Otten statement on 2024-2025 state budget 

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten    July 19, 2024 | 4:38 PM

On Thursday, July 11, the House approved the Pennsylvania state budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year by a vote of 122-80. Gov. Shapiro signed the bill into law the same night.  

I voted in support of this budget, which makes significant investments in public education, affordable housing and healthcare, human services, our workforce, communities, and the future of Pennsylvania – all without raising taxes.  

This budget is not perfect. It falls short on some of the priorities important to me and our community, but there is also a lot to like. The reality is that we have a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate, and this budget reflects the compromise that was required for both sides to reach agreement. I believe that on balance, this budget contains more good than bad and will bring relief and growth to our families and communities.  

Here’s a deep-dive into where the budget delivers, and where I believe it falls short. Please give it a read, and contact my district office at repotten@pahouse.net or 484-200-8259 with your questions or feedback.? 

The headline in this year’s budget is school funding. 
Heading into budget season, school funding was the number one priority for me and my House colleagues, and I am happy to say that we delivered. While the budget falls short of the full amount and some of the important reforms we advocated for, it represents an enormous win for students and families across the Commonwealth, including here in Chester County.  

School funding highlights:  

  • Investments in K-12 Public Education: This budget invests $1.3 billion in public schools—a historic investment that helps every school district in Pennsylvania and takes the first steps toward meeting our moral, constitutional, and legal obligation to our students, schools, parents, and taxpayers.  
     
    For the 2024-2025 school year, the Coatesville Area School District will receive an increase of $7.9 million in new state funding and cyber charter savings combined. Downingtown Area School District will receive an increase of $2.5 million.  

  • Adequacy acknowledgement: For the first time in our history, the Pennsylvania School Code explicitly acknowledges and codifies adequacy – the constitutional mandate for the General Assembly to provide every school district in Pennsylvania with the funding and resources required to meet the needs of their students – and implements a formula to calculate that adequacy.  

  • Funding to the school districts that need it most, through Ready to Learn Block Grants, Basic Education Funding appropriations, and tax equity supplements to provide some relief to school districts like CASD that for years have shouldered more than their fair share of the property tax burden.  
     
    It’s important to know that school districts are required t complete their own budgets before the state finalizes its budget, meaning that districts had to make decisions about any necessary property tax increases based on their best estimates of what the state budget would contain. So, while districts will begin to receive the additional funds now that the state budget is passed, those funds will not have an immediate impact on school taxes for the 2024-25 school year. However, they should help to alleviate the local tax burden for the next school year.  

  • A $30 million increase in Career and Technical Education to help ensure that students who want to pursue a career in the trades are able to get the hands-on training they need. 

  • Transparency and accountability reforms for cyber charters, including new ethics requirements for cyber charter school boards and a requirement for cyber charters to make their advertising expenditures publicly available. Any advertisements must clearly state that their tuition, technology, and transportation are paid for by taxpayers. Cyber charters will be required to conduct certified audits and make the audits and their budgets publicly available. Cyber charters will also be required to conduct weekly student wellness checks, verifying that the student has been seen and communicated with in real time by a teacher.  

School funding shortcomings:  

  • Failure to set a timeline for constitutional compliance: Although we acknowledged and codified a school funding adequacy gap of $4.5 billion, this budget fills only 10.9% of that gap and fails to include a clear timeline to achieve this investment.  
     
    The House included a clear timeline to full funding in House Bill 2370, which passed with bipartisan support, but Senate Republican leadership refused to include it in the budget, meaning that we’ll need to fight this fight again next year in order to meet the constitutional requirement laid out in last year’s Commonwealth Court ruling.  

  • Expansion of Voucher programs with no new accountability or reporting requirements: The budget allocates an additional $75 million in public taxpayer dollars to EITC and OSTC programs, meaning we will now send $525 million per year in public taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools that in many cases openly discriminate, with no information about student outcomes or who is benefiting from these programs.  

  • Failure to pass full cyber charter reform: Twice this session, the House passed measures to cap cyber charter tuition at a standardized statewide rate and to tie cyber charters to the same special education reimbursement rates as public school districts. Together, these reforms would have saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year, while ensuring that tuition dollars would go to services that benefit students.  Senate Republicans refused to pass these reforms. Instead, the budget contains $100 million in reimbursements to school districts for cyber charter tuition payments. While this eases the burden at the local level, it doesn’t end the overpayments to cyber charters; in fact, it increases the overall cost of cyber charter schools to Pennsylvania taxpayers.  

Here are some additional high points in this year’s budget, as well as the areas where I believe we still have more work to do. 

Budget high points: 

  • Investments in the Student Teacher Support program: The budget allocates an additional $20 million for the student teacher stipend program, on top of the $10 million allocated for the 2024-24 school year in last year’s budget, for a total of $30 million for the program’s first year. This falls short of fully funding the program, but it will provide stipends to more than 2,000 student teachers in the 2024-2025 school year and help us grow and diversify the teacher pipeline in Pennsylvania. I’m especially proud of and excited for this investment, which builds on the proposal I introduced and passed in the House in 2023.  

  • Funding for Menstrual Hygiene products in schools: The budget allocates $3 million for grants to allow schools to provide menstrual hygiene products to students. I’ve been pushing for access to menstrual products in schools since taking office in 2019, and I’m excited to see this program come to fruition. No student should have to miss class time or entire school days because they lack access to a basic hygiene necessity that should be provided in exactly the same way public bathrooms routinely provide toilet paper and soap.  

  • Investments in higher education to make it easier for our best and brightest to stay in PA to learn and to earn, by improving access to grants and loans, reducing the student debt load, facilitating smoother transfers from community college to state schools, and creating a new scholarship program to get more students in the most needed careers like nursing and teaching.   

  • Investments in Environmental programs, including $11 million to plug abandoned oil and gas wells and $50 million to the Clean Streams Fund to address industrial, agricultural, and residential sources of water pollution.

  • Solar for Schools Program: $25 million to help schools, community colleges, and technical schools take advantage of federal tax credits to fund solar energy installation.  

  • Affordable Housing: An increase of $100 million to address the housing crisis by putting more money in affordable housing, and doing more to prevent evictions, keep people in their homes when facing a crisis, and fund organizations that help people experiencing homelessness.   

  • Support for seniors, including investments in transit systems and funding for the LIFE program to help seniors stay in their homes. 

  • Investments in Childcare, Health Care, and Human Services: The budget includes increased wages for childcare workers and tax incentives for employers that contribute toward childcare costs. It adds funding for rural hospitals, home care workers, and OB-GYN services, and makes historic investments in care and support for our communities, including $273.4 million for MA Community Health Choices, $261 million for Intellectual Disabilities through the Community Waiver program, a $5 million increase for Homeless Assistance, and millions more for outcome-focused programs to make Pennsylvania safer and more equitable for all.  

  • Investments in mass transit and infrastructure, including $80 million for public transportation systems and more than $200 million in funding to fix and upgrade roads and bridges across the commonwealth.  

  • Updates to the liquor code in a bill that included my proposal to regulate the placement of “crossover products,” which are alcoholic drinks that closely resemble the traditional, non-alcoholic versions of a brand’s juice or soda beverages. The legislation requires retailers to post clear signage indicating that the product is an alcoholic beverage, helping to ensure that consumers don’t inadvertently purchase alcoholic drinks. The bill passed as part of the budget negotiations also makes COVID-era allowances for outdoor seating for bars and restaurants permanent and gives us more happy hours in the Commonwealth, allowing establishments to offer happy hour discounts up to 24 hours per week, instead of just 14.   

Areas for Improvement: 

While there were lots of wins in the budget, they didn’t come without a cost. As part of the budget negotiation process, House leadership agreed to some bad environmental policy, including Senate Bill 831, a bill that’s bad for both our environment and our property rights, plus legislation that allows corporations to undermine the environmental permitting process by paying for expedited permitting review and using outside consultants for review.  

In addition to the school funding shortcomings addressed above, we also failed to fund some budget priorities that the House majority has consistently fought for.  

  • We left billions of dollars unallocated that could instead have been used to address critical issues such as the rape kit backlog and full staffing for DEP to enable to them to carry out the essential work of inspections, oversight, and hazardous site cleanup, and other environmental protections. 

  • Senate leadership would not agree to additional relief for our fire and EMS departments, which are struggling in the face of rising costs, declining volunteer coverage, and low insurance reimbursements.  

  • Senate leadership failed to pass a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for our PSERS and SERS retirees. 

  • The House advocated for food and nutrition assistance including universal school meals and an increase in the SNAP minimum payment from $23 dollars to $35 dollars per month for seniors and those with disabilities, but Senate leadership blocked these provisions.  

We once again left many issues on the table heading into this budget and the legislature’s summer recess, and there is much work left to be done in both chambers, and on both sides of the aisle. This legislative session, the House has passed a minimum wage increase, commonsense gun measures, relief for sexual abuse survivors, and the Fairness Act to protect LGBTQ+ individuals from discrimination, but these proposals have not been taken up in the Senate.  

In addition to these issues, we still have a fight ahead of us to finish the job on school funding, improve access to affordable healthcare, and champion renewable energy sources to protect our environment for generations to come. I will continue to fight in Harrisburg and at home for these issues and the other needs and priorities of our district.  

 

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