This weekend, Governor Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania legislators crossed a major milestone.
Thanks to your relentless organizing, prayers, and persistent presence, the state has passed a budget that directs an additional $565 million in adequacy funding to our most historically underfunded public schools.
This is the power of our collective voice.
Even better? Together, we completely blocked the corporate-backed attempt to pass private school vouchers that would have drained vital resources away from our children’s classrooms.
Because you called your representatives, packed the halls in Harrisburg, and held town halls across our counties, the state legislator was forced to take another step toward fulfilling its constitutional and moral obligation to our kids.
But as people of faith and moral courage, our call is always to look at the whole picture.
A government’s spending plan is a mirror of its soul – it reveals exactly who and what our leaders truly value.
And if we look closely at this budget, it is clear that Harrisburg still has work to do to establish policies that allow working families to live with dignity:
- Our schools deserve more. While this investment is a step forward, our public schools remain billions of dollars away from truly erasing the unconstitutional funding gap.
- Working families are still being squeezed. The legislature completely failed to raise our state’s poverty-level minimum wage, choosing instead to leave working people behind in a time of rising costs.
- Corporations are still getting a free pass. Our leaders chose to delay closing corporate tax loopholes or tax extreme wealth and mega-tech companies to sustainably fund our future.
- Our planet is still being compromised. While they passed new reporting rules for massive, water-and-energy-consuming data centers, they stopped short of the bold structural regulations needed to shield our neighborhoods from soaring utility bills and environmental degradation.
We are grateful for the progress we won together for our schools.
But we can’t build a just Pennsylvania by kicking structural problems down the road – and we can’t claim to love our neighbors while letting extreme wealth dictate who gets to thrive.
Celebrate this milestone today. You did that. Our organizing did that.
Talk to your neighbors, share the good news with your congregations, and remember what faith in action can achieve.
And tomorrow? We dust off our shoes and keep moving. We’re going to keep calling, marching, organizing – whatever it takes – until every child has a fully-funded school, every worker has a living wage, and our state’s ledger finally reflects the inherent dignity of every human being.
In faith, boldness, and solidarity,
Rev. Dr. Gregory Edwards
Executive Director, POWER Interfaith
