The following summary includes education-related proposals from the 2005 state of the state addresses. To assure that this information reaches you in a timely manner, minimal attention has been paid to style (capitalization, punctuation) or format. To view the documents, click on the blue triangle next to the state.
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 | Pennsylvania |
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| Governor Edward Rendell's 2005-06 Budget Address
Economic Development
Replicate the extraordinary impact of the GI bill in Pennsylvania by offering new opportunity to our students and workers in companies across the Commonwealth. Budget includes 100 million dollars in new funds that will be combined with new investments announced by the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) to launch an exciting new initiative that is critical to our economic recovery strategy. It is called Job Ready Pennsylvania, and we intend to use it to improve the effectiveness of the more than 2 billion dollars in state and federal workforce, high school and vocational education funds that we currently invest in Pennsylvania's workers. The goal of Job Ready Pennsylvania is nothing less than re-making Pennsylvania's workforce as the best in the nation – educated, trained and ready for the challenges of the 21st Century economy.
To create a Job Ready Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth will:
-- Create partnerships with employers to upgrade the skills of current workers and making unemployed adults more job-ready;
-- Increase options for Pennsylvanians to receive post-secondary education by making college more affordable and creating a stronger community college funding system. This budget provides for a $22.8 million increase in community college funding, which is the largest increase in 15 years;
-- Boost the skills of high school graduates by transforming high schools, dramatically improving Career & Technical Education and investing in quality tutoring; and
-- Make Pennsylvania more attractive for employers by lowering the Corporate Net Income (CNI) tax to 7.99 percent and introducing other reforms that make the business tax system fairer.
High School
Project 720 is aimed at reforming how we prepare our graduates, from the first day of ninth grade through last day of twelfth grade – 720 days. -- Double the number of schools who are teaching the skills today that our graduates will need for tomorrow's jobs.
-- Use 12th grade better by helping school districts pay for students who have the skill and drive to take college level courses in 12th grade. Budget makes dual enrollment – enrolling in college while still in high school – a financially viable option for more Pennsylvania school districts than ever before.
Career/Technical Education
-- Upgrade the training available for the estimated 90,000 students who will graduate from our vocational and technical education schools.
-- Launch a five-year program to work with employers to re-tool our vocational and career training system.
-- Work with our schools to improve their curricula and make smarter equipment purchases and make sure that these students meet Pennsylvania's proficiency standards for high school reading and math.
Adult Learning
-- Budget includes an additional 15 million dollars on top of the 36 million dollars that we currently spend for our customized job training and other programs targeted to increase the skills of those currently employed. These funds will be allocated by the Department of Labor and Industry to partnerships of employers who have common training needs for their current workers. Through strategic use of these funds we expect that thousands of currently employed workers will upgrade their skills and in turn improve the competitiveness of Pennsylvania companies.
-- Budget includes a 21 million dollar increase in the state share of tuition costs and targets these funds to courses that make a real difference in the workforce.
Community College Facilities
Budget includes almost 2 million dollars to support the debt service on 20 million dollars in capital funding to augment our current support of community college capital needs.
Financial Aid
-- Budget includes an historic increase in funding for student grants. For the last several years rising tuition costs have outpaced inflation. Invest more than 300 million dollars in new funds for student grants over the next four years – increasing our student grant pool by 18 percent in just one year.
-- Make available an additional 63 million dollars in grants to students while boosting the Commonwealth's investment in student grants to 368 million dollars.
-- Allocate funds to help working adults who have busy lives take courses to improve their skills and their earnings. Working adults who have the time to enroll for three or more courses a semester are eligible for state grants right now. But that's asking a great deal, especially of working parents. With these new funds, workers who have the time to take one or two courses will also be able to tap these precious funds and as a result become a more highly skilled, and hopefully more highly rewarded employee.
Address the nursing shortage. The natural reaction to this is, "Let's find ways to attract more students to our nursing schools." But the fact is, our nursing schools are already turning away thousands of applicants annually because the schools do not have enough teachers, lab space or the residency slots. The problem is that our schools lack the resources to grow. Invest 10 million dollars a year for the next four years to provide the resources to train more nurses.
Child Abuse
In addition to stepping up our fraud and abuse investigations, this budget funds child welfare services with significantly more general fund resources because we no longer have the federal TANF cushion to tap. While this increases a general fund obligation we also ensure that we use our dollars wisely and improve the outcomes for abused or neglected children by establishing new formulas that more accurately reflect actual county costs. These two initiatives combined could generate savings of more than 100 million dollars.
Leadership, Accountability
Base superintendent and principal contract renewals, in part, on improved student performance.
Skills-Based Pay for Teachers
Change how we pay teachers so that they are rewarded for teaching skills -- not just longevity.
Child Care
Provide at least 1,540 parents who struggle with childcare needs will be given access to childcare.
Finance
-- Increase funding for K-12 education by $228 million.
Finance -- Tutoring
-- Increase investment in the tutoring program by $38 million
Finance-- Early Learning
-- Increase funding for Head Start by $15 million.
Finance-- Libraries
Increase the public library subsidy by 2.5 percent from $57.9 million in FY04-05 to $59.4 million in FY05-06—24 percent above the $47.8 million they received in FY03-04
http://www.governor.state.pa.us/governor/cwp/view.asp?a=1101&q=440156 |  |
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