Click here to subscribe today or Login.
It’s already waited for years — decades, depending on how you want to measure — so maybe a new delay in the historic lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s school funding system isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things.
The suit, which includes Wilkes-Barre Area School District and local parent Tracey Hughes among the plaintiffs, has had the trial date bumped from Sept. 9 to Oct.12.
The Education Law Center, which has been helping to spearhead the suit, sent out a media release Wednesday announcing the change announced by Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer. “The later date will allow superintendents and other petitioners who filed the case against state officials additional time to provide up-to-date specifics to supplement the evidence and testimony gathered during earlier stages of the litigation.”
Set to be held in the Pennsylvania Judicial Center in Harrisburg, the trial is expected to run through much of the fall. Jubelirer has said it will be held five-days a week and live-streamed for public view.
The delay appears to make time for an Aug. 11 ruling that ordered petitioners to supplement responses that should be updated since the discovery phase of the trial concluded. “For example, superintendents will provide information on how long-standing inadequacies in their districts were exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis,” the release noted. “In the pretrial conference, the parties agreed that postponing the trial date by a month allowed sufficient time for all parties to prepare, submit, and review the updated information.
“The updated information only reinforces the undeniable reality of Pennsylvania’s school funding system: Students who need the most get the least, because of where they live. Students in low-wealth districts were disproportionately impacted by lack of sufficient school resources during the pandemic,” Maura McInerney said in the release. The legal director for the Education Law Center-PA added “since we filed the case, the disparities have only grown. Our legislative leaders have acknowledged this reality but refuse to comply with their constitutional duty to provide a quality public education to all children, regardless of local wealth.”
“The last 18 months have laid bare the profound inequities that Pennsylvania children grapple with,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. “The General Assembly’s failure to live up to their constitutional duty to support strong public schools in every community will still be on trial this fall — and we’ll prove that the potential of kids across our state has been shortchanged for far too long.”
Along with Wilkes-Barre Area, the list of petitioners includes the districts of William Penn, Greater Johnstown, Lancaster, Panther Valley and Shenandoah Valley, as well as the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, the NAACP-Pennsylvania State Conference, and four public school parents. They are represented by the Education Law Center, Public Interest Law Center, and O’Melveny.
The suit alleges the state is violating its own Constitutional requirement to adequately fund public education. Prior efforts at similar suits were ruled to not be the purview of the courts because there was no way to measure adequate funding. Proponents argued successfully this time that the state had not only set measurable goals of adequacy through the state standardized testing system and related mandates, but that the legislature itself proved the inadequate funding argument by having a “costing out” study done to determine how much money each district needed to meet those mandates.
Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish