EQUITY FIRST JOINS ‘EDUCATION APARTHEID’ RALLY TO FIGHT FOR SCHOOL FUNDING EQUITY

Citizens for Fair School Funding “Support Equity First” Media Contact: Equity First Info@SupportEquityFirst.org | @EquityFirstOrg FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 21, 2017 EQUITY FIRST JOINS ‘EDUCATION APARTHEID’ RALLY TO FIGHT FOR SCHOOL FUNDING EQUITY 2017 Agenda Asks Governor Wolf and General Assembly to End the Nation's Worst School Funding Discrimination in Basic Education and Special Education Funding (Harrisburg, PA) – June 21, 2017 – Equity First joined with numerous of grassroots coalitions, faith-based members of the community and legislators in ...

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Op-Ed: 13 Pennsylvania School Districts Receive Less Than 50% of their Recommended Level of Basic Education Funding

Citizens for Fair School Funding “Support Equity First” Media Contact: Equity First Info@SupportEquityFirst.org | @EquityFirstOrg   FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 8, 2017 13 Pennsylvania School Districts Receive Less Than 50% of their Recommended Level of Basic Education Funding 99 School Districts Receive TWICE the Recommended Level of Basic Education Funding (Harrisburg, PA) – June 8, 2017 – Basic Education Funding is the largest General Fund allocation in the Pennsylvania state budget.  For FY 2017-2018, Governor Wolf has proposed spending ...

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Bucks, Montgomery school district officials ask state lawmakers for more money for public education

By Chris English, staff writer Area school district superintendents, other administrators and school board members had a clear message for Harrisburg Wednesday during a roundtable discussion and news conference at the Centennial School District administration building in Warminster. "Please give us more money." In a free-flowing discussion organized by a group called The Campaign For Fair Education Funding, officials said the lack of state financial support for education in Pennsylvania compared to most other states forces property taxes up more than they need to ...

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Pottstown at the center of fair education funding fight

By Evan Brandt, The Mercury POTTSTOWN >> Ground Zero in the fight for fair education funding this week has been 750 N. Washington St. That’s the address of Pottstown High School and the place where the action has been in the last 24 hours. First there was the special Superintendent’s Forum Tuesday night that featured the provocative question — “Why Are My Taxes So High?” The next morning the school was the Montgomery County location for a series of statewide press conferences calling attention to Pennsylvania’s rank as the worst in the nation ...

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School superintendents coordinate to plead for state funding help

GARY ROTSTEIN Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grotstein@post-gazette.com The ability to educate public school students is increasingly hampered by spiraling mandated costs for pensions, special education and charter and cyber schools, which dwarf the size of modest funding increases anticipated from the state, according to a group of Western Pennsylvania school superintendents. The heads of 10 diverse districts joined at West Mifflin High School Wednesday to plead their case that the current system of funding basic education in Pennsylvania is unsustainable and that ...

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Pottstown Schools Host Forum on School-Funding Formula

Pottstown Schools Host Forum on School-Funding Formula From the Reading Eagle, May 31, 2017 State funds - which make up roughly 34 percent of school district funding - are distributed in a way that does little to minimize the disparities, although Pennsylvania's new fair funding formula was implemented last year with an eye to doing just that, said Michael Churchill, another staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. The new formula awards state funding based on several factors, including the number of students living in poverty, learning English as a ...

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For Immediate Release: EQUITY FIRST – “END SCHOOL FUNDING DISCRIMINATION”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 30, 2017 EQUITY FIRST - "END SCHOOL FUNDING DISCRIMINATION" 2017 Agenda Asks Governor Wolf and General Assembly to End the Nation's Worst School Funding Discrimination in Basic Education and Special Education Funding (Harrisburg, PA) – May 30, 2017 - Two (2) years after the historic adoption of the bipartisan funding formulas for Basic Education and Special Education, shockingly, only 6% of Basic Education funding and 8% of Special Education funding are running through the adopted new funding formulas. These measures result in massive ...

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Editorial: Demand state change school funding inequities

POSTED: 05/07/17, 11:12 PM EDT | UPDATED: 1 WEEK, 3 DAYS AGO Brandt reported on two recent studies which analyzed school funding under the current application of the so-called fair funding formula. The results paint a startling picture of discrimination. Not only were poorer districts getting less than their fair share, the less white a poor district was, the worse the inequity. “On average, the whitest districts gets thousands of dollars more than their fair share for each student, while the least white districts get thousands less for each student than their ...

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Opinion: Focus outrage on public school funding formula

By Merlyn Clarke Interpreters of Greek mythology suggest that when Pandora opened her famous box, her intent was purely innocent, driven by honest curiosity, but nevertheless resulted in introducing evil into the world. The Judeo-Christian take on this event substitutes knowledge for evil. One could argue that the adoption of the fair funding formula for distributing education dollars approximates both interpretations. Developed by well-meaning legislators and administrators determined to rectify the irrationalities of basic education funding in Pennsylvania, it has ...

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STROUDSBURG SCHOOL BOARD PASSES RESOLUTION SEEKING FAIR FUNDING FOR All BASIC EDUCATION FUNDING

For Immediate Release: June 22, 2016 (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) – Equity First reports, The Board of School Directors of the Stroudsburg Area School District recently voted to adopt a resolution to clarify intent of what the Pennsylvania School Board Association (“PSBA”) deems “fair funding”. The PSBA’s Core Legislative Principles and supporting concepts outlines in its ‘Funding Formula’ section that “Pennsylvania must develop and maintain a system of public school financing that emphasizes a sharing of costs between the commonwealth and local ...

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