A downpayment on our future
State investments in Philadelphia schools
Rep. Joanna E. McClinton August 9, 2024 | 9:52 AM
It’s the time of year when kids and families anxiously prepare to go back to school, and this year Philadelphia schools will be better equipped than ever to offer every student the education they need to graduate college and career ready.
When it comes to strengthening our community, there is nothing more important than ensuring our kids get the best education they can. After all, today’s students are tomorrow’s health care professionals, community leaders and entrepreneurs.
The budget I helped steer through the legislature in July delivers a record amount of funding for our schools, and more importantly it adds an extra boost for districts that have been chronically underfunded, like Philadelphia.
The School District of Philadelphia is receiving an additional $229 million this year - an increase of 13.5%!
With this increase, the district’s total allocation is more than $1.9 billion. Plus, some of these additional state dollars are being distributed using a new subsidy that begins to address decades of inequitable state support and will start to level the playing field with other districts that rely on more robust tax bases to invest in schools.
What does this historic investment mean for our local schools? The funds could be used to reduce class size or provide access to the latest educational tools and resources. It could allow schools to expand the courses they offer to better prepare our kids for college, the workforce, or the trades, and provide additional resources for students who need extra help.
Since children spend a lot of their day in school and are growing not just academically, but socially too, there is also funding to improve access to mental health care and to bolster physical security of school buildings.
To help many of our aging school buildings, we doubled down on an investment from last year by providing $100 million to repair and update school infrastructure around the state. When we improve our school buildings, we make them safer for students, staff, and visitors, and more efficient and less expensive to operate.
For the second year, every student is eligible for free breakfast at school. Eating breakfast keeps kids healthy and helps them focus on learning throughout the school day. Plus, this year we added a new $3 million investment to make menstrual products available in schools, so girls don’t have to miss school or go home early because they got their period.
Finally, we doubled our investment in the popular Educator Pipeline Support Grant Program, which provides eligible student-teachers with a stipend of up to $15,000 while they gain firsthand experience in our classrooms. This will help us meet our demand for new educators by making student-teaching more affordable, attracting new people to educator prep programs, and keeping new teachers in Pennsylvania after they graduate.
These new and enhanced investments are good news and a step in the right direction, but Philadelphia and other districts need these investments every year to best serve all students.
So, this year, while we advanced the football, we haven’t scored the touchdown yet. To accomplish that and meet our constitutional and moral obligations, we need to sustain and bolster these investments every year. And that is my goal.
I’m in the game and am going to continue fighting for our schools and students.