State budget offers temporary relief to Upper Darby schools’ funding woes
When the Pennsylvania legislature passed a budget earlier this month and broke a months-long impasse, local Democratic lawmakers cheered the fact that the budget included an increase in funding for Upper Darby School District. Yet according to Upper Darby Superintendent Dr. Daniel P. McGarry, the story is more complicated than that.
“I think people are thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, Upper Darby just got $9 million extra that we hadn’t anticipated, but that’s not right,” McGarry told Fideri News Network. He explained that based on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposed budget released in February, the school district anticipated it would get a little over $9 million and factored that into its own budget. And once state lawmakers finally passed their budget this fall, Upper Darby School District wound up with about $195,000 in additional funding that it hadn’t originally anticipated, McGarry said.
If state lawmakers didn’t ultimately agree on a budget, the school district was preparing a Plan B; in fact, “we were about to go out and announce [we were] borrowing money,” McGarry said. He said he is grateful that state Reps. Heather Boyd and Gina Curry both advocated for much-needed funding for the school district.
McGarry also said uncertainty about federal funding has been troubling Upper Darby School District leaders since last summer, when it wasn’t clear whether federal funding that the district typically uses for technology and professional development would come through.
“Then we were told, ‘the federal dollars are going to be there,” he said, but the district received guidance stating it should explain in its budget how it plans to use that funding.
Fast forward to November, and news that the Trump administration is planning to dismantle the Department of Education and assign its responsibilities to other federal agencies is creating additional headaches for school districts like Upper Darby, McGarry said.
“Where will those funding streams go?” McGarry asked. “If they eliminate Title I, if they eliminate Title II, if they eliminate Title III, eliminate Title IV, that’s millions of dollars in funding that we would not be able to recover from.”
The delayed passage of the state budget — which Shapiro signed into law on Nov. 12 — is also concerning, McGarry said, noting that Upper Darby School District is bound by specific timelines when forming its own budget each year.
“We just obviously had our state pass its budget; now we are already in the process of planning for the next year’s budget, so I don’t even know what that’s going to look like from the state or the federal government,” he said.
