Chambersburg Area School District: School Funding Up in the Air (PA)

July 29, 2010

With Pennsylvania’s recently-passed budget now looking iffy, the Chambersburg Area School District’s board and administration are wondering how state funding for the district will be impacted.

"Today for the first time (business manager) Steve Dart and I believed we may end up with less subsidy than we did last year," said Superintendent Joe Padasak.

The state and district’s budget were mulled at Wednesday night’s school board meeting. The budgets were re-visited after a report was delivered by Dart that $850 million that state legislators were banking on from the federal government for Medicare subsidies was now not even expected to be voted on by the U.S. Senate. Gov. Ed Rendell signed a state budget earlier in the month that included an additional $250 million in funding for public school districts statewide, including an additional $1.2 million for CASD. However, the increase was contingent upon the fe deral Medicaid funding being available for states. With the Medicaid funding now not expected to be coming and state legislators possibly looking to make cuts to address the shortfall, board members were wondering if funding will even reach the levels they did during the 2009-2010 school year.

Board member David Sciamanna reminded those in attendance that although the governor’s budget called for a $1.2 million increase from the state for the district, the district had not budgeted for any increase because there was skepticism on whether or not the money would actually be available.

"We had tremendous doubt that the additional funding was ever going to reach Chambersburg Area School District," Dart said.

Further adding to the speculation is the fact that there currently is not a proposal available in Harrisburg stating how much less school districts might see.

"Education is going to take a hit, we just don’t know how much it’s going to be," Dart said.

Additionally, board member Stanley Helman said it may not be determined if any new state taxes or revenue streams are being created until after the general election is over in November. Dart said the state legislature has set an Oct. 1 deadline on determining whether or not to tax the extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale Reserve. Dart and board members expressed additional concerns that any new tax would be approved by the fall deadline.

The board also approved by an 8-0 vote the appointment of Sylvia Rockwood as the district’s new Director of Human Resources. Board member Anne Boryan was absent.

Rockwood was previously the Director of Information Services and replaces Bill Hodge , who has moved into an Assistant Superintendent position within the district. Rockwood will earn a salary of $80,000, a $5,000 increase over what she previously earned as Director of Information Services.

Padasak said after the vote that Rockwood’s old position will be abandoned and the duties will be divided among other district employees.

Padasak also addressed the issue of school uniforms briefly, stating that administrators would be spending the upcoming school year investigating uniforms and how they’ve fared in other school districts across the state. He said the board could then possibly vote to implement them at a smaller elementary school as a pilot program. Padasak said plans to have a large presentation on the issue at the meeting were scrapped when administrators started investigating the issue for the meeting.

"We found there was a lot more work than what we anticipated," Padasak said.