| Prevent Our Kids’ Futures from Going Down the Drain
At least once a week, people ask us the same question: why did you put a toilet on the Capitol steps?
After years of using charts and graphs to prove that students in Pennsylvania were harmed by the state’s failure to fund the schools, we decided a toilet would make the case perfectly clear.
It dramatized that the state’s failure to fund the schools is flushing the future of our children down the toilet. But it did so much more.
This toilet, with a line of 75 child advocates waiting to speak in front of it, starkly demonstrated what it looks like in some of our schools where there is only one working toilet for 75 children.
Of course, it’s one thing to produce a powerful stunt to make a point; it’s another to get results. We got the results because we worked so effectively with partners across the state!
Because you supported Children First, 2022 was a banner year for the funding of public schools.
State politicians listened to us, delivering the largest state increase for schools in the history of the Commonwealth – a $1.1 billion increase in funds for public education!
That sounds like a lot but still too many children languish in underfunded schools, start school without pre-k, and still thousands more cannot get the health care they need.
We need to do much more in the year ahead.
Please donate to our work this year so we can build on this success next year! Our schools are still billions of dollars short of what they need.
As the year comes to an end, we are grateful that despite hyper-partisan efforts to narrow our school curriculum and make schools less welcoming, we are proud to say that our strategy delivered for public education.
Thank you for donating all you can to Children First so we can build on this great foundation and end the school funding crisis in Pennsylvania. |
