Six Pennsylvania School districts, including the Panther Valley School District, filed a lawsuit in 2014 claiming that the state had not met its constitutional duty to fund the cost of education. The issue is an old one. Districts with low value properties must tax their property owners at a higher rate than rich districts. The rich districts are awash in money; students in the poor districts suffer.
The Commonwealth Court dismissed the case last year, but the State Supreme Court is hearing an appeal of that dismissal. Legislators and Gov. Wolf want the Court to uphold the dismissal.
Just last week a Connecticut court threw out the state’s funding formula, which was also based on property taxes.
I have been a defender of some sort of property tax, but I’ve changing my mind. There are ways to make the system fair, but they are unlikely. For example, we could pay our property tax into a central fund. Let’s say every property owner paid 1% of the assessed value of the property to the PA Department of Revenue, and then it was distributed to each district on a per-pupil formula.
The Department of Education would probably have to adjust the formula to give districts with more special needs students more funding, and other tweaks might be necessary, but the quality of a student’s education would no longer depend on whether he or she lived in Panther Valley or Parkland.
That won’t happen. Rich districts will want to retain the current system, and rich districts have more clout. Legislators like Doyle Heffley don’t really want to eliminate the property tax either. This way they can promise to do it every two or four years, but nothing happens, even when the Republicans had a majority in both houses and Corbett was in office.
The only way we will fix this is if the Court says the system does not meet constitutional standards. Keep your fingers crossed.
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