After months of delay, Pennsylvania has a $50 billion budget to see it through the next fiscal year. Included in that total is almost $18.5 billion for the state’s school districts, charter schools and community colleges, an increase of about 5 percent over last year’s budget.

The 17 districts in Lehigh and Northampton counties are set receive more than $585 million in state funding this fiscal year, an increase of 8.1 percent, significantly higher than the statewide average. The Allentown School District, which includes most of the city, is set to receive the third largest bump in total dollars anywhere in the state after Philadelphia and Reading, increasing more than $25 million to $275.9 million.

The sortable table below shows the allocations for each district.

 

How state education funding works

The three largest funding streams for public schools are Basic Education Funding ($8.26 billion), Special Education Funding ($1.53 billion), and Ready to Learn Block Grants ($1.34 billion). Basic funding accounts for 45% of all public education allocations for primary and secondary school students. It increased a modest 1.3 percent this year, after a much larger increase last year. Special education increased 2.7 percent, but the RTL grants ballooned by more than 68 percent year over year.

This chart shows the breakdown in education funding.

While the increase in overall education spending is 5 percent, Pennsylvania’s 500 districts saw increases ranging from less than one percent for the Pittsburgh School District to more than 23 percent in Dauphin County’s Susquehanna Township district. The map below shows the figures for all 500 districts. Select an area to see the breakout in each of the three funding streams.

Philadelphia, by far the state’s largest district, gets more than $2 billion in school funding, an increase of almost $174 million, while Reading will receive an additional $32 million this year, bringing its total for the three funding streams to more than $293 million.
Weighted and adjusted

The formulas used to determine how much of each pot of money will go to the state’s 500 districts are enormously complex, but come down to recalculating Average Daily Membership — the number of students for which a district is responsible, whether through in-person learning, charter school enrollment or home schooling.

ADM is first weighted based on types of students, reflecting the different costs to educate children based on characteristics like grade level (high school students cost more than elementary), English language learners, special education needs, individual poverty, charter school enrollment, etc. The weighted ADM is then adjusted based on characteristics including median household income, the local tax base, chronic poverty and population density.

The calculations can change a district’s funding formula dramatically, although not all money is based strictly on ADM. For instance, Allentown School District’s in-person enrollment is about 17,000 students, but its adjusted ADM is about 22,000, and the total student-weighted ADM is 33,780. The Education Department further calculates the district’s household income, taxable real estate values, current tax rates and chronic poverty to almost triple that number to 90,704, more than four times its adjusted ADM.

At the other end of the Lehigh Valley scale, Southern Lehigh School District has an in-person enrollment of 3,053 students, and an adjusted ADM of 3,140. When all factors are considered, the district’s final ADM figure is 2,218, only 70% its adjusted ADM.

The map below shows total funding from the three main revenue streams per adjusted ADM, where the Average Daily Membership is adjusted only for grade level. Values range from $1,192 in state money per adjusted ADM in Montgomery County’s Lower Merion to $19,171 in Chester-Upland in Delaware County, showing the effects of the add-on recalculations to a district’s level of state support.

This table shows the same data for the 17 Lehigh Valley districts.

Ready to Learn

The biggest change in the education portion of Pennsylvania’s budget is the Ready To Learn Block Grant program, which seeks to compensate historically underfunded districts. RTL grants account for 7.5 percent of budgets statewide, but, as this table of Lehigh Valley districts shows, it accounts for one out of every five dollars flowing from the state to the Allentown School District.

The same RTL data is shown on this map for all 500 districts.

 

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