With a newly approved state budget that boosts funding for K-12, there could be new opportunities ahead to provide instructional services and programming to Pennsylvania school districts.
Lawmakers passed the $50.85 billion 2026-27 state spending plan last week. Overall, it allocates $8.3 billion for general education and $1.6 billion for special education — an increase of $58 million and $55 million, respectively.
It also includes an additional $565 million for the continuation of a supplemental payment program that funnels additional resources to schools that have historically been underfunded.
For districts in the state, which has approximately 2 million K-12 students, that means creating forward-looking instructional plans and growing programs — a departure from how most have had to operate in recent years, said Kevin Busher, chief advocacy officer of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.
The final budget was passed nearly two weeks after the state’s deadline — a relatively small delay compared to last year, when a disastrous, five-month impasse caused some districts to shelve plans for buying new instructional materials, and in some cases, turn to short-term bank loans to cover payroll and expenses.
EdWeek Market Brief spoke to Busher about the most notable takeaways from the state budget, where there could be new opportunities for K-12 spending, and what education companies should know.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you see as the important takeaways for K-12 in the approved budget?
One of them is the continued investment in public education — which is vital — and the fact that this budget was relatively on time, as close as we’ve been in the last couple years.
Last year there was record investment [in K-12 approved by the state]. However, the budget wasn’t done until November, so a lot of that record investment gets gobbled up by [districts’] interest payments to banks in order to float bank loans and those kinds of things.
This year we won’t see that.
Also, some of the policy objectives that have occurred over the last couple of [legislative] sessions, like cyber charter policy reforms and funding reforms, are contained within this budget.
While there wasn’t a cyber charter financial change this year, [lawmakers] did continue some of the language around truancy and wellness, like residency checks to ensure that the money going to cyber charter schools from our school districts and our taxpayers are going to where it’s intended. And that is to pay for kids that live in those school districts. I think it’s really vital that the legislature, again in a bipartisan manner, says we’ve got to get that right.
Are there potentially new opportunities for district spending when it comes to the additional state resources allocated?
This is probably the first budget where we’ve heard from our members that this investment will hopefully go to growing programs and building upon programs that have already been implemented over the last three or four years.
Broadly, this is the first time that we could be forward-looking with with those investments, with the programs that were put in place in November — like the structured literacy provisions that were put in place in November and still funded in this budget.
Those are the type of things that my school districts look at, and they go, “Okay, there’s a year-after-year commitment to this program, so I can look at it, I can invest in it, I can figure out where we can grow.”
So, we’re actually probably too excited about where this where this budget landed in terms of the commitment from the legislature and the governor’s office and where they see public education going.
What other elements of this budget are you excited about?
There’s a section of the school code that [required] a legislative budget and finance committee study on standardized testing. I think that’s an interesting discussion that’s bubbled below the surface with many of my members, and many of their legislators, about spending an exorbitant amount of time teaching towards what we believe will be on a test instead of teaching what we believe kids need to know to make them successful members of society.
The way they have drafted this study on standardized testing doesn’t pigeonhole us in a way that says it’s just SATs or it’s just graduation rates.
The one line that I really really like about this section is that they want a review of all types of assessments used in all other states that also comply with the federal law. So they’re not just seeing what’s working in Pennsylvania, but what’s working in Ohio and Mississippi and Texas … and where could we fix what we’re doing here.
It’s not a mandate. It’s not something that they’re saying every school district has to go do. But they also talk about how that impacts the educator evaluation system, the future-ready index, and the calculation of growth and all those kinds of things.
Is there anything else that vendors interested in providing products/services to Pennsylvania districts should know?
I believe that it’s a forward-looking budget that seeks answers, and some solutions, instead of a budget that throws some spaghetti at the wall and sees what sticks. That’s never more evident [than when looking at] the school facilities inventory study.
Year after year, we hear from our members about school infrastructure and school facilities and how vital it is to fund those. Year over year, we’ve funded those at about $100 million, $125 million per budget, which is really pennies on the dollar when we’re talking about what we believe the school facilities deficit may be.
This budget sets a study, a collection of information that will hopefully in 2027 — when most most of this information will be due — set us up for a conversation around what is the true need for school facilities and infrastructure.
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That, matched with the science of reading, the statewide study of state testing — I believe all of these combine themselves in a way that allows us to build a fabric of what is needed in terms of investment down the road.
Do you think vendors will have a role in any of these information-gathering efforts?
Some of these school districts are going to have to, especially with the school facilities stuff, partner with a with somebody [who can] come in and say, [what they’re] going to need. There is going to be some need at the at the district level to have their own facility study done, so that they could submit these studies to the state.
It’s going to be interesting to see how it comes about, because it’s not necessarily specific in the language around the execution of it. That’s really an interesting component of this.