A select few Pennsylvania school districts get special deals and millions in bonus funding

Like other school superintendents, William Jones must make tough choices to balance tight budgets. This year that meant raising taxes and cutting staff to close a $5.5 million deficit at the 2,000-student district he runs in northeastern Pennsylvania.

But then Jones got good news. An email this summer from a state senator representing Luzerne County said the state was sending Hanover Area School District an extra half-million dollars above the standard $7.9-million subsidy.

It was like a gift, “a complete surprise,” Jones said.

The superintendent hadn’t asked for the money or submitted a grant application. In getting the funds, the district wasn’t required to say how they’d be spent.

The money came, Jones said, with “no strings attached.”

Other superintendents can only envy Jones’ good fortune.

As Pennsylvania showered Hanover Area and about two dozen other districts with bonus funds, the vast majority of the state’s 500 school districts — including those in Lancaster County — have gotten nothing above their usual allocation or even been told bonus funds are available.

“There are winners and losers ... and it breeds resentment,” said state Rep. Mike Sturla, a Democrat whose district includes the School District of Lancaster.

Formula undermined

Three years ago, Pennsylvania enacted a funding formula to even the playing field by subsidizing schools according to need. The idea was to finally take politics out of the equation.

But that bipartisan reform has been undermined by the millions the state bestows through behind-the-scenes deals cut by Gov. Tom Wolf and legislative leaders of both parties.

In receiving $500,000, Hanover Area was in the middle of the pack.

Erie City tops the list at $18.2 million, followed by Allentown, $10 million; Scranton, $8 million; East Allegheny, $2.5 million; Morrisville, $2 million; Bellefonte Area, $1,057,000, and Sto-Rox and Stroudsburg Area, $1 million, each. Lesser amounts have gone to Greater Johnstown, Wilkes-Barre, Mount Carmel Area, Pottstown and 14 other districts.

Meanwhile, Upper Darby was promised $3.5 million.

A search of public records since 2016 suggests that Lancaster County’s 17 school districts haven’t benefited. But because transparency is not a hallmark of these special arrangements, who can know for sure?

Even rank-and-file lawmakers complain they’re in the dark.

“We don't necessarily know what any of this is until all of a sudden there's a (legislator’s) press release hailing whoever for securing the money,” said state Sen. Scott Martin, a first-term Republican who represents Lancaster city and the southern half of Lancaster County. “How does this work? Explain this to me. I thought the Legislature had to approve spending.”

Taking credit

Actually, press releases that call attention to the special treatment appear to be rare.

One exception was a June release in which state Rep. Mike Schlossberg, a Lehigh County Democrat, crowed about “the major win” he and Republican Sen. Patrick Browne helped to achieve in grabbing an extra $10 million for Allentown schools, ensuring, he said, that “our children” and “our community” will be successful.

And in August, state Sen. John Blake of Lackawanna County took the step of calling reporters and TV cameras into his district office to announce that he’d won an extra $6 million for Scranton’s beleaguered schools.

“When you are in the 11th hour of a budget negotiation ... we have to battle for everything we can get, and that's what we did,” Blake said at the press event, having wrangled $2 million out of the state budget for the district only eight months earlier.

Blake told LNP that he requested the governor and legislative leaders release more money for Scranton because the state in 2017 put it on “financial watch status.”

But if “watch status” is the reason Scranton qualified for funding, it doesn’t explain why Chester-Upland, York City, Reading, Steelton-Highspire and six other districts in similar straits didn’t get an extra boost.

Blake, a two-term Democrat who has a low-level Senate leadership position, said he made an appeal to more senior leaders who negotiate the budget. He pushed for $10 million, the amount Scranton’s school board asked him to seek.

“There may not be a formula or analysis” that showed Scranton deserved the money, Blake said, but state leaders recognized the needs of the high-poverty district.

He said the deal does not make him beholden to leadership’s wishes on any particular vote down the road.

Lawmaker strikes back

Five years ago, state Rep. David Hickernell, a Republican representing western Lancaster County, including struggling Columbia Borough School District, began questioning GOP House leaders about the fairness of bonus school funding that Columbia never received.

Hickernell has continued to make waves.

What caught Hickernell’s eye in 2013 was an LNP story reporting that legislative leaders had created a $30.3 million pool of supplemental funds it divided among 21 favored districts.

The School District of Lancaster got $2.4 million that then-superintendent Pedro Rivera, now state Education Secretary, said came as a surprise, and that local lawmakers said they didn’t seek. Allentown that year received $8 million, the most of any of the 21 districts.

The following year, after the press scrutiny, the state drastically cut bonus funding to $3.95 million and assigned it to a new budgetary line item called the Educational Access Program, which the state never defined.

“There's no application, because I've asked for it already,” Hickernell said.

In subsequent years, the state added more money to the Educational Access grant program. Funding went from $6 million in 2015 to $23.15 million in 2017.

Hickernell pushed back by introducing a bill in 2017 to kill bonus funding. Over 50 representatives signed on, and apparently legislative leaders took note.

When the proposed 2018-19 budget was revealed, Hickernell, who chairs the House Education Committee, took satisfaction in seeing the Educational Access line item had been reduced to zero.

But the story doesn’t end there.

3 new grants

In the new budget, a different program — the Ready-to-Learn grants — grew to $268 million, an increase of $18 million, or 7.2 percent. But the added money comes with a twist. The state set aside $250 million for routine Ready-to-Learn grants that all districts may apply for. But allocation of the extra $18 million is outside the normal process. A budgetary note said how that $18 million is to be spent “will be determined at a later date.”

What has become clear is budget negotiators decided to divide the $18 million among just three districts.

As noted earlier, lawmakers in the Allentown and Scranton areas celebrated their success. Allentown secured $10 million, Scranton, $6 million.

The Education Department, in response to LNP, said East Allegheny got the remaining $2 million.

Gov. Wolf, through a spokesman, declined to offer a substantive explanation for why those districts were favored, saying only that he believes in fair funding for all students and that legislators during budget negotiations decided who would get grants.

The grants, in other words, are a repackaging of business as usual, which causes Stephen DeMaura of the advocacy group ExcellentSchoolsPA to shake his head in frustration.

“Funding should be based on need and agreed upon transparently and not through a political process,” DeMaura said. “Without transparency, then we have no way of figuring out what happened other than asking a bunch of people questions, most of which no one has any answers to.”