PA: What the Vouchers Would Cost

The most recent attempt to push vouchers, called Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program, ended up dying at the finish line.  But that certainly is not the end of things, so it's worth it to take a moment to understand what the vouchers really would have cost us.

The argument that voucher supporters made (and which was part of what they had to do to get the vouchers past Governor Shapiro) was that the $100 million voucher program wouldn't take a cent away from public schools. There are a couple of problems with that promise.

1) $100 million spent on vouchers includes an opportunity. If you've got that kind of money lying around, why spend it on private school subsidies instead of fixing the unconstitutional school funding system?

2) The state doesn't have that kind of money lying around. And as much as some politicians love school choice, none of them ever seem to love it enough to just say to the taxpayers, "Look, we think it's so important to run multiple parallel school systems in this state that we are going to raise your taxes to pay for it." 

So that $100 million was going to come from somewhere. And one group has a pretty good idea where.

The volunteers at FixHarrisburg (a joint campaign of Fair Districts PA and the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania) dug through various budget documents, and this chart shows what they found. They note that it is probably incomplete, and they don't claim to be forensic accountants. But it certainly gives us a general idea of what the plan was. (Note: you have to add 000 to all of these numbers).

So what was the plan?

$700 million less basic ed funding than the House asked for, which is still an increase over previous years, so we can chalk that up to disagreement over what that number should be. 

Zeroing out the dual enrollment funding. The BOOST program for after-school and summer was started under federal grants as part of that whole pandemic catch-up thing; the GOP would rather not continue it with Pennsylvania money.

$125 mill less than Dems asked for the Level Up supplement (which is also $100m more than the governor asked for--and we probably need to talk about that at some point), a fund set up to bring Pennsylvania's most underfunded schools a bit closer to what they need.

Cutting the School Safety and Security Fund in half! That's supposed to be funding efforts to Harden The Target.

And setting the School-Based Mental Health Supports block grants to zero (instead of $100m). Right now doesn't seem like the time to backing away from mental health supports for students-- particularly if your argument on school safety is that the problem is not guns, but mental health and soft targets.

Republicans can make the argument that they were simply cutting with one hand and adding with the other and the two actions have nothing to do with each other, that they were actually moving $100 million out of mental health supports in order to use that money to subsidize private schools. Budgeting is a mysterious process in which imaginary money appears and disappears, and none of it is real money, so it's hard to discuss whether or not it's the same money.

But if your question is, how does the GOP think we could afford to add a $100 million program to the budget without raising taxes or touching school funding, this is an answer-- by chopping up some education-adjacent programs.