Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda

During this extraordinary financial crisis, we must do all that we can to ease the burden of local property taxes by helping our public school districts cut costs and adapt to the new expenses and revenue shortfalls they are already facing due to this pandemic. 
 

Pennsylvania is one of only five states in the U.S. that mandate that public school districts provide transportation to private school students, up to within 10 miles outside of the boundaries of their districts. Of those five states, several pass the cost of that nonpublic student’s transportation on to parents through a fee for the service, and the majority of those states subsidize or reimburse the total cost of nonpublic students’ transportation to public school districts.  
 

The current cost to public school districts across the Commonwealth for transporting nonpublic and charter school students varies from three to ten times the amount that our state government reimburses them for each nonpublic and charter school student.  
 

This costs our struggling public school districts between tens of thousands and over one million unfunded dollars per year. In some cases, local taxpayers in the Commonwealth are burdened with funding the transportation of nonpublic students to private schools across state lines to schools in our neighboring states.