HARRISBURG, Pa. (CN) — Following 40 days of arguments, 41 witnesses, more than 1,100 admitted exhibits and more than 14,600 pages of trial testimony, trial summations began Thursday in a fight to reallocate billions of state dollars for education.
Initiated back in 2014 by the William Penn School District and others, the case seeks to dismantle Pennsylvania's system of using local taxes to pad the funding budgets of public schools in the state, thus allowing richer neighborhoods to spend an average of $5,000 more per student per year than what is spent in poorer districts.
Katrina Robson, who represents the district challengers, said in her two-hour-long closing statement Thursday that the system of funding tramples the Pennsylvania Constitution, drafted in 1873, which vows to “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education.”
A lack of substantial funding from the Republican-controlled state Legislature is to blame for school funding disparities, the O'Melveny & Myers attorney continued, painting a picture of neglected schools across that are becoming less sufficient each year with millions needed to sustain building maintenance needs and provide staff for growing student populations.
Talking about a school that had rodents and roaches in its deteriorating school buildings, Robson recalled the testimony of one student there who said the environment made students feel “like you were less, like you didn’t matter.”
The lawyer described libraries shuttered and used for storage due to staffing shortages, and classrooms in spaces once used for storage or as hallways. Dingy bathrooms, leaking pipes or one toilet for 125 children to share. In Greater Johnstown, the state’s poorest school district, there is a middle school building in such disrepair, Robson recalled, that its students had been sent instead to an elementary school where they no longer had access to science labs.
In another rural town, Wilkes Barre, she said a rural high school is literally crumbling to the point where scaffolding at the entrance has been erected so students aren’t hit with falling debris.
Philadelphia’s school district serves some 85,000 students — more students than any other in the state — but Robson said its low salaries and poor working conditions make it hard for the city to retain or attract teachers. It also does not have sufficient funding or staff to keep up with its 300 buildings that require maintenance. Meanwhile in majority-white school districts just outside of Philly, the learning facilities are significantly nicer, with more counselors, more academic coaches, more reading specialists. Robson called it a bright red flag.
“You can't have one system of education for one set of kids or one set of schools for one set of kids, and another for the others,” said Robson, whose clients include eight school districts as well as individual parents, the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, and Pennsylvania’s chapter of the NAACP.
With all this evidence, she emphasized in her closing Thursday, the court has no alternative but to conclude from that the state’s GOP-controlled General Assembly is failing its mission.
“Low-wealth districts do not have the resources that they need to prepare all children for college, career and civic success,” Robson said. “And why is that? Because the educational funding in Pennsylvania has become politicized, subject to the partition poll, of conflicting interests and adverse party platforms.”





