Pennsylvania Budget Approved, Major Cuts to Early Learning Avoided
(July 1, 2010)
Yesterday, after negotiations between the Governor and legislative leaders, the Pennsylvania General Assembly agreed to and passed the FY2010-11 budget.
The final state budget includes the following for early learning programs:
- Child Care Services (which includes funding for Child Care Works, Keystone STARS and T.E.A.C.H.) – State funding maintained at FY2009-2010 levels. (And, thanks to the investment by Congress in the Recovery Act, even more can be done for child care in the state.)
- Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts - Funding cut by $1.172 million (1.4%) from FY 2009-2010 levels.
- Head Start Supplemental - Funding cut by $1.096 million (2.8%) from FY2009-2010 levels.
Given the large budget deficit and fiscal pressures faced by the state going into negotiations, early learning faired significantly well, especially compared with many other programs and departments that saw spending decreases of over 10%.
Breaking Budget News
(June 30, 2010)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading our budget alerts, for contacting your legislators, for e-mailing leadership and the administration. Your voices were strong and your messages and stories have been heard.
June 30, 2010 and it appears that a new fiscal year is dawning for Pennsylvania and a budget impasse has been avoided. “No budget impasse” is good news to child care providers after our experience last year with 100+ days of no budget. Now we turn our attention to the analysis of the budget spreadsheets to see if the budget numbers translate to a “good” budget.
Staff and consultants are reviewing spreadsheets that became available last night and it appears that some of the cuts that were proposed by legislative leaders late last week were restored in the final budget proposal. The budget amendment that will be considered today appears to cut PreK Counts by $1.172M and the Head Start State Supplement by $1.096M. These are larger than the cuts proposed by the Governor in February but much smaller than what had been the talk last week (which was in the neighborhood of a combined $9-10M cut range in pre-kindergarten).
Child care services appears to be level funded and child care assistance may have a small cut of $1.094M. However, that really may not be a cut at all because we are still reviewing the impact of all the federal funds including ARRA on these line items at this point. The big picture is that this has been a very difficult budget negotiation and many important programs suffered deep cuts. For example, libraries were cut by 9% and tutoring was cut by nearly 20%. Serious cuts are present in other education and human services programs.
For those of you who are wondering, the budget will include an increase in public education of $250M but many other PDE line items were cut causing the net gain to school districts to be less. Still this is not as bad as had been in various scenarios last week and keeps the state committed to investing in education and closing the achievement gaps.
The rest of the story on revenue and FMAP isn't quite so straightforward. The budget assumes FMAP will be enacted by Congress and if it doesn't happen we will very likely see more cuts later in the fiscal year. There is an agreement to do a natural gas extraction tax but not until the fall.
At this point in time, PACCA expects this draft budget will pass both the Senate and the House of Representatives and be signed by the Governor.
We will keep you informed as more detail becomes available. However, given the current fiscal environment in our nation and the state, we can be pleased with the outcome.
Sincerely,
The PACCA Staff