No representation for low-wealth school districts
My name is Susan Knoll. I am a voter who resides in the 96th Legislative House District (the area of Lancaster City). I am a social worker who has worked in several school districts and colleges throughout Lancaster County. I am also a parent of a middle school student at the School District of Lancaster (SDOL) and I have organized a group of concerned SDOL parents and staff called SDOL Fair Funding Now. Additionally, I am parent board member for Education Voters PA. Over the past few years, there has been an enormous effort on behalf of parents, clergy, community members, and teachers to meet and speak with our district’s house & senate representatives about the severe lack of funding in our schools. Several rallies have taken place in Harrisburg and Lancaster. Countless letters, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings have been sent/made with our legislators’ offices. The pandemic only made our district’s ongoing crisis and glaring inequities crystal-clear. As schools shut down, we watched the rest of the districts and private schools in our county make the switch to online learning fairly seamlessly. Our frustrations as parents and school staff reached a crescendo, as our district struggled with meeting the basic needs of our students and it took several weeks to just to ensure one laptop, as well as wifi, was secured per family. As a parent, I spoke with the PTO members of several schools in our district over the past year to talk with our community about the issue of underfunding in our schools. Over and over again, two themes emerged from these meetings: most parents were confused about who their representative was because there are four in our district, and for those who knew their representative and had expressed concerns about school funding, they said they had given up because “they just don’t seem to care.” In spite of herculean efforts to try to secure adequate funding for our schools by literally hundreds of community members, the majority of reps in our district consistently vote against any initiative to do so. We are growing exhausted with them not hearing our voices. Our district is an “urban” (meaning: predominantly Black and Latino) one that serves almost 11,000 students (compared to about 3,000 in the other 15 districts in our county). We educate the vast majority of English language learners in our county, and the vast majority of our families live at or below the federal poverty level (we are a Title 1 school and all students receive free and reduced-cost lunch). Because our schools are funded primarily via local property taxes, and we have high poverty rates coupled with a high concentration of tax-exempt properties (non-profits to serve disadvantaged community members, schools, churches, and government buildings) in our city, we continue to raise taxes on residents at disproportionately high levels—and we still come up way short than most districts in our county, by about $4500/student (per the Public Interest Law Center). Because our representatives continue to ignore our pleas for adequate funding, four years ago our district joined several others in a lawsuit against the state to force a change in how we fund districts, especially in high-poverty areas. That hearing, six years in the making, will finally be held in October, but it should not have had to come to this. Our school district has four representatives, one of whom, a Democrat, actually resides in our city, while the other three, all Republicans, reside in the suburbs surrounding us. If you look at a map of party affiliation of families in our district, it is almost entirely Democrat—yet three Republicans get an outsized say in whether our district receives any significant increase in funding—and they vote against it every single time. Meanwhile, the majority of those Republicans' districts are solidly red and are areas of higher wealth and hence they have access to well-funded schools. Because of our state’s “hold harmless” cause, we have been told that by our reps that if they vote for fairly funding for SDOL, the other districts in their areas will lose money—it’s apparently a zero-sum game. One of them, Rep. Brian Miller, basically said to a parent, "What are you complaining about? We've given you more money," which, technically, is true, but the amount is stingy and it is insulting he would give that as his closing argument. So, year after year, we are stuck with super-high tax rates to compensate for the lack of funding, and no real advocates in the general assembly. Meanwhile, the same inadequate staffing and amenities to meet the needs of our children continues. There seems to be no end to this vicious cycle as long as our reps do not care about this issue as it doesn’t impact them, their children, or their neighbor’s children. What’s worse, their only solution seems to be establishing more private school vouchers via EITC to allow certain families an “out” to this unfair system via publicly-funded tuition subsidies. For every child in our district who is from a low-income family and “lucky enough” to receive a full EITC-funded scholarship, there are 20 others still learning in severely underfunded schools. This is not good policy, and it literally traps thousands of children in our community an ongoing cycle of poverty that continues to repeat itself generation after generation. The tentacles of poverty are far-reaching and impact all of us. What I am asking today is that as you consider boundaries for redistricting, the representatives in school districts reflect the community members and have the best interests of the children in those communities at the forefront. There is no need for four representatives in our school district. One, maybe two, would suffice. When a representative has just a small sliver of a school district in their area, and a large portion of another district as well, it naturally follows that the slightly-represented district will not be their largest concern. Most people would agree that a solid, well-resourced school is a major ticket to a stable life, and is especially critical in districts like ours that contain high levels of poverty. We need representatives who care about our schools and are accountable to students and families in their areas.