Pa. Cuts Schools’ Funding by 11% (PA)
July 1, 2011
The newly approved state budget reduces funding for Lancaster County public schools by about 11 percent for 2011-12.
The $27.2 billion spending plan, approved Thursday night by the Legislature, will provide $174.3 million for the 17 public school districts that enroll county students.
That’s a decline of nearly $21 million from the amount provided to county schools in 2010-11. But it’s a slight increase in funding from the total originally proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett in March .
Under Corbett’s plan, the 17 districts would have received about $26 million less than they received this year, or a decline of about 13 percent.
The funding cuts in the final budget range from $293,547 in Pequea Valley School District to more than $5 million in School District of Lancaster.
The reductions prompted nearly every district in the county to implement layoffs and staff reductions, wage freezes and program cuts for the 2011-12 school year.
School officials expressed dismay that the cuts in the final budget remained severe, but said they appreciated that lawmakers approved the spending plan by the June 30 deadline for the first time in nine years.
“Obviously, we’re still disappointed that it cuts $1.5 million from our budget,” said Michael Leichliter, superintendent of Penn Manor School District.
But that funding reduction is about $472,000 less than originally expected, thanks to the restoration of some cuts proposed by Corbett, who wanted to slash Social Security payments for school district employees by $22 million and eliminate the entire $259 million accountability block grant fund.
The Legislature restored $100 million in ABG funds, which districts use primarily to pay for full-day kindergarten programs. It also restored $25.9 million to the Social Security payment fund and boosted basic education funds by $128 million over what Corbett had proposed.
Even with the restored funds, the budget reduces state aid to public schools by the biggest margin in history — about $900 million, compared with the more than $1.1 billion cut proposed by Corbett.
Members of the Republican majority in the House and Senate said the state was forced to make the drastic cuts because it faces a $4 billion deficit and the loss of $654 million in federal stimulus funds that were used in 2010-11 to support basic education funding .
County school officials said they don’t expect lawmakers to reverse the cuts implemented in the 2011-12 budget when they begin negotiating the next year’s spending plan.
“I think this is the way it’s going to be under this administration,” said Brenda Becker, superintendent of Hempfield School District, which will get about $1.7 million less in state aid in 2011-12 than it receive the previous year.
“It’s going to be just as bad and probably worse next year,” she said of the district’s budgeting process.
Hempfield was able to cut nearly $5 million from its 2011-12 budget by implementing a districtwide wage freeze, an early-retirement program that reduced its payroll and a 20 percent cut in school building budgets.
The cutbacks enabled the district to avoid layoffs, something that most other districts in the county are implementing in 2011-12.
“I can’t do an early-retirement incentive every year. I can’t get people to buy into a pay freeze year after year,” she said. “You can only cut back so far until you’re cutting into bone.”
Leichliter agreed.
Penn Manor also plans to freeze salaries in 2011-12 and has cut its teaching staff by 10 positions through attrition, enabling it to avoid teacher layoffs.
But like all other districts, it faces rising employee pension and health care costs in the next few years that are expected to add tens of millions of dollars to school expenditures in the county.
And districts are facing even tighter controls on their ability to raise property taxes to generate additional revenue.
“It’s not this that concerns us, but the next three to five years,” Leichliter said. “I’m very cautious at this point as to what we can expect in the future.”