Adults dread school for a different reason
Youngsters tend to dread the mention of school, for reasons you no doubt remember personally.
As adults, you might dread the mention of school for a completely different reason.
The burden of paying for public education on Pennsylvania falls squarely on the taxpayer, especially when he or she owns property. And “burden” is the increasingly operative word.
When you receive your tax bill and start screaming, your invective naturally aims toward the folks who are responsible for spending the money that, in turn, has you emptying your pockets.
But the administrators and elected officials in your local school district are far from enthusiastic about raising taxes. The great majority of them are property owners who have to pay right along with the rest of us.
Some of the spending they authorize might seem to be on the extravagant side. But keep in mind that the South Hills is home to exceptionally well-regarded districts, and the people who run them have the obligation to keep them that way.
In the meantime, they constantly are looking for ways to save money, as you’ll hear if you sit in on a school board meeting during budget talks.
To help greet a new academic year, The Almanac is launching “Balancing Act,” a series of articles to explain the challenges that school officials face in making revenues match expenditures each year.
This week, the focus is on some key pieces of state legislation that have contributed toward a situation in which annual real estate tax increases have become all but inevitable. Bethel Park School District was able to pull off the feat of keeping the rate the same for 2016-17, but that’s certainly an anomaly these days.
Before you refocus your furor at the General Assembly, remember what they say about hindsight. Yes, it’s easy to look back at what our lawmakers did and wonder, what were they thinking?
The steepest financial challenge facing public education in Pennsylvania today is how to pay for pension benefits that have been promised through the Public School Employees’ Retirement System. The shortfall in assets vs. liabilities is approaching $40 billion – yes, that’s with a “b” – and it seems as if every piece of legislation related to PSERS in the past 15 years has just exacerbated the situation.
But the road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions, and way back when, legislators wanted state employees to share in the prosperity of the 1990s. By the time they voted to increase pension benefits, it was the start of the 2000s, and the road turned out to be paved with economic turmoil.
Further legislation addressed the situation by making it worse, until the Legislature finally took the steps necessary to make sure someone would make up the PSERS difference.
That someone is your local school district, and by extension, it’s you.
How dreadful.