Democratic lawmakers celebrate funding to clean PA’s toxic schools

Pennsylvania has some of the oldest school buildings in the country and cleaning toxic schools will cost billions of dollars. A new round of funding will help restart the cleaning process. 

Democratic lawmakers gathered at the Martha Washington school in West Philadelphia on Tuesday to celebrate $175 million in funding to repair and rehabilitate toxic schools across the commonwealth. 

Pennsylvania has some of the oldest school buildings in the country with students and teachers in districts such as Philadelphia, Allentown, Erie, and Pittsburgh exposed to lead, asbestos, mold, radon, outside elements, and other dangerous conditions.

Restoring the funding to clean and rehabilitate older school buildings has been a priority for House and Senate Democrats over the past few years, and they were finally able to have some of that funding restored. 

“There was a time when Mayor [Cherelle] Parker was Representative Parker, and the state was spending back in those days a couple hundred million dollars a year in a program called PlanCon,” State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-Philadelphia) said during Tuesday’s press conference. 

“For a whole bunch of reasons, folks walked away from that commitment, but the persistence from the state perspective matched with a very successful lawsuit that proved something that we already knew: funding of education in Pennsylvania was unconstitutional, not equal, inappropriate, insufficient.”

Through continued efforts to address the toxic schools crisis, Democrats were able to get funds to help remediate the problem, Hughes said. Lawmakers secured an over $1.1 billion increase in education from funding in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s most recent budget and additional funding to clean toxic schools. 

The Philadelphia School District is set to receive $16.7 million from this batch of funding, however it is only a drop on the bucket of what is needed to make the appropriate repairs.

According to the Education Law Center, the Philadelphia School District estimated that it would cost between $7 billion to $9 billion to make all of the necessary repairs and upgrades. 

State Rep. Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, reiterated that cleaning toxic schools is not just a Philadelphia issue, but an issue that cuts across urban and rural school districts. 

“School facility funding is not just a Philadelphia issue. It is not just a Philadelphia issue. I say that because oftentimes the legislature tried to make school facilities just an issue in [Philadelphia],” Harris said.

“It is not. I have traveled across this commonwealth and we have seen schools all over Pennsylvania that are in disrepair and are in need of financial support. This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is not an argument between rural, suburban, and urban. This is an education issue for all of Pennsylvania.”