As the 2019-2020 school year comes to a close, school district administrators, teachers, staff, and board members are turning their attention to planning how they will safely educate students when the new school year begins in the fall.
School districts need additional federal aid to re-open safely.
Among many other things, districts will need to ensure the safety of staff and children who are at higher risk; provide personal protective equipment to employees; develop procedures for cleaning, sanitizing, disinfecting, and ventilating learning spaces and for ensuring the safe use of cafeterias and other congregate settings; provide additional support for students who fell behind during the school closure; and so much more.
And instead of having additional resources to invest into safely opening schools this fall, many districts are being forced to lay off teachers and cut core programs and services to balance their budgets.
Districts are facing $850 million-$1 billion in lost local revenue because of the COVID-19 economic downturn. And, an increase in charter school tuition rates in the state’s outdated and broken law will drain an additional $200 million in tuition payments from districts in 2020-2021.
School districts need additional federal aid to re-open safely.
The US House passed an additional COVID-19 relief package with funding for public schools (the HEROES Act), but the US Senate has not taken action to support additional aid for public schools.
The $13.5 billion that was allocated in the initial COVID-19 emergency response package to schools nationwide ($524 million to Pennsylvania’s schools) is appreciated. However, these funds are just a fraction of aid the federal government provided to schools in 2009 during the Great Recession and this funding is not enough to ensure schools have the resources they need to open safely.
School districts in the poorest communities, many of which educate large numbers of students of color and struggle even during the best of times to provide students with the resources they need, will face the greatest barriers to restarting education this fall. Pennsylvania students have already lost so much. We need Senators Toomey and Casey to make every effort to keep them from falling further behind.
Best,
Susan Spicka, Executive Director, Education Voters of PA