The Tenuous Fate of Pennsylvania’s Public Schools
The legislature’s budget disagreements could mean that many of the Keystone State’s schools are about to shut down
Pennsylvania public schools are now at Defcon 1—borrowing millions of dollars to keep the lights on, starting to ask teachers to work without pay, and even voting to shut the schoolhouse doors and send the kids home—all because an unprecedented state budget crisis has left them within weeks of insolvency.
Funds are running out so fast in Erie, the state’s fourth-largest city, that the schools could shut down by November 1. The school board last month unanimously authorized this previously unthinkable option. If the money runs dry, Erie would consider requiring its 12,000 students to stay home for a week or two.
Yes, it would disrupt their learning. Yes, it would present families with unexpected childcare chaos. But talking to the anxious administrators on the ground, it soon becomes clear: Their options are disappearing as quickly as their bank accounts.
“Nobody anticipated the budget would come in on time ... we knew that this impasse would happen, but as it drags on and the effects become more real, it takes on the sense of a crisis,” said the superintendent of Erie’s Public Schools Jay Badams. “It also seems more and more ridiculous. All of our money’s sitting there in Harrisburg [the state capitol] and here we are having to contemplate shutting down.”
Such are the outrageous options that a startling number of Pennsylvania school superintendents are actively considering, three-plus months into the state budget standstill that’s left 500 of them struggling to make it through the first half of the school year with page after page of their budgets missing in action.
Legislators’ inaction since the deal was due June 30 has, so far, resulted in the withholding of some $2 billion in state-aid payments to districts. By the end of this month, that number is expected to soar to $3 billion. Even in the Keystone state, where budgets are routinely delayed by weeks or months, this is uncharted territory, school officials say, and goes far beyond the usual faceoff between states and their school districts over funding allocations.
Exacerbating the Harrisburg hangup: Many Pennsylvania districts, still recovering from the recession and a massive 2011 state-aid cut, were already financially vulnerable.
“They were going into this delayed budget with less financial resources behind them than they would have the last time around,” said Steve Robinson, a Budget Disputes in Pennsylvania’s Legislature Could Force Public Schools to Shut Down - The Atlantic: