Pottstown School District Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez (at top) during a June 2018 rally in Harrisburg
POTTSTOWN PA – Pottstown School District Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez is one of three panelists scheduled to speak Monday (Dec. 7, 2020) during a 1 p.m. Keystone Research Center web broadcast on how Pennsylvania’s neediest schools have been shorted in distribution of federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding, the center announced.
Also scheduled to participate are center Executive Director Stephen Herzenberg, and Susan Spicka of Education Voters of PA. The webinar is free to attend and open to the public. Registration is available here.
Keystone recently published a report claiming the state Legislature and Gov. Tom Wolf failed to take variables like poverty into account earlier this year as they distributed a fixed amount of CARES money to each Pennsylvania school district, and distributed remaining funds based on the districts’ average daily numbers of students. Poorer districts had greater needs and should have received more money, it contends, because research indicates their students are “more expensive to educate.”
The report looks ahead, in part, to the possibility that local K-12 schools are government entities most likely to receive additional federal relief if Congress acts within the coming weeks to approve more pandemic stimulus funding.
The webinar intends to address how schools with the most poor students and the most students of color have suffered a “dramatic impact” as a result of the funding distributions to date.
Rodriguez also serves as president of the PLUS Caucus of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
2018 archive photo
