Is this any way to run a school district?
Back in 2012, the long-beleaguered Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania ran out of money — literally — and the unionized teachers and staff agreed to work without pay. (When it made national news, first lady Michelle Obama invited a Chester Upland teacher to sit with her at the State of the Union speech that year.) Well, it’s happened again — at least the part about the district being out of cash and all of the teachers, support staff, bus drivers and other adults in the system agreeing to work for free when the 2015-16 academic year starts on Wednesday.
“We knew we had to do it, again,” said John Shelton, who has been an educator in the district for 23 years and now is dean of students at a district middle school. “With great pain, we agreed to work as long as our families allow us to.”
Why does this keep happening?
About 20 miles west of Philadelphia, Chester Upland is one of the poorest districts in the state and has been in financial distress for many years. Under state control for most of the last two decades, it now enrolls about 3,300 students, fewer than the total number of students who attend charter schools in the district.
As teacher Stephen Singer explained on the Badass Teachers Association blog, Pennsylvania lawmakers failed for years to adequately fund Chester Upland (and other poor districts in the state) and left the district “to survive on the drip of local property taxes from residents who, themselves, don’t have two pennies to rub together.”
Making matters worse is the funding controversy involving the district’s charter schools, which were encouraged and supported by Pennsylvania lawmakers and the former Republican governor Tom Corbett. The largest charter in Chester Upland, as my Post colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote in this story, is Chester Community Charter School, a nonprofit institution managed by a for-profit company (headed, incidentally, by one of Corbett’s largest individual political donors). As Layton noted, Chester Upland pays local charter schools about $64 million in tuition payments ever year — more than the district receives in state school aid.
Lawmakers set up a funding formula in which Chester Upland’s charter Is this any way to run a school district? - The Washington Post:
