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Since he was sworn in as governor in January, my husband and I have been crisscrossing the state, visiting schools, meeting with teachers and administrators, and talking with students in the classroom. We have seen the same thing in school after school and classroom after classroom: motivated students and dedicated teachers who simply don’t have the resources they need to succeed.
At King Elementary School in Lancaster, I heard about how some textbooks in the library are more than 30 years old because they don’t have the funds available to replace them with updated versions. At Paul Fly Elementary School in Norristown, administrators shared how vital support and program specialist positions have been cut, leaving fewer teachers in classrooms with consistently increasing numbers of students.
As parents and lifelong students, Tom and I take education very seriously. We were very involved in our daughters’ public school educations and we saw firsthand the difference a quality education – starting before kindergarten – can provide. It unlocks potential and opportunity, leading to higher graduation and employment rates and lower dropout and incarceration rates.
Every student in Pennsylvania deserves no less than a first-class education – the availability of which should not be determined by his or her ZIP code.
Further, a quality public education system is at the very core of everything we want to achieve as a state. It will help Pennsylvania attract new businesses, retain talent and grow the middle class. It is crucial to our potential economic growth.
That is why my husband’s budget proposal restores the devastating cuts schools have seen over the last four years, with a commitment to increase education funding by $2 billion over the next four years. This proposal, called the Pennsylvania Education Reinvestment Act, would generate more than a billion dollars by 2017 by instituting a reasonable 5 percent severance tax on oil and natural gas extraction. Pennsylvania is the only gas-producing state in the nation without a severance tax, and it’s time for gas companies to pay their fair share.
If enacted by the General Assembly, this historic investment plan for Pennsylvania’s school children will increase the state’s share of funding for public education to 50 percent for the first time in at least four decades, and will greatly reduce the disparity between our wealthiest and poorest districts. According to the latest information available from the U.S. Department of Education, Pennsylvania ranks dead last in the nation when it comes to equitable school funding between wealthy and low-income school districts.
I think we can all agree that our children are our greatest asset – and investing in them is an investment in the future of our commonwealth. We cannot afford to wait. The time to act is now.