| Students Going Back to School But PA Senate Still Stalling State Budget Negotiations
 With 447,330 PA students returning to classrooms in just two weeks, education advocates demand that the Senate GOP fulfill their constitutional obligation to adequately fund public schools.
With the clock ticking and just two weeks until the first day of school for hundreds of thousands of public school students, the PA Senate has yet to indicate if it will support a budget that fulfills their constitutional obligation and continues to meet the promise made to students in last year’s historic budget agreement.
School districts across the Commonwealth are making final preparations for the upcoming school year while facing significant uncertainty about their funding levels due to the ongoing budget impasse.
Last year, the legislature took a historic first step toward addressing the $4.5 billion adequacy gap in our state’s public school funding system. This bipartisan achievement wasn’t just good policy—it was a constitutional obligation following the Commonwealth Court’s ruling. The Senate can and must follow through on that commitment and pass a budget that continues to close the remaining $4 billion shortfall.
This summer, the Senate GOP’s failure to pass a budget matching the urgency for public school funding in Governor Shapiro’s proposal and the House-passed budget is creating unnecessary chaos for school districts preparing for the new academic year.
Meanwhile the budget proposal passed by the House and the budget proposed by Governor Shapiro, both of which would benefit every school district, begin to adequately fund districts. Both of those budgets address the shortfalls that leave thousands of dollars missing per student in our underfunded school districts.
The House and Governor budget proposals would save districts millions in unjustified payments to cyber schools. Pennsylvania taxpayers have been overpaying cyber charter schools by hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The governor has proposed reforms that would reduce payments to cyber schools by $378 million. This year’s final budget must provide school districts with at least this level of relief.
Everyday state lawmakers delay passing a serious budget creates harmful uncertainty for school districts trying to plan their fiscal year, and Pennsylvania’s students bear the brunt of the budget delay. Without knowing their state funding levels, districts across Pennsylvania — rural, urban, and suburban alike — cannot make critical financial decisions about staffing, programs, and resources. School districts need budget certainty now to properly invest in their students.
The Senate GOP must fulfill its constitutional responsibility by immediately passing a budget that adequately funds all school districts across the Commonwealth, especially those chronically underfunded.
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