School survey shows Pa. educators still struggling with student mental health, funding | CNHI

HARRISBURG — The new school year is getting old and so it seems are the chief concerns weighing on school administrators across Pennsylvania.

Student mental health needs, budgetary pressures and staffing vacancies remain the top challenges in public schools for three years running, according to the 2025 State of Education report from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. Released annually since 2017, the report blends state and federal education data along with the survey responses from administrators in 256 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts.

“The first thing I thought is, wow, things haven’t really changed since our statewide lawsuit for adequate funding for schools,” said Matthew Splain, superintendent of Otto-Eldred School District and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools. He was referring to a Commonwealth Court ruling in February 2023 that found the commonwealth’s prior funding formula violated the Pennsylvania constitution.

The top challenges identified by school administrators aren’t far from the minds of state lawmakers and the governor’s office.

They’ve found bipartisan agreement to boost spending on public schools by more than $2 billion since 2023-24, though there is reluctance on plans for further spending this year as Republicans raised issues of fairness in spending another $526 million toward closing the so-called adequacy gap that’s been a Democratic priority and was at the heart of the landmark lawsuit and court ruling.

“As a small rural district, we’re one of those districts not seeing a benefit,” Splain said. “There’s a lot of schools benefitting from the increases, we’re not one of them.”

They’ve also invested nearly $300 million since 2022-23 in school mental health initiatives buoyed largely by one-time federal funding sources and have implemented programs for grants and student-teacher stipends to boost the school workforce.

While many PSBA survey trends remained unchanged from prior years, nearly twice as many administrators compared to 2023 cited the condition of school facilities and infrastructure among their biggest challenges.

About 1 in 3 school administrators identified school facility conditions among their biggest challenges, finishing as the fourth-most cited issue in PSBA’s survey. It ranked fifth among budget pressures and also among issues complicating classroom instruction.

“I think it’s a product of schools putting off those renovations and improvements because they just don’t have the money,” said Andrew Christ, PSBA’s senior director of education policy. “Now, it’s becoming a bigger issue.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget proposal for 2025-26 seeks an additional $25 million to build on a grant program to support school facility improvements, potentially raising the fund to $125 million. According to the proposal, approximately $275 million has been disbursed since the administration took office to fund about 208 projects — roofing, HVAC, plumbing and more.

Splain was meeting Monday with a contractor about fire alarm systems in his district’s school buildings. He said school administrators more often focus now on staying up to code and making necessary building renovations.

“In our area of the state, the days of building new buildings are over,” Splain said.

Christ advocates for the funding of PlanCon, a moribund state program that had once been an important funding mechanism for public schools. The partial reimbursement program administered by the state Department of Education helped fund new construction and renovation projects. It hasn’t been funded for at least a decade.

Acting Education Secretary Carrie Rowe testified during a budget hearing last month that PDE is prepared to work toward jumpstarting the program but an immediate reopening isn’t on the horizon. She suggested the usefulness of a needs assessment of repairs, renovations and new construction for all public schools in Pennsylvania.

“There is no shortage of projects that need funding,” Rowe said.

Christ said PlanCon, short for Planning and Construction Workbook, would be “a great first step” to address renovation and construction needs.

“Let’s start to fund it and see what schools can do,” he said.

Money for mental health needs has been made available to schools. Shapiro seeks a dedicated annual spend beginning this year, proposing $111 million for mental health, safety and security programs.

Christ said funding is necessary but it isn’t the greatest impediment. That would be simply finding mental health care providers to aid students.

According to the State of Education report, more than 83% of respondents said qualified providers are scarce “making it the biggest challenge in connecting students to the care they need.”

The report found that learning loss from the pandemic is still evident, though there was a 16% drop in survey respondents who say students have yet to recover. That could be, in part, due simply to the passage of time as students aged out of secondary schooling.

Analyzing student performance on the annual Pennsylvania System School Assessment, PSBA says there are large gaps in testing between districts with high poverty and low poverty. Students in wealthier districts were testing proficient at a far higher rate than those in areas with lower incomes — 34% higher in English, 35% higher in math, 31% higher in science. Similar gaps were found in Pennsylvania’s other standardized tests, the Keystone exams, at near or above 30%, the study found.

Public school enrollment on the whole is falling — 5.8% across the past 10 years, the report found.

However, special education costs are growing as more students are falling into that classification, PSBA’s report found. About 15.4% of Pennsylvania’s student population were considered special education in 2013-14 compared to 20.1% a decade later in 2023-24.

Also growing is the population of students to whom English is their second language — from 2.8% in 2013-14 to 5.9% in 2023-24, the report states. Nearly 57% speak Spanish, by far the most common foreign language, followed by Portuguese, Arabic and Russian all falling below 5%.

Hiring special education staff and foreign language teachers count among the workforce challenges facing public schools.

So is the cost to support public charter and cyber charter schools. The survey found 73% of respondents said the school district’s mandated charge for local students to attend charter school was the top budgetary concern.

Auditor General Tim DeFoor, a Republican now in his second term, flagged cyber charter school spending in an audit released last month, calling for reforms to the existing cyber charter funding formula and “reasonable limits” to how large reserve accounts for the schools can grow.

There are 162 brick-and-mortar charter schools that serve over 104,000 students and an additional 13 cyber-charters that serve nearly 60,000 students, the report found.

In his budget proposal, rather than a system of fluctuating student tuition costs from one cyber school to the next — costs paid by local school districts — Shapiro proposes the adoption of a standard base cyber charter tuition rate of $8,000. The change would save public schools a combined $378 million, according to the governor’s proposal.

Schools were allocated $100 million this school year for tuition reimbursement for charters, plus changes to cyber charter payments are to collectively save public school districts $69 million annually starting next year. The districts are expected to save about half that this school year since the change took place halfway through the current school year.

Senate Republicans, the upper chamber’s majority, have also balked at the standardized tuition rate. Christ said it might be too low to get it adopted and said his organization is comfortable with a flat rate of $10,000.

“There really is no reason why there should be 500 or 1,000 different charter tuition rates. We’re looking for a flat statewide rate,” he said.