7/21/2019 Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez - Testimony on School Funding

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Office of Maria Quiones SnchezCouncilwoman, 7thDistrict

City Hall, Room 592Philadelphia, PA 19107

215-686-3448Maria.Q.Sanchez@Phila.gov

Councilwoman Mara Quiones Snchez

Testimony to the Pennsylvania State House Policy Committee

Hearing on School Funding March 9, 2015

Fixing our broken school funding system in Pennsylvania is an urgent moral imperative. As the

local elected representative with one of the highest proportions of school-age children in my

district, it has been heartbreaking to watch as we have to come up with new language each yearto describe the inadequacy of our budget for public education. Year after year we have had to

find new ways to cut services, despite already having put into place a "doomsday" budget.

As long as Pennsylvania remains one of only three states nationally without a true funding

formula for public education, a disproportionate burden will continue to fall upon localities,

particularly those which lack a robust tax base. In Philadelphia, we on City Council have

repeatedly taken difficult votes to raise revenue to fill the immense hole created by formerGovernor Corbetts 2011 budget. Since Fiscal Year 2009, local funding to the School District has

increased by 42%. We passed repeated property tax increases in 2011 and 2012, as well as

increases in the commercial Use and Occupancy tax and the cigarette tax. We can and shoulddebate the details of Governor Wolfs proposals, but there is no question we need an ambitious

plan like that he has proposed, in order to grow the pie of funding available for schools across

Pennsylvania and rebalance how we pay for services so that the burden is fairly distributed.

For last two years, I have worked with the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia to help

gather complaints from parents, students, teachers, and school staff about the inadequateconditions in our schools. We collected hundreds of complaints through MyPhillySchools.com,

testifying to violations of basic, guaranteed standards. Stories included schools without

counselors to help process college applications, lack of nurses resulting in dangerous conditions

for students who depend on daily medications, overcrowded classrooms and so-called splitgrades where students at different levels are put into a single classroom to save money. The

complaints painted a portrait of a school system in which we are failing to provide the basic

components of a safe learning environment.

Students like those in my City Council district are hit especially hard by Pennsylvania's failure to

provide a fair funding formula along the lines of that proposed by the "Costing Out study"commissioned by the state under Governor Rendell. My students often have Limited English

Proficiency, with families who speak other languages at home. They face high rates of poverty

and violence in their homes and neighborhoods, and need extra assistance to deal with that

trauma and still perform academically. They often have IEPs and need special services. And theyattend schools that are not funded at rates matching those needs to provide targeted services. It is

7/21/2019 Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez - Testimony on School Funding

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profoundly disturbing that, currently, our states funding supplement for needs like English

Language Learners most frequently do not go to those districts with the greatest concentrationsof such students. If we had a funding system that directed resources according to the

characteristics of student population, my schools would look very different. Instead, schools

must share scarce nurses and counselors, with overwhelming caseloads that mean students in

crisis often have to wait dangerously long for help.

I want to briefly mention a related issue, that of the disturbing overuse of standardized testing.With my City Council colleagues, we have held hearings and recently passed a resolution asking

for a comprehensive review to minimize use of these tests in Philadelphia, and have requested

that the School District seek a waiver from the impending Keystone exams as a graduationrequirement. Not only do these tests consume scarce resources in terms of staffing and learning

time, they fail to truly assess the capability of our lower-income students, especially those who

have special needs or Limited English Proficiency. At a time when our schools are being starved

of needed funding, it is truly cruel to attempt to judge the performance of those schools, and thestudents and teachers within them, solely or primarily through their standardized test scores. I

hope that we can work together to put in place more appropriate measuring systems that willallow us to assess the relative success of our school communities.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue, and I implore you that our students in

Philadelphia and in many districts throughout the state cannot wait another year. We must actnow to fulfill our constitutional obligation to provide them with a thorough and efficient

education, and a true chance to fulfill their potential.