On February 4, 2025, Governor Shapiro gave his budget address and shared his 2025-26 state budget proposal, which demonstrates his strong commitment to supporting public education. The proposed new investments and efficiencies, if adopted as a package, will be a win for rural, urban, and suburban students and communities across the commonwealth.
Key Proposal Highlights:
✅ $494M in adequacy funding for the 348 districts with an identified adequacy gap (11% of the total gap).
✅ $32M in tax equity funding for the 50 districts with the highest local property tax efforts.
✅ $70 M increase in Basic Education Funding for all 500 districts.
✅ $40M increase in special education funding for all 500 districts.
✅ $278M in net savings for school districts through proposed cyber charter funding reforms.
✅ New investments in school facilities, career & technical education, student teacher stipends, and more.
Interested in seeing the full details of the Governor’s budget proposal?
Click here to see a full overview of what this budget includes for Pennsylvania’s schools and how it impacts students across the state.
You can view the funding breakdown for each district in this spreadsheet, which details the funding increases and how cyber charter reform would benefit your local schools.
NOTE: The proposed basic and special education increases are not enough to allow many districts to keep up with inflation.
If the proposed cyber reforms are not adopted, many districts will need to increase property taxes just to keep pace with inflation and pay for increased cyber charter costs.
The adequacy funding proposal is the bare minimum and the rate of closing the adequacy gap is still too slow with a $3.5 billion gap that still must be filled if this proposal is enacted in full.
Without a funding acceleration for the adequacy supplement, students who were in kindergarten when state funding system was declared unconstitutional will be in high school before districts are fully funded.
An update about our recently released report: Our Taxes, Their Slush Fund
There were minor data discrepancies in our recent report. After Ed Voters was made aware of these discrepancies, we manually matched each line of the approximately 10,000 entries in our data set against the original PDFs we received from CCA. An updated report and spreadsheet that contains detailed corrections along with new total spending for categories in the report can be found by clicking here.
Thank you for your support of public education,
Susan Spicka, Executive Director, Education Voters of PA
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