We are gearing up for a big fight in Harrisburg to keep Governor Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers from expanding school vouchers in the 2024-2025 state budget. The proposed PASS/ESA private school voucher proposals would give tax dollars directly to families whose children attend private schools and would be the first step toward a universal school voucher program like the one in Arizona, which is bankrupting the state and forcing massive cuts in public schools.
We invite you to join us for a webinar where we will provide an overview of current voucher proposals in PA; discuss how vouchers undermine our public schools, support discrimination, and waste tax dollars; and share concrete actions that we can all take to support a state budget that rejects private school vouchers and invests in our PUBLIC schools.
Click HERE to register for a webinar on Tuesday, March 19 or Thursday March 21. (Pick one date. The same webinar will be presented twice.)
If you are interested in the issue of transparency in schools and universities, Spotlight PA is hosting a roundtable discussion with journalists and Ashli Giles-Perkins, staff attorney for the Education Law Center, to discuss their work ensuring transparency for how schools and universities in the commonwealth spend taxpayer dollars on Thursday, March 14th at 6:00 pm.
This article focused on the event states:
Excessive secrecy among school leaders and boards can weaken that trust. That’s why journalists hold publicly funded institutions and the people who run these schools accountable for how they spend taxpayer dollars. Pennsylvania’s open records and meetings laws are key resources for information gathering, but there are limits.
I was invited to be part of this discussion to share Ed Voters’ work with Right to Know requests focused on information from Pennsylvania’s notoriously unaccountable and opaque cyber charter schools, which receive $1 billion in tax funding annually.
This roundtable discussion is part of Sunshine Week, a national initiative spearheaded by the News Leaders Association to educate the public about the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive and unnecessary secrecy.