LNP/LancasterOnline. June 16, 2024.
Editorial: As Pennsylvania’s budget comes together, say yes to transformative public school funding and no to private-school tuition vouchers
THE ISSUE: Between “committee hearings and casting floor votes on pending legislation, a select group of party leaders will also negotiate a state budget with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro for the fiscal year 2024-25, trying to strike a deal before the June 30 deadline,” LNP ' LancasterOnline’s Jaxon White reported earlier this month. “Among those leaders are Lancaster County Republican state Sens. Ryan Aument and Scott Martin, their chamber’s whip and Appropriations Committee chairman, respectively. In February, following Shapiro’s annual address, both lawmakers condemned the governor’s proposed $48.3 billion budget — particularly his pitch to spend about $3 billion of the state’s $14 billion reserves, which they said is not sustainable long-term. Republicans also continued to criticize much of Shapiro’s plan through spring budget hearings.”
Aument provided LNP ' LancasterOnline with a list of policies he hopes to see enacted as he advocates for a “fiscally responsible budget.” The West Hempfield Republican’s list includes:
— The GOP-led state Senate’s $3 billion personal income tax reduction from 3.07% to 2.8%, pitched as an alternative to Shapiro’s $3 billion of spending from the state’s reserves.
— Accelerating the corporate net income tax reduction.
— A bill requiring students to obtain parental permission to access books deemed to be sexually graphic in school libraries.
— A new grant program for schools that limit student access to smartphones and social media during school hours.
We think Aument’s effort to restrict smartphone use in schools has merit, and we’ll address that in a future editorial.
But we’re far less impressed by his pandering to culture-war forces on the issue of school library books. School libraries exist to meet the diverse academic and social needs of students; a book that might be deemed unacceptable by Aument just might be a lifesaver for a struggling student.
Meanwhile, as LNP ' LancasterOnline’s White reported, “Martin, of Martic Township, leads the Appropriations Committee, which has first say over amending any budget-related bills before they can reach the chamber for a vote. He said his focus this month will be to complete a budget that ‘respects taxpayers and addresses the pressing economic and demographic challenges facing our state.’ ”
Among Martin’s priorities:
— The state Senate’s “Grow PA” plan, which includes initiatives to create new grant programs for university and trade school students, as well as expand existing ones.
There’s much to applaud in the “Grow PA” package, which passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support last week. We agree with Martin that trade school opportunities must be expanded for Pennsylvanians. If you ever want to experience pure joy, attend a Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology commencement ceremony, where you’ll meet new graduates celebrating their achievements — and the well-compensated job offers they already have in hand.
— Martin also said he’ll continue to fight for the private-school tuition voucher program that sparked a more than five-month budget delay last year: the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success program. That bill received some bipartisan support last month in the state Senate Education Committee.
But this is where we sharply depart from Martin. As we noted in a February editorial, students in the commonwealth’s low-wealth school districts, which include the School District of Lancaster, cannot wait any longer for politicians in Harrisburg to ensure they get the education they were promised by the state constitution.
We strongly support Shapiro’s proposal for a more than $1.1 billion increase in basic education funding. That increase is actually just a down payment toward meeting the state’s obligation as outlined in a February 2023 ruling in a landmark school fair funding lawsuit, of which School District of Lancaster was a plaintiff.
Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer — who ran for the bench as a Republican — ruled then that “the current system of funding public education has disproportionately, negatively impacted students who attend schools in low-wealth school districts. ... As a result, students in low-wealth districts do not have access to the educational resources needed to prepare them to succeed academically, socially, or civically.”
To this point, we were heartened to see the state House passage last week of House Bill 2370. The bill, which all House Democrats and five Republicans voted in favor of, “sets up the state to increase state funding of public schools by $864 million in the next academic year, and a broader proposal calls for more than $5 billion over seven years,” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Gillian McGoldrick and Maddie Hanna reported. “Public school advocates say the changes are conservative but would be transformative.”
“Transformative” is urgently needed — for both students and local taxpayers. Full passage of HB 2370, which also includes crucial cybercharter school reform, must be part of the final budget deal.
Students in low-wealth districts have been shunted to the back of the line for years as lawmakers and governors have set other spending priorities. Property tax reform that might actually ease the burden on homeowners in low-wealth school districts, and shift some of that burden to the state, remains a unicorn in Harrisburg: long-wished-for, but never materializing.
Lawmakers such as Aument and Martin seem more concerned with securing private-school tuition vouchers for a relatively small number of students than with ensuring that the school districts most in need can provide good educations to their students.
As the June 30 budget deadline approaches, we’re likely to hear much blather about how private-school tuition vouchers would save children in low-wealth school districts by enabling them to attend supposedly better schools. Less attention will be given to the students who will be left behind in those districts. And even less attention will be directed toward transparency and accountability measures for vouchers, if they are approved.
Private schools can pick and choose their students; public schools cannot — they must teach economically disadvantaged students, English language learners and students with disabilities. That requires funding that can’t be raised in districts that abound with low-income households and tax-exempt properties such as government buildings.
Instead of using taxpayer resources on private-school tuition voucher programs and catering to school-choice lobbyists, it’s time for lawmakers to meet their constitutional obligation to provide a “thorough and efficient system of public education” that serves all students.
“What we’re doing is what the court has told us to do, to give every child in this commonwealth an equitable and fair public education,” Democratic state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford said last week during passage of HB 2370, according to The Associated Press. “This isn’t politics, this is a constitutional requirement, one that this body has failed for too long.”
He is correct on all counts.
Adequate funding for all public school districts is the key to preparing the next generation of Pennsylvanians for citizenship, prosperity in the workplace and leadership of an increasingly challenging world.
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. June 14, 2024.
Editorial: Private equity and nursing homes are a match made in hell
The long-term mismanagement of nursing homes by private equity firms has reached a tipping point, resulting in over 20 bankruptcy filings in local elder care facilities in just a few weeks. It’s only the beginning of turmoil for nursing homes run by private equity, and the terrible results should be a lesson guiding future oversight.
Private equity company Carlyle Group pioneered the business strategy for maximizing the (short-term) profitability of nursing homes in 2007, when the firm bought ManorCare nursing facilities, including 46 facilities serving 7,000 patients in Pennsylvania. At the time, officials with the company assured skeptical state regulators that the massive sale would not affect the quality of care.
The company filed for bankruptcy 11 years later, eventually defaulting on $380 million in loans.
Private equity firms extract money from nursing homes in a process called a “sale-leaseback,” or selling the land out from under the facilities for lump payments. Nursing homes are suddenly forced to pay rent or “management fees” to occupy facilities they once owned. This is the same process, in a much less sensitive business, that resulted in the bankruptcy of the Red Lobster restaurant chain.
This new financial burden, along with chronic staffing issues and low government reimbursement rates for care, have created an untenable situation for elder care in Pittsburgh and across Pennsylvania. Now, many of the private equity companies that followed the Carlyle model are also going bankrupt.
Some of them are trying to avoid closure through quick sales using bankruptcy court deals. The operators of multiple nursing homes in the Pittsburgh area, LME Family Holdings and Ephram Mordy Lahasky, are trying to sell four facilities before they are forced to shutter them. The four nursing homes owe $15.7 million in back rent — in this case to an Arkansas-based real estate investment trust — and $15 million in state fees.
The companies are requesting that the court set aside two lawsuits against these facilities. One suit, from the U.S. Department of Labor, concerns $20 million in unpaid overtime wages to healthcare staff, and the other alleges the facilities falsified documents relating to Medicaid and Medicare investigations.
In other words, the choices are either to force irresponsible companies to pay their debts and lose hundreds of needed nursing beds, or to dismiss millions in debts and lawsuits to ensure care for these vulnerable people continues — at least for a time. The current operators are trying to outrun the clock and find new owners, betting on the dire need to keep skilled nursing facilities open to save the business in bankruptcy court.
The government can’t simply stop companies and trusts from buying up care homes, but the Biden administration has published a rule, which goes fully into effect later this year, requiring that facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funds — essentially all of them — disclose their ownership. This will hardly solve the problem, but it will allow families to make informed decisions about their loved ones’ care.
And hopefully it will shift incentives against vulture capitalists, and toward operators that put their patients, not profits, first.
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Scranton Times-Tribune. June 16, 2024.
Editorial: Misplaced priorities drove higher education to crisis
As Penn State cuts staffing at its 20 Commonwealth campuses and at least two private colleges in our region sink into financial distress, the people who run those institutions point to shrinking enrollment as the culprit.
But the dwindling number of students — undergraduate enrollment declined 6 percent nationwide between 2019 and 2023 — is merely a symptom of misplaced priorities and a lack of leadership in higher education.
Even as enrollment declined for a decade, colleges and universities expanded programs and services secondary to their educational mission, bloated the ranks of administrators and built bigger and better non-instructional facilities in the competition to attract students. To pay for it all, they curtailed tenure so that nearly one-half of college instructors are now part-time employees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and raised tuition to dizzying heights, driving student debt past $1.7 trillion. Meanwhile, the presidents of the nation’s leading schools make millions per year and the average annual salary for a college president surpasses $200,000, according to the online jobs platform ZipRecruiter.
A study by the Progressive Policy Institute found the nation’s top 50 universities have, on average, one faculty member for every 11 students while employing one non-faculty member for every four students. Three universities, the California Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of California at San Diego have more non-faculty employees than students, the study found.
No wonder tuition, fees, housing and a meal plan will cost a Pennsylvania resident more than $32,000 at Penn State’s main campus this year. Even a small private college like Keystone College in Wyoming County, which says it will avoid a threatened closure with the help of a yet-to-be-publicly-named investor, costs about $18,000 per year. Clarks Summit University in Lackawanna County, which has temporarily furloughed all employees to close a budget gap this summer, charges nearly $30,000 per year, according to U.S. News and World Report.
Stop-gap measures, like Penn State’s decision to cut staff at its satellite campuses by 10 percent and consolidate administrative positions so that chancellors oversee multiple campuses will only go so far. A reckoning is coming as community colleges and technical schools draw away students with lower tuition and the promise of access to highly paid and highly sought-after trades and specialties
The pressure on non-public colleges would only grow under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposal to combine Pennsylvania’s 10 state-run and 15 community colleges, boost their funding and cap tuition at $1,000 per semester for qualifying middle-income families.
Republicans in the state Senate have resisted Shapiro’s plan, instead offering new state-sponsored scholarships to be used at any Pennsylvania college or university, but targeted toward students in certain “in-demand” occupations such as agriculture, computer science and engineering.
As always, what emerges in the final state budget is likely to look much different from either side’s opening position, but at least each party is focused on reform and innovative solutions.
The willingness to try new approaches will be essential if our institutions of higher learning are to return to their core mission of preparing students for fulfilling lives and careers and stop saddling them with crushing debt that will hang over them for decades. To achieve that goal, the leaders of those institutions must begin thinking more like educators and less like entrepreneurs.
END