School District of Lancaster Superintendent Damaris Rau
The spotlight for the next few days in Commonwealth Court will be on the School District of Lancaster, the largest of the six school districts that filed the school funding lawsuit. Superintendent Damaris Rau took the stand late Thursday morning and will face cross-examination on Friday.
The Lancaster district serves more than 10,000 students in the city of Lancaster, 40 miles east of Harrisburg. Lancaster is the state’s eighth-largest city. The school district’s diverse student population is now 61% Latinx and 17% Black, with nearly 20% English learners – and more than 90% of students are economically disadvantaged. In addition to having a large population from Puerto Rico, the city has become a gateway for immigrants and refugees from around the world.
Dr. Rau, a career educator with almost 40 years of experience, came to Lancaster in 2015 to become the district’s superintendent. She is the fourth petitioner superintendent to testify in the trial. We will report on her testimony when it is complete.
Earlier Thursday, the parties wrapped up a third day of testimony on early childhood education. Attorneys finished their questioning of Tracey Campanini, the deputy secretary at the Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL), the office responsible for much of the early childhood programming in the commonwealth.
She has overseen growth in the state’s preschool program. She said her office under the Wolf administration has maintained that pre-K programs should be expanded, based on national research showing that preschool benefits children, particularly low-income children, and can provide a strong foundation for success in the K-12 education system.
But Campanini’s office estimates that the state is meeting only 40% of the need for high-quality preschool among children who are eligible, she said. The “unmet need” represents 60% of the population considered by OCDEL to be at-risk.
OCDEL does not have a cost estimate for how much it would cost to expand high-quality pre-K to all students living in poverty, but Campanini said the cost would be significant.
Campanini made the case for preschool in testimony to a legislative committee in 2015 that was cited in court Wednesday:
"Children that have the opportunity to learn and reach their full potential through quality early education are more likely to enter kindergarten with necessary skills to succeed. Furthermore, they are less likely to require costly special education and remediation services; more likely to do well in school, graduate, and attend college or career training; and more likely to be employed.”
High-quality programs meet standards for staff qualifications (competencies in early childhood education), provide ongoing professional development, support family and community engagement, utilize the state’s early learning standards, and have a continuous process of evaluation, Campanini explained. Such programs, Campanini said, are important for school readiness, particularly for economically disadvantaged students.
Her office oversees and supports a few different programs that the state considers to be high quality: the Pre-K Counts program for 3- and 4-year-olds, the state’s Head Start Supplemental centers, and child care centers that earn three or four stars from the state’s Keystone Stars rating system.
Thanks to $145 million in additional funding since 2014-15 for Pre-K Counts and $30 million more for Head Start supplemental, the state has seen the number of slots for children in these programs more than double over that time frame. Pre-K Counts now serves more than 29,000 students and Supplemental Head Start serves 8,200 students.
Yet there are communities where there is no Pre-K Counts program.
To make high-quality pre-K available to all eligible children living in poverty in PA would require two things, she concluded: “Ensuring that the providers needed to support all children are operating in all communities” and “financial resources to be able to support those enrollments for children that are currently unserved by a high-quality program.”