Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and other top leaders of the city government and the Philadelphia School District will travel to Harrisburg on Monday for a high-stakes trip aimed at securing millions of dollars in new funding for the financially strapped public schools.
Parker will spend much of the day advocating for increased public education dollars as state lawmakers hurtle toward their June 30 budget deadline. The mayor is slated to host an afternoon rally in the Capitol Rotunda alongside Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr., school board president Reginald L. Streater, and City Council President Kenyatta Johnson.
Their trip to the Capitol comes after weeks of tension among those same leaders, who earlier this month hammered out a city budget deal that was in large part centered on finding new funding for the school district, which is facing a $300 million structural deficit and had planned to cut more than 300 school-based staff positions.
Parker and school officials wanted the city to levy a $1-per-ride tax on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft to secure about $50 million a year in recurring funding, but Council rejected that plan, and instead voted on a one-time diversion of money to the district that came out of the existing city budget.
City officials have pledged $216 million to the district over five years to keep funding the school workers, though the exact sources of that money is yet-to-be-determined.
Parker, who served in the state legislature for a decade before becoming a City Council member and then taking office as mayor in 2024, said when she announced the new funding plan that city leaders would be able to travel to Harrisburg “saying we’ve made tough decisions, we’ve made sure we’ve done our best to take care of our own, and we have a plan.
“Philadelphia is primed to travel to Harrisburg to advocate in unity to ensure that our children get access to the revenue that they deserve,” she said, “so that they can have a first-class school district here in the city.”
The mayor’s message to lawmakers will be largely focused on securing capital dollars for the district’s $3 billion plan to modernize 169 aging school buildings over the next decade. In April, the school board adopted its controversial facilities plan — which includes an intention to close 17 schools — with the goal of bringing in $2 billion of that money from state and philanthropic sources.
Finding that money in Harrisburg could be a tall task as the state faces its own multibillion-dollar budget shortfall. All 203 state representatives and half of the 50-member Senate are up for reelection this year, and many lawmakers gearing up to face voters in November are averse to broad-based tax increases aimed at juicing revenue.
In addition, gridlock is commonplace in the divided legislature, where reaching a state budget deal has been a drawn-out and arduous process in recent years. Last year’s bitter negotiations stalled for more than five months, leading to mass service disruptions statewide.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who is in the midst of his own reelection battle and is seen as a potential contender for president, has also said that he is generally not looking to raise taxes. Leaders in Harrisburg last month rejected a separate proposal by Parker to raise the city’s hotel tax to generate new funding for homelessness prevention programs.
However, Shapiro has positioned himself as a champion of public education, and he proposed increasing the Philadelphia School District’s general funding allocation to about $2.2 billion in the coming fiscal year, a $151 million increase over this year’s amount.
Statewide, Shapiro called for an additional $565 million for public schools as part of the state’s new “adequacy funding” formula, a multiyear plan developed to address the chronic underfunding of low-wealth school districts.
The formula was adopted in 2024 after a Commonwealth Court ruling that the state had for years unconstitutionally deprived some children of an adequate education by sustaining a funding plan largely reliant on local property tax dollars. Philadelphia is the only school district in the state that can’t itself raise taxes. Instead, it depends on the city and state governments for funding.
Parker said earlier this month that despite her own tax proposal to fund the schools falling through, she intends to “take this fight on the road.”
“We stand in unity with our legislative leaders in Harrisburg, our legislative leaders on both sides of the aisle, [and] we stand with our governor,” she said. “And we fight until the end to ensure that we do everything we possibly can to ensure that our school district has access to the resources that it needs.”