Pennsylvania faces a long-standing issue with school funding, largely due to its heavy reliance on local property taxes. This model creates significant disparities, where school districts in areas with lower property values struggle to raise adequate funds despite high tax rates, while wealthier districts can easily generate more than enough revenue with lower tax rates.

We believe it is important to look at new methods to address this dilemma so that we can ensure that property tax revenue serves to increase and uphold the quality of each public school in the commonwealth.

We are proposing a resolution to gather and aggregate property tax data to study and evaluate the impact of different school funding schemes.  Using this data our resolution will also enable us to examine a more regional approach to funding local schools. This resolution will direct the Pennsylvania Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to conduct a statewide study which would collect data on every school district’s property tax revenue and effective tax rates, and determine revenue impacts if school districts pooled property tax revenue at the intermediate unit level and distributed those funds based on the number of students in each school district.

We need more creative approaches to solving this decades-long problem of funding school districts. Collecting and analyzing data from this study would help us to understand school district funding disparities across the state and help us to evaluate and determine the most effective way to fairly fund education in Pennsylvania.

Please join us in supporting this resolution to study how school district property tax revenue can be used to address the funding disparities in public education.