Office of Maria Quiones Snchez

Councilwoman, 7th District

City Hall, Room 592
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215-686-3448
Maria.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 year
to 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 former
Governor 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 should
debate 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 inadequate
conditions 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 split
grades 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 they
attend schools that are not funded at rates matching those needs to provide targeted services. It is

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 concentrations
of 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 graduation
requirement. 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 the
students 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 will
allow 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 act
now to fulfill our constitutional obligation to provide them with a thorough and efficient
education, and a true chance to fulfill their potential.