“It's a balancing act,” recalled Jane Harbert, who served for four years as superintendent of the William Penn School District and testified before Commonwealth Court on Thursday and Friday. “We have to continuously say, all right, what do our students need? What can we afford?”
Harbert retired in 2020 after 11 years as an administrator in the Delaware County school district, a petitioner in the school funding lawsuit. Based on targets adopted by the state, the district has an adequacy gap of more than $4,800 per student.
With a large portion of the district’s students living in poverty, the biggest concern the district faces is trying to address any “learning gaps” among those students, Harbert testified.
Only 20-30% of students have the opportunity to attend a high-quality pre-K program, Harbert said. These students are often behind their peers not just academically but in social skills needed for classroom learning.
Producing college- and career-ready graduates is also a challenge, she said. The district’s 78% graduation rate ranks 478th in the state. The average composite SAT score in the district for 2019 ranks in the bottom 15% in the state. About three-fifths of district graduates enrolled in college within a year. But only 21% of graduates from the class of 2013 earned a degree within six years.
“We can’t correct those learning gaps in the last four years of school.” Harbert said. “We have to start early.”
But several of the district’s elementary schools are crowded, with average class sizes about 25 students in the lower grades, Harbert said. Court heard testimony Dec. 22 from a William Penn kindergarten teacher who is the only adult in a room with 25 students.
Harbert said that a classroom of 28 kindergarten students can have 28 unique individual needs. “Our kindergarten teachers deserve medals,” Harbert said.
If she had the funding to do so, she said would have added more staff to kindergarten classrooms. Being able to read at grade level by third grade is crucial, Harbert said, but internal assessments showed that many William Penn students were not on track to reach that goal.
Harbert wanted to implement a program that would have provided one-on-one tutoring for 20-30 minutes a day for 30% of first-grade students with the greatest need for help in reading. This program would have continued with 20% of students in second grade, and 10% of third graders.
These interventions would have required about 30 to 35 reading specialists, she said, but the district did not have funds to implement it. Today, William Penn has no reading specialists.
“Everybody needs those critical thinking skills, critical reading skills, being able to do math problems, because we are not just the sum of the career that we choose,” she said. “There are other parts of our lives.” Harbert testified that the reading and writing skills assessed by Pennsylvania’s state standards have many uses: appreciating novels, making healthcare decisions, and generally navigating life decisions.
After the drastic funding cuts of 2011, Harbert prioritized keeping instructional staff. She worked to preserve class sizes in elementary school – often between 25 and 30 – and focused on cuts to middle and high school staff, she said.
“We started running numbers and saying yes, let's put 30 kids in a math class,” she said, “and let's put 30 students in a social studies or history class and 30 in our ELA classes.”
Before these cuts, the district did not have sufficient instructional staff, Harbert said. And after, “we definitely were short the number … of instructional people that we needed for our students.”
Since then, increases in state funding have fallen short of unreimbursed special education increases – not to mention other mandated costs.
The district had only seven principals for eight elementary schools and a central office staff of five, including herself. The district’s four elementary school counselors served two schools each. “They were primarily working in crisis mode,” she said.
Tight budgets mean teachers have only a classroom set of textbooks -- not enough for students to take textbooks home. This made it difficult to provide effective homework, she said.
Harbert also testified to lack of heat and air conditioning and old school buildings in disrepair. The district’s newest building was built in 1971; its high school is more than 100 years old.
Following up on William Penn athletic director Rap Curry’s Dec. 22 testimony about the district’s rental of lights for its football field, Harbert said she took the step of spending scarce funds on rented lights after hearing a pitch from a group of football players, encouraged by Curry. The four seniors told her they wanted the opportunity to play a Friday night home game under lights before they graduated from high school.
Harbert took a chance: the students contacted a rental company and secured a discount, the team printed flyers, and students went door-to-door ahead of the first game to let neighbors know about their first-ever night game.
Volunteer efforts from district staff and community members were unprecedented. Security officers volunteered to staff the game. Her secretary collected money at the gate. Her business manager smoked chicken. Teachers made “Friday Night Lights” t-shirts. More than 500 students, alumni, and community members attended, and the game was the catalyst for the football team becoming a winning program.
“The camaraderie that we brought together for the entire school system and the six communities were, to me, unmeasurable,” Harbert said. It was money well-spent, she said.
Harbert testified that sufficient resources would make a difference for her students.
“We’re going to open the door for them to so many more opportunities for them in their career, at colleges, and in their personal life,” she said.
Harbert’s successor as superintendent, Dr. Eric Becoats, takes the stand Monday morning.