Advocates from the Pennsylvania State Education Association held a press conference on Aug. 26 criticizing Senate Republicans, specifically Sen. President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, over the budget impasse.
Jaxon White
Teachers union slams Pa. Senate GOP over school funding delay
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Jaxon White/WITF
Jaxon White
Advocates from the Pennsylvania State Education Association held a press conference on Aug. 26 criticizing Senate Republicans, specifically Sen. President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, over the budget impasse.
Declaring that Pennsylvania’s school children “are not bargaining chips” in a political contest, the head of the state’s largest teachers union on Tuesday blamed the Senate’s top leader for delaying millions owed to school districts across the state.
Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, blasted Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward for comments earlier this month in which she said a private school tuition voucher program was one issue she was pushing during budget negotiations with Democrats in the state House and governor’s office.
“Our children are not pawns in some grand strategy to enact a tuition voucher program that will shift taxpayer dollars away from our public schools to private and religious schools,” Chapin said during a news conference in the Capitol, echoing comments he’s made in recent weeks.
He pointed to a critical study of such programs adopted in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., from the National Coalition of Public Education that found the programs are costly to taxpayers and do not improve educational outcomes for students.
Responding to PSEA’s criticisms, Ward noted in a statement that Senate Republicans passed a temporary state budget earlier this month that would maintain funding for school districts at last year’s levels. House Democrats rejected that proposal.
Ward said PSEA’s pushback against Senate GOP leaders’ prioritization of public school alternatives is “gaslighting Pennsylvanians” by focusing their criticisms on her and not House Democrats.
On Monday, Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters again that he and lawmakers were nearing a deal on the overarching state budget. He declined to provide details.
Gridlock
Pennsylvania began its fiscal year on July 1 without a spending plan, resulting in funds being paused for school districts, counties, mass transit agencies and nonprofits. PSEA said more than $1.7 billion is owed to public school districts across the state, and the organization provided a list detailing how much money each district had expected in July and August, but had not received.
Some schools have taken out loans to replace the absent state funds. That includes the School District of Lancaster, which earlier this month approved taking out a $35 million loan to cover its costs if state funds aren’t released soon.
Christina Rojas, a speech-language pathologist at SDOL and president of the teachers’ union there, noted that SDOL has missed $23.7 million in state payments since July 1, and its loan will cost local taxpayers more than $200,000 in fees and interest payments.
Rojas said that money “could have gone towards more teachers or more paraprofessionals and more services for our growing number of students with autism. Instead, it’s going to be wasted because our kids are being used as pawns in a political game.”
Lancaster is far from the only southcentral Pennsylvania district feeling the financial pressure.
Jimbo Lamb is president-elect of PSEA’s Southern Region division, which represents educators in districts across Adams, Fulton, Juniata, Lancaster and York counties.
“They all have a lot of anxiety about the unfinished state budget. Our educators and support professionals are worried about what it could mean for our schools and our students now and in the weeks to come,” Lamb said.
Private school vouchers
The debate over a private school tuition voucher program is a long-running one in the Capitol. It was at the center of the months-long 2023 budget impasse, after Shapiro used his line-item veto power to remove funding for a private school scholarship program, one that Senate Republicans argued he had previously committed to supporting.
Education spending — public and private — has since remained a sensitive topic with deep-pocketed donors lobbying officials on both sides of the aisle.
For the 2025-26 budget year, Shapiro pitched a $75 million and $40 million increase to the state’s basic education and special education funding, respectively. And he asked for $526 million in adequacy funding — a payment system lawmakers created last year to address the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that said the commonwealth unconstitutionally underfunded school districts in poorer parts of the state.
Shapiro and House Democrats argue the proposed funding would be the next step toward resolving the Supreme Court case.
Meanwhile, some top Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader Joe Pittman, of Indiana County, and Appropriations Chair Scott Martin, of Lancaster County, have said the adequacy funding formula agreed to last year is unfair because it provides more money per student to certain schools. They also say those schools often perform at inadequate levels.
Pittman and Martin have also joined Ward in calling for more state funds to be allocated this year to alternatives to public schools.
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