Casey, Pashinski and local educators push for American Family Plan

Local lawmakers joined educators from the Wilkes-Barre Area School District online Wednesday to press their case for President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan, arguing the the support it would provide for schools and families could reshape the state.

Biden’s $1.8 trillion proposal has seen public support among some sectors but sharp criticism form conservatives and Republicans skeptical of the steep price and wide-ranging list of things it pays for, including at east four years of offering free community college, creating a national paid family and medical leave program, set up universal pre-school and extend or expand tax credits for working parents and families.

State Rep. Eddie Day Pashinski, D-Wilkes-Barre, moderated the online discussion, introducing the others.

Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti said the COVID-19 pandemic had “laid bare the facts of what it is like to be a family” these days, showing that “In northeast Pennsylvania we have so many families that struggle.

“We can’t miss this opportunity to fix the structural problems, to fix the root causes of poverty,” Cognetti said, and the American Families Plan does that.

Laurel Run Borough Mayor Justin Correll, who is also principal at Wilkes-Barre Area School District’s Solomon Plains Elementary School, focused on the proposed increase in pre-school availability, contending the evidence is clear that quality pre-school increases a child’s development and, in the long run, reduces retention rates. He also argued the proposed financial support for teacher training is necessary to offset a growing shortage of staff in “high need areas like special education teachers and special education services.”

Correll said the plan would help transform young children from “scribblers to scholars.”

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Scranton, has been pushing the plan from the start, and has often pushed proposed elements of the plan in the past separately. He noted no Republican senators cross the aisle to support Biden’s COVID-19 Rescue Plan, which provided direct payments to adults and extended child and dependent tax credits as well as extended earned income tax credits for middle class families.

Arguing both moves help lift millions out of poverty but are only short-lived under the rescue plan, he noted the Family plan extends those benefits at least for several years.

“It’s long, long overdue. We’ve had about 40 years of a federal tax code being rigged for corporations and wealthy families,” Casey said.

Wilkes-Barre Area Kistler Elementary first grade teacher Susan Augello-Kuhl said she has seen first-hand the benefits of providing many of the things the plan proposes, including healthy meals for all children and technology so students can be exposed to new options early.

“I see a lot of students who do not get a healthy breakfast struggle to maintain their focus,” she said. “We cannot nourish the minds of our students if we do not first nourish their health.”

Her “firsties” love learning coding lessons, she said, which can be the building blocks for a future in science and engineering fields. And students who come to first grade after benefiting from quality pre-school and kindergarten programs “develop the social and emotional skills needed to work as teams and stay on task.”

Augello-Kuhl also praised proposals intended to bring a more diverse group of teachers into the classrooms. “Our children are not seeing enough teachers who look like them, and they need to see themselves in their teachers.”