LANCASTER, PA — One of the more surprising things about the current formula for funding schools in Pennsylvania is that it does not take into account the number of students in the districts. That should change, said members of the benchmarking committee of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials (PASBO). Speaking at a public hearing in Lancaster on November 24 held by the Basic Education Funding Commission, Wayne McCullough, a member of the PASBO committee, said, “The number of actual students in each school district is a factor in nearly every basic education funding formula in every other state, and was used in each of Pennsylvania’s prior funding formulas. Using accurate student counts to drive a formula ensures that it can respond to the changing actual needs of each school district.”

He said the state should count the students before it hands out money.

He also outlined other factors that should be included as the commission moves forward with the creation of a new funding formula. McCullough said that poverty has long been used as part of the funding formulae, but the measure of poverty currently in use is no longer viable. Poverty in school districts is currently measured by the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. But because any district with a poverty rate of 40% or higher can offer free or reduced-price lunches to all students, the numbers are skewed, and those school districts no longer keep the records that they used to. He said poverty rates are measured by the U.S. Census every 10 years and estimated in other years, and should be used to measure poverty in school districts.

Another measure that should be taken into account, according to the PASBO committee, is the number of students in a district who don’t speak English as a first language, or English Language Learners (ELL). McCullough said, “Most estimates show that it takes students between three to six years to become entirely English proficient. Although the cost… will depend on the size of the school district, the number of ELL students and the range of languages they speak, it is clear that the cost to educate an ELL student is higher than the cost to educate an English-speaking regular education student.”

McCullough also said the number of charter school students in the district should also figure into the funding formula, because districts must pay for students to attend them. He said, “There are currently 162 charter schools and 14 cyber charter schools educating nearly 130,000 Pennsylvania students, numbers which have increased dramatically over the years.”

He added, “From 2009-10 to 2012-13, when property taxes increased by $937,385,712 across the state, a full 50% of this increase was dedicated solely to covering the corresponding growth in charter school tuition costs.”

Hold harmless debate

One aspect of education funding that has been widely discussed across the state is the “hold harmless” policy that has been in place since 1991, which provides that every school district receives at least as much money as it had the previous year, even if school enrollment declines. Some have argued that the hold harmless policy be eliminated because it has resulted in a situation where some schools receive much more money per student than other districts.

According to James Paul, a senior policy analyst for the Commonwealth Foundation, this has lead to very uneven funding. “In 2012-13, 25 districts received more than $10,000 of state aid per student, while 50 districts received less than $3,000 per student.”

He and PASBO recommend not that hold harmless be dropped altogether, but that it be changed to ensure that districts receive the same amount of per student funding from one year to the next.