Newspaper: State budget doesn't do enough to fund struggling schools

Ed Rendell, the "education governor," gets an F for failing to find a way to properly fund Pennsylvania public schools over the past 8 years.

From an editorial in The Mercury:

Although the state budget signed by Gov. Ed Rendell on Tuesday did not cut basic education funding to schools, it didn't help much either.

The budget provided a $250 million increase in basic education aid, but all that does is make up for some of last year's reductions.

State funding for basic education is still $104 million short of 2008-09 levels, according to the Education Law Center, which advocates for school funding in Pennsylvania.

State Rep. Tom Quigley, R-146th Dist., provided The Mercury last week with the dollar amounts and percentage increases for area schools in the budget package, expressing concern at some of the levels.

Quigley said he could not explain why struggling school districts, such as Pottstown and Daniel Boone, had received increases of just 2 percent while districts with stronger tax bases, such as Spring-Ford and Perkiomen Valley, received increases closer to 8 percent and 9 percent.

"That's part of the problem, we need to find a way to make these formulas more predictable so districts know what funding they are getting," said Quigley, who voted against adopting the budget.

Quigley also noted the concern education funding advocates have about what may happen to school budgets if the $850 million in federal stimulus money, on which balancing the budget depends, does not materialize.

Without the funding being stabilized, Quigley noted that school districts could be "right back to where they have to start making cuts in the middle of the year to balance their budgets."

Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Website.