Education leaders applaud state budget that adds $900M in new funding for school districts

Education is the centerpiece of Pennsylvania’s 2025-26 budget.

At least that’s what Laura Boyce took away from the funding plan for the state’s 500 K-12 public schools, approved last week after a 4½-month impasse.

“There were a lot of hard decisions that had to be made as the governor’s original proposal was cut down to the overall final spend number,” said Boyce, executive director of education support nonprofit Teach Plus.

Lawmakers cut about $1.5 billion from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s February budget proposal, landing on a $50.1 billion spending plan.

The budget maintains several funding categories from last year, such as $100 million for school safety and mental health and $125 million for building and facility repairs.

But it also adds more than $900 million in new education funding, including a $105 million bump in basic education and a $40 million increase in special education. Most notably, legislators allocated $565 million — about $39 million more than last year — to the state’s adequacy formula, an effort to more equitably fund schools.

The spending plan also adjusted the formula school districts use to calculate the amount of tuition they owe cyber charter schools each year. This is expected to save school districts $175 million, according to the state Department of Community and Economic Development.

Adequacy funding ‘major for our academics’

The second installment of adequacy formula dollars is the hallmark of the state’s budget, Boyce said.

The formula was brought on by a February 2023 state Commonwealth Court ruling that deemed Pennsylvania’s education funding system unconstitutional.

The PA Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center filed a lawsuit against the state on behalf of six school districts, two statewide associations and several parents in November 2014, arguing the state’s formula for funding public schools violated the state constitution.

The case went to trial in 2021. A verdict was reached two years later.

The state allocated $526 million to the formula last year. But about 70% of school districts statewide are still being impacted by a $4 billion adequacy gap, according to nonprofit PA Schools Work.

Pennsylvania is expected to close the gap by 2032, Boyce said — but only if it continues to fund the formula each year.

“We absolutely do expect to start being able to see academic gains within the next few years from these investments,” she said. “At the same time, the funding could have a lot more impact if schools and districts could count on those increases continuing and state budgets being passed on time in the future.

“It’s difficult for them to plan how to use those new investments in long-term ways when, for example, the state budget is 4½ months delayed.”

New Kensington-Arnold used its $1.2 million in adequacy funding last year to pay for a behavior interventionist, school counselors and instructional coaches, Superintendent Chris Sefcheck said.

But because the dollars are funneled through the state’s Ready to Learn block grant program, the district is limited in how it can spend the adequacy funds, Sefcheck said.

Potential uses include programs that improve academic performance, continuing professional education for teachers, physical and mental health services, disability inclusion and paying increased charter school tuition costs.

Some of New Kensington-Arnold’s most pressing expenses — capital projects and collective bargaining agreements with teachers and support staff — are not permitted uses in the block grant program, Sefcheck said.

“That’s major for our academics, and I don’t want to downplay that,” Sefcheck said. “But we have other glaring needs that we just don’t have the money for …”

Chris Lilienthal, assistant communications director for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said he has seen school districts use the adequacy funds to reduce class sizes, hire more STEM teachers and start tutoring programs.

“We’re seeing this funding invested in students and invested in classrooms,” he said, “and that’s really what we wanted to see, because that is the goal of this program: to level that playing field and make sure every student has the resources they need for a great education.”

The formula doesn’t work for everyone, though.

At Franklin Regional, district officials saw their state funding increase by about 1.6%, compared to between 4% and 10% in many other districts.

“If you look at Norwin, they’re seeing about a 10.5% increase, more than $2 million,” Superintendent Gennaro Piraino said. “Most districts saw between $600,000 and $1.4 million in the state’s ‘Level Up’ funding — FR received $50,000.”

Pirano made it clear that he’s happy to see the statewide investment in education.

“From a Westmoreland County standpoint in general, this provides a lot of relief,” he said. “But that picture is very different for FR. The way the formula is written does not benefit us. I know our residents don’t want to hear this, but part of the formula is level of taxation compared with local wealth, and based on that, we fall in the bottom half of the state when it comes to the taxes we impose.”

Piraino said he supports the investment in public education, particularly districts affected more heavily by poverty.

“I’m very happy for districts that will receive a financial lifeline with this budget,” he said. “But for a district like ours, that operates at a high level without significant state or federal reimbursement, it doesn’t provide a lot.”

Cyber charter changes in budget

Not everyone is thrilled about the state’s education funding decisions.

Cyber charter school leaders, for example, have expressed concerns about changes made to the way their tuition is calculated.

School districts pay for students in their area to attend one of the state’s public cyber charter schools.

Annual tuition costs vary throughout the state, ranging from about $7,600 per student to nearly $29,000 per student, according to the state Department of Education. Rates are based on the school district’s budgeted expenses from the year prior.

The state’s 2025-26 budget allows school districts to reduce their tuition payments, particularly for special education students, Lilienthal said.

“We want to make sure that students get the services that they are legally entitled to and deserve,” he said, “but we want to make sure that school districts aren’t struggling with their own budgets because they are being overcharged for those services.”

The tuition adjustment comes after calls for a flat cyber charter tuition rate this year. Shapiro’s proposed budget and state House Bill 1500 both suggested an $8,000 annual per student rate for regular education students.

This proposal did not make its way into the final budget, and the legislation has been under review by the Senate education committee since June.

The change tells Malynda Maurer all she needs to know about how the state views cyber charter schools.

“I am glad to see that the state still values public education, and that is evidenced by the fact that they’ve increased funding in many different areas,” said Maurer, CEO of Central PA Digital Learning Foundation. “I am not happy about the fact that they keep trying to diminish the value and importance of children whose families choose to use cyber education as their method of public education.”

Cyber charter school PA Distance Learning will have to cut back on its work-based student field trips and hold off hiring additional social workers in light of the tuition adjustments, said Chief Administrative Officer Michael Leitera.

“There were certainly things within the funding that needed to be discussed,” said Leitera, who worked for 27 years in Pennsylvania school districts. “I think that many of the cyberschool CEOs tried to reach out and really collaborate with legislators on making this something that was fair, equitable and compromised ...

“We found some legislators to be very open to our ideas. In the final bill and law, not many of our ideas were encapsulated with that.”

The budget places additional requirements on cyber charter schools — spurred, in part, by the death of a 12-year-old cyber charter student from Chester County in August 2024.

Students must be visible on a webcam during synchronous instruction, and school officials will have to conduct weekly wellness checks on students.

“In addition to our funding being cut,” Maurer said, “we’re now being asked to do more with less.”

The budget also prevents students with six unexcused absences or more from transferring to a cyber charter without prior approval from a judge, Leitera said.

“The reason they may be leaving a school is because of a physical ailment, bullying, a bad environment in the current school they’re in or that system of education they’re in … just isn’t working for them,” he said. “And now we’re actually curtailing a transfer from a public school to another public school.”