July 11, 2024 – The General Assembly passed a state budget, which unfortunately did not include the long-term plan for a new, constitutional public school funding system laid out in HB 2370.
The budget does, however, calculate a target for how much additional state funding is needed for public schools. Even after artificially reducing the constitutional funding gap calculated in HB 2370 by undercounting students in poverty, both chambers of the legislature have now agreed that adequately funded public education would require, at minimum, an additional $4.5 billion in state funding distributed to the communities that need it most.
The budget begins to fill this gap with additional, desperately needed resources targeted to underfunded public schools. For the first time, the largest portion of new state education aid, called “adequacy funding,” is the portion dedicated exclusively to districts with identified funding gaps, as the Basic Education Funding Commission and the House had proposed. But the legislature has made no commitment for future years. Now, educators and students await a long-term commitment to fill the entire unconstitutional funding gap. Read more in our statement on the 2024-25 state budget.
Here is a district-by-district breakdown of the funding increases in the compromise 2024-25 budget adopted and signed into law in July 2024.
A transformational plan for strong public schools in Pennsylvania - House Bill 2370
Underfunding in Pennsylvania public schools is widespread, fueled by insufficient state support. The students who need the most have had the least, because of where they live: urban, suburban and rural communities that lack sufficient wealth to meet the needs of their students in every corner of the commonwealth.
In Feb. 2023, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled that this is unconstitutional, and must change. Our students have a fundamental right to education, but for too long, they have been going without basic resources because of a funding system that relies heavily on local wealth.
For generations, students in low-wealth communities have lacked basic core resources: enough teachers, reading and math specialists, libraries, safe buildings, up-to-date curriculum, technology and more—the tools they need to prepare for life in the 21st century.
We can fix this. A serious long-term plan for a new public school funding system that lives up to the promise of our state constitution has now passed the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The plan, House Bill 2370, would provide funding based on what students need to succeed, not what communities can afford—starting next school year.
HB 2370 passed the House with bipartisan support on June 10, 2024. This plan would:
Boost current state funding to 367 underfunded school districts by $5.1 billion to fill constitutional adequacy gaps, through annual increases each year for seven years.
Provide $1 billion in property tax equity support for communities facing the highest local tax levels due to state underfunding
Ensure stability for all 500 school districts, particularly those with declining enrollments, by guaranteeing that they will continue to receive no less than their current level of state funding.
Significantly reform cyber charter school funding.
Learn more about this plan and how it was developed in this detailed explanation.
Gov. Shapiro has endorsed this plan, and in his budget address, he said something all Pennsylvanians should agree on: “No one here should be OK with an unconstitutional education system for our kids.”
Our school funding system is unconstitutional, and our students have been paying the price. Now there’s a plan to fix it. But it’s up to all of us to tell our leaders to finish the job for our students and pass this plan into law.