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WILKES-BARRE — An education advocacy group contends Wilkes-Barre Area School District wouldn’t have to layoff a single teacher — much less the several dozen facing furloughs after the school board voted to suspend four programs Monday — if the state doled out education money based on a formula devised by a bipartisan commission last year.
“We need citizens getting mad about the situation in Wilkes-Barre,” Citizens for Fair School Funding founder Kelly Lewis told a small gathering at Donahue’s Irish Pub Tuesday afternoon.
Lewis, a former state representative, is helping spearhead an effort to get Harrisburg to change how state money is allotted to each district. The movement cites a 2015 report from the state’s bipartisan Basic Education Funding Commission that determined 170 districts statewide are underfunded.
Wilkes-Barre Area is not only on that list, it is more severely underfunded than any other Luzerne County district. The report determined Wilkes-Barre Area should be getting nearly $29 million more per year. An infusion that high would amply offset the $4 million in savings the school board wants to make in the 2016-17 budget, a goal that prompted approval Monday of a plan to suspend art, library science, industrial art and family and consumer science programs.
Lewis noted that years ago the state started a “hold harmless” policy with education money, always providing districts with the same amount they received the previous year plus a share of any new funds. But that meant a district got the same money even if enrollment and costs dropped, or if special needs or low-income enrollment soared, driving costs up.
The new formula uses data from each district to more closely determine actual need, but legislators have been sluggish in adopting it, preferring to use it only for new money offered this year. The problem, Lewis said, is that does little to help those districts already underfunded.
“Wilkes-Barre Area has been underfunded for 25 years, and with this system it will be underfunded for another 25,” he said.
The group has proposed a compromise: Give 75 percent of any new money to the districts defined by the report as underfunded, while the other 25 percent goes to the other districts. Over a number of years, this would bring the underfunded districts up to the appropriate level.
“We think that gets us the votes,” Lewis said, urging the public to push the plan by calling state legislators and signing an online position at supportequityfirst.org.
