Rendell in Delco to push new school funding plan

Gov. Rendell will visit Delaware County's Ridley High School this morning, to promote his plan to enact a new school funding law that would increase state education funding by $2.6 billion over the next six years.

The proposal, included in the governor's budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, would establish a new funding formula for Pennsylvania's basic education subsidy, the main state source of public school funding.

The proposed formula is based on figures from a "costing out" study released last year that outlined how much money it would take for each Pennsylvania school district to educate its students adequately, adjusting the per-student base figure by the district's number of low-income and limited-English students, its size and regional cost differences. This year's proposed increase in the basic education subsidy would be $291.3 million, 5.9 percent more than last year.

Pennsylvania ranked 44th among the states in the percentage of public school education funding coming from the state in 2005-06, the latest year for which figures were available. That year, the state funded 35.4 percent of the $22.7 billion spent on kindergarten to 12th grade education in Pennsylvania, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The legislature has until June 30 to act on the budget proposal.