By SUSAN JONES
Once again, the Pennsylvania state budget is being held up because of disagreements about education funding, but this year it’s not about money for the state-related universities — well, at least not entirely.
Last week, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a $45.6 billion spending bill, which included $100 million for the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success program — a school voucher program that would give taxpayer-funded scholarships to families of students in the lowest-performing public schools to allow them to enroll in private schools.
Gov. Josh Shapiro supported the PASS program, but after the issue stalled passage of the budget in the Democratic-controlled state House, Shapiro said he would line-item veto the $100 million in order to get the overdue budget passed.
On Wednesday, the state House, in which the Democrats have a 102-101 majority, approved the budget bill with the agreement that Shapiro would veto the PASS funding.
Now the budget must go back to the Senate for the constitutionally required signature of the presiding officer. Right now, Republicans who control the chamber haven’t scheduled the Senate to return to session until Sept. 18. Shapiro urged the Senate to return to Harrisburg to sign off on the budget bill and also to work with the House to pass legislation to direct how money in the budget bill can be spent.
University funding
Part of that spending includes funding for the four state-related universities — Pitt, Penn State, Temple and Lincoln — which once again is a sticking point. Republicans in both chambers are upset that Pitt, Penn State and Temple won’t commit to a tuition freeze if they receive the 7 percent funding increase requested by the governor.
GOP lawmakers also have expressed concern that the universities are not subject to the state’s open records laws and want assurances that state funding will only be used for in-state tuition discounts. All three schools have said repeatedly that the money from the state is used to reduced in-state tuition. The discount for Pitt students is around $16,000 per year.
Separate bills to fund the four universities individually were brought up in the House last week, but only the appropriations bill for Lincoln, which has agreed to the tuition freeze, cleared the two-thirds vote threshold required for nonpreferred appropriations.
A measure that packaged funding for all four schools into one bill also failed last week, but the House on Thursday entertained a motion to reconsider — only to have the bill fail again 130-to-73, six votes short of the 136 needed, according to the Post-Gazette.
So where does this leave Pitt’s funding from the state? Still undecided. House lawmakers promised to vote again on the issue for a third time, but it’s unclear when that might happen. According the Philadelphia Inquirer, House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler (R-Lancaster) emphasized that his caucus wanted to find common ground on public records requests and how the universities spend state money.
Under the governor’s proposal, Pitt would receive $162.3 million in general support and $3.6 million for rural education outreach in 2023-24. Pitt generally waits for the state budget passage before it sets its budget — including the salary pool and tuition rates — for the coming year.
In 2015, when the budget was delayed for several months, Pitt went ahead in July 2015 and set tuition rates, but the salary pool was not set until January 2016 — even though the budget had still not been passed by that time.
In 2009, the Board of Trustees budget and executive committees approved tuition increases before the state budget was passed with the caveat that a tuition surcharge could be imposed if state funding fell short. The board had already imposed a salary freeze that year, so the salary pool issue was moot.
Last year, the state budget and funding for the state-related schools were signed by Gov. Tom Wolf on July 8 after an amendment was removed that would have required Pitt to end medical research using human fetal tissue from voluntary abortions if it wanted to receive its state appropriation. The budget passed by the legislature kept funding for Pitt, Penn State, Temple and Lincoln at the same amount they had received since 2019.
Former Gov. Tom Wolf later allocated nearly $30 million to the state-related schools from the money that the state legislature appropriated to the governor’s office for “pandemic response.” These allocations fulfilled Wolf’s plan to increase funding to the state-related schools by 5 percent for the 2022-23 fiscal year.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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