Pennsylvania Democrats Your Schools Plan, Too Partisan! (Philadelphia, Harrisburg: low income, lease)

[JimfromPennsyl]

Democrats across Pennsylvania need to understand that Republicans across Pennsylvania have a legitimate point of view with their opposition to your plan to boost state education funding by $3.75 billion; many Pennsylvanians are not interested in raising the annual education expense in the state budget significantly higher than the inflation rate because this will ultimately end up raising the PA income tax to pay for this PA Budget item. Causing the General Assembly to appropriate these additional billions and send it directly to the school districts across PA is an underhanded way to dramatically increase Harrisburg's annual outlay to these districts such permanent large bumping up of the state's education expense is the practical effect of this Democrat maneuver.

If a one-time significant state outlay of monies to address long term problems in Pennsylvania Education system can be made that will make a real difference on this problem it should be pursued! Why can't all this one-time injection of state monies be appropriated to the PA Department of Education to be distributed through grant programs in this Department. Have two grant programs. For one grant program have it be a two billion dollar grant program take $1 billion from the American Rescue plan and $1 billion from the state budget surplus; these grants are only for schools to fix the lead paint problem in schools and asbestos problem in schools any mold problem in schools and any broken heating system problem in schools and installing or fixing central air filtration systems that reduce airborne contaminants (including viruses). Let us try to finally end this problem of lead and asbestos in schools these dangers have been known about for forty plus years. In all probability the country is not finished with Covid 19 variants especially since the FDA has done the incredibly foolish thing of approving the Merck anti-viral drug molnupiravir whose mechanism for defeating the virus is to create virus variants until a variant is made that cannot replicate (of course no fail safe feature in this mechanism) let us use the respite created from the omicron surge end to install these filtration systems in our schools so they can operate well during future Covid surges.

Why doesn't Harrisburg take one billion dollars from the Budget surplus and put it in a grant program for infrastructure for charter schools. Charter schools do some great work for Pennsylvania children. One of the challenges that charter schools have is that they have to direct a significant portion of the funding they receive for infrastructure expenses to lease their building or pay the mortgage on their school building. It would help these charter schools direct more of their funding to the actual education of children if the state could lift some of their infrastructure cost burden. Have the program be eligible for charter schools that have been in existence for five plus years, no point in spending money on a charter school authorities can't have a high confidence will be around in a few years. Use this program to build actual school buildings for charters that need one so they can get out of their lease and do things like retire the mortgage on charter school buildings for charters that have an outstanding building loan; the one condition is that the charter cannot then take out a loan on the school building the state financed for the charter because that would defeat the whole purpose of the program which is to lessen charter's infrastructure expense.

In the state budget for these two programs specify how much of the grant money would go to each school district. Allow the monies to be spent over eight years the priority should be that the money be spent very effectively not on quick spending. It would be great if representatives from wealthy districts would agree their school districts would not participate in these programs let us try to get the school systems in our low income school districts to be greatly effective at educating our children, it is rather clear to the general public that many of these school districts are not meeting this mark as of today! Last year The National Center For Education's statistics showed that twenty-two percent of Philadelphians sixteen years of age or older were not reading proficient. If one cannot really read that is an impediment for such a person becoming knowledgeable and skilled in many areas including being knowledgeable about being an emotionally, psychologically and physically healthy person. It pretty much goes without saying that if we want to see Philadelphia improve on its current statistic that about twenty-five percent of Philadelphians currently live in poverty and the violent crime rate is at a crisis level in the city we have to significantly improve the school system in Philadelphia; these suggestions offer a big step toward that goal!

[Wells5]

Do you have references for what you have noted?

[blazerj]

Originally Posted by Wells5

Do you have references for what you have noted?

OP is a Russian bot, so nope.

[trackstar13]

Hilarious post Jim, keep it up I need a good laugh from time to time