Five school districts in Butler County will receive adequacy supplements this coming school year under the 2024-25 state budget, but the money falls short of what was proposed by Democrats to fund Pennsylvania’s poorest schools.

The funding, which spans $493.8 million in adequacy supplements, is the crowning jewel of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s education plan that includes a $1 billion increase to public education.

It’s not what advocates hoped for: A House Bill would have sent $728 million and codified seven years of adequacy funding to help bridge the divide between rich and poor school districts.

The proposal for adequacy funding was based on recommendations made by the Basic Education Funding Commission, which found schools that had met state goals in academic performance and graduation rates pay an average of $13,704 per pupil for classroom instruction, support service and other services.

Determining a school district’s adequacy gap is a “multistep process,” Priyanka Reyes-Kaura, K-12 policy director of advocacy group Children First PA, said before the budget passed.

Under the proposal, districts in Pennsylvania that spend less than $13,704 were considered to have an adequacy gap, the total amount of which can be determined by multiplying the difference by the number of students in the district.

The second step is to calculate the state’s share in closing the gap.

“Every district is responsible for (alleviating) some of that through local sources and the rest comes from the state,” Reyes-Kaura said.

“The state share is calculated (based on) how much of a gap would there be if that school district raised local taxes to the 33rd percentile of local effort compared to all across the state,” she said. The formula also takes into account whether school districts are raising taxes at a high local effort, she said.

“Some school districts don’t have the wealth in their district but are taxing their communities at a high level,” she said. “Some districts are in the opposite situation — they are exerting a relatively low tax effort ... if some districts can contribute sums locally, they should do that before the state taps into its reserves.”

Mars Area School District, Seneca Valley School District, Knoch School District and Allegheny-Clarion Valley School District will not receive adequacy funding.

Seneca Valley, Reyes-Kaura noted, “could reasonably generate” the funds needed to close its adequacy gap at the local level.

At a school board meeting last month, Moniteau School District’s board president, Michael Panza, shared that taxes would need to be raised by “10 mills to ... generate the 1 mill they raise in Seneca Valley.”

Marc Stier, executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center, said between the governor’s plan and the final state budget, the formula to determine each school district’s adequacy supplement has remained the same. However, poverty calculations from district to district have shifted. Instead of using figures from the Department of Education, Stier said, the state is using U.S. census data to help determine the state’s share of adequacy funds.

Butler Area School District will receive about $1.4 million, $724,241 short of the proposed $2.16 million.

Karns City Area School District will receive $115,836. Moniteau School District will receive $102,041; Slippery Rock Area School District will see $218,210.

Before the budget passed, preliminary calculations found Butler Area School District to have a significant adequacy gap of about $24.36 million. Karns City Area School District’s adequacy gap was listed as nearly $2.6 million.

Freeport Area School District will receive $295,287 in adequacy funds. The school district, like many others, is facing significant building repairs, rising health insurance costs, contractual salary increases and increased costs of utilities, transportation, supplies and out-of-district placements.

“Many school districts have an adequacy gap,” Reyes-Kaura said. “They don’t have ... enough teachers, updated curriculum, enough additional academic support.”

Adequacy funds would offer some relief to the school district, Moniteau’s interim business manager, Eric Brandenburg said before the budget was passed. He said the funds would provide revenue that could go toward repairs, filling vacant positions and pushing for competitive salaries.

“If there were adequacy (funds), they might be able to add a position to help with curriculum,” Brandenburg said. “... that's a big part of it. I mean, curriculum is a big task. You can't expect the superintendent to do the job of what other school districts have two or three people to do.”

“When you have positions and you have people, you get that opportunity,” he said.

“When you don't have the money, sometimes you can't get the curriculum, or the amount of staff you need,” he said. “When you get a place that has a lot of money, they may be able to have a special (education) coordinator, an assistant special (education) coordinator, a curriculum director.”

Brian White, superintendent of Butler Area School District, said adequacy funding would make a dramatic impact on the district.

“We have significant facility issues, and so we really try to maximize what we're doing, but we're not engaging all the time in the preventive things that we want to do to maintain our facilities,” White said. “Facilities is probably the most dramatic things people would notice. But I would also then start to get into talking about our support staff. We had vacancies, and most of our support staff rolls over the course of the year, and a lot of that is because our wages are low ... that funding would help funnel some of that to attract and retain employees.”

Rep. Tim Bonner, R-17th, described adequacy funding as an ineffective answer to Pennsylvania’s discrepancies in education funding. Some schools have performed below desired state standards for years despite revenues, he said.

“The only thing we’re doing is throwing more money at the problem,” he said. “There’s no reform.”

Instead, Bonner said he supported shifting away from property taxes.

Reyes-Kaura said the aim of adequacy funding is not to entirely shift away from property taxes, but to address inequitable funding from one neighborhood to the next.

“The role of the state is to even out discrepancies between local wealth, not totally replace it,” she said.

“It’s just a matter of how do we do it in a way that is fair, doesn’t harm student outcomes or put students in (low-income) neighborhoods at a disadvantage,” Reyes-Kaura said.

While advocating for adequacy funding, White echoed Bonner’s remarks that further reform in public education is needed.

For school districts located in lower-income areas, where properties are assessed at a lower rate, it seems that in trying to meet state goals they’re pushed further behind their wealthy counterparts.

“The system itself is flawed,” White said. “The system creates inequity because it's over-relying on property tax, and I think (legislators) have a real opportunity to have some discussion over how to fund education in an equitable way.”

“There's 500 school districts in Pennsylvania,” White said. “Each one of them has a different amount of money to educate students, but every one of them has to meet the same standards.”

“It feels like every year we're being asked to do more without the resources necessary, and then you watch others that really have, you know, amazing things for their kids,” White said. “You wish that for all kids.”

Rep. Stephenie Scialabba, R-12th, who does not support adequacy funding, said she does not believe it to be sustainable.

“We have no way of measuring how many of these dollars actually make it into the classroom,” she stated before the budget was passed. “We need to know how the money is being spent and make sure it’s being used to help student achievement.”

Reyes-Kaura previously said the state had enough funds to ensure adequacy revenues would be possible for the first few years, but not enough to see the proposal through all seven years. The state budget does not include this seven-year timeline.

“Reaching sustainable education funding isn’t a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’” she said. “Our courts already said Pennsylvania schools are underfunded and the state needs to do something different.”

Last year, Commonwealth Court President Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer declared the state’s system of funding public schools was unconstitutional and inequitable, failing poor school districts. The ruling followed a 2014 lawsuit filed by parents, six school districts, the NAACP and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools.

Pennsylvania ranks 45th in the country for its share of funding for public schools, which are financed using federal, state and local government funds. The state covers about 38% of the costs of public education, according to the PA Schools Work Campaign, a nonpartisan coalition of various organizations representing educators throughout the Commonwealth.

Children First PA, the group Reyes-Kaura represents, is one of the organizations that is part of the coalition.

Stier, whose organization is also a member of the coalition, said what was approved in the 2024-25 state budget is “just a small share of the total adequacy gap in the neighborhood of 10% to 11%.”

The House Bill expected the gap could be filled in seven years.

“The current budget does not have that plan,” Stier said. “We think that’s unfortunate.”

“The timeline was not resolved,” he said. “The (state budget) defined what adequacy is, but it did not say how many years it will take to fill that gap.”

It could take the state nearly 10 years, or more, to fill that gap, Stier said, depending on how many funds are allocated to school districts each year through the state budget.

“That’s another whole generation of Pennsylvania kids attending inadequately funded schools,” he said.