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Gov. says spending plan increases Basic Education Funding. Schools disagree.
Luzerne County’s 11 school districts would lose at least $25.1 million next year under Gov. Tom Corbett’s proposed budget. Or they would lose $8.3 million. Or maybe $5 million.
It depends how you do the math.
In raw numbers, districts will see their state aid drop by more than $25 million. But a big chunk of that – nearly $20 million by Corbett’s math – came from the federal stimulus bill that pumped $2.6 billion into Pennsylvania schools during the last two years. And when Corbett released his proposal, he made it clear districts never should have expected that one-time federal infusion to continue. He compared his proposal to the prior state budget, stimulus money excluded.
Using that yardstick, Corbett contends his budget actually increased Basic Education Funding, or BEF – the largest component of state money for public schools – by 2.5 percent., which would mean Luzerne County schools are getting $3.1 million more in BEF from the state than they did last year. Put another way, districts got a lot more in BEF last year, but it wasn’t all from the state, so the state could up its contribution and the total could still go down.
But there’s more to the budget than BEF, and Corbett zeroed out several programs that will cost districts $8 million combined, including “Dual Enrollment,” which let high school students take college classes, “Accountability Block Grants” which could be used for a variety of things within state guidelines, and “Charter School Reimbursement,” designed to compensate for money districts lost when students enrolled in charter schools (“per pupil” state payments the district would have received go with the student to the charter school.
So even by the most optimistic interpretation – using Corbett’s BEF figures and the money lost by cutting those programs, local districts still suffer a net loss of more than $5.2 million.
Which means even if a district made a preliminary budget assuming complete loss of stimulus money in the BEF spending would revert to pre-stimulus levels, it still underestimated how much it was going to lose. Take Lake-Lehman School District: Superintendent Jim McGovern said the preliminary budget accounted for a complete loss of stimulus money. If that was all Corbett cut, his budget would actually put the district $153,000 in the black thanks to that 2.5 percent increase Corbett contends he is making. “What I did not expect was the governor taking out the Accountability Block Grants and the Charter School Reimbursement,” McGovern said. “We lost about $275,000 more than expected.”
The Dallas School District preliminary budget, on the other hand, had expected only a partial loss of the stimulus funding, budgeting for $340,000 in state cuts; Corbett’s proposal cuts $556,000 beyond that
If you look strictly at the dollar amounts last year and this – which means including the stimulus money – Corbett’s plan cuts BEF anywhere from $664,149 at Dallas to $3.6 million at Hazleton Area.
If, like Corbett, you think the stimulus money shouldn’t be included in calculating the cuts, the elimination of the Block Grants still means local losses ranging from $172,174 at Dallas to $1.3 million at Hazleton, while cutting the Charter School Reimbursements means losses ranging from $55,800 at Wyoming Area to almost $1.1 million at Wilkes-Barre Area. Dual enrollment money was small by comparison, and went to the colleges for tuition and other costs. The losses range from $783 at Northwest Area to $32,644 at Crestwood.
The annual Accountability Block Grant report for 2009-10 – the latest available online – shows the money was used to provide full-day kindergarten for 2,183 students in seven districts. Wilkes-Barre Area provided pre-kindergarten classes for 57 students.
For more details, www.times
leader.com