Editorial Roundup: Pennsylvania

LNP/LancasterOnline. February 14, 2024.

Editorial: Pennsylvania’s low-wealth school districts must get funding they need, but legalizing marijuana isn’t the answer

We strongly believe that Pennsylvania owes children in low-wealth school districts better educations than they’re receiving now in their understaffed, under-resourced, crowded and crumbling schools.

Six school districts, including the School District of Lancaster, were among the plaintiffs that won a landmark lawsuit last February in which a Commonwealth Court judge ruled that state officials weren’t fulfilling their obligation, under the state constitution, to provide all students with a “thorough and efficient” education.

It’s past time for the state to meet that obligation.

But we believe there’s something unseemly about legalizing marijuana in order to provide children with better educations.

We realize that we may be outliers in our continued opposition to legalizing marijuana. We’ve fully supported its medical use. And we’ve editorialized for its decriminalization, because racial disparities persist in marijuana arrests — Black and white Americans used marijuana at roughly comparable rates in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, but Black Americans are much more likely to be penalized for it.

That said, we still haven’t seen evidence that convinces us that the recreational use of marijuana is harmless.

And, yes, we’re aware that alcohol — sold in Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board stores — isn’t harmless, either.

But the number of Lancaster County roadway fatalities is already 4.1 times greater than the average county in the United States, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. We dread the possibility of more impaired drivers on our roads.

Alcohol impairment is more easily detected when a person is stopped for driving under the influence. A roadside Breathalyzer can quickly determine a person’s blood alcohol level, but it cannot detect marijuana use.

And yes, we’re fully aware that recreational marijuana is legal in all our neighboring states — New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland and Delaware — except for West Virginia. So legalization in Pennsylvania may be inevitable. But we still cannot endorse it.

Our objections remain the same as they were in 2020, when we last addressed this subject. They include the following:

— According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, marijuana use could lead to increased risk of stroke, heart disease and other vascular diseases.

Moreover, people “who use marijuana are more likely to develop temporary psychosis (not knowing what is real, hallucinations, and paranoia) and long-lasting mental disorders. … The association between marijuana and schizophrenia is stronger in people who start using marijuana at an earlier age and use marijuana more frequently.”

The CDC also notes that marijuana use has been linked to depression, social anxiety and suicide.

— Smoking marijuana damages a person’s lungs. According to the American Lung Association, “Marijuana smokers tend to inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer than cigarette smokers, which leads to a greater exposure per breath to tar.”

— Should marijuana be legalized, it would only be for adults age 21 and older. But, as we wrote in 2019, “we’re guessing that parents who don’t lock their liquor cabinets won’t lock away their weed. … And if teens don’t get marijuana from their parents’ stashes, they’ll get it from older siblings. Obviously some teens are getting their hands on marijuana already. But why make it easier for them?”

According to the CDC, “Using marijuana before age 18 may affect how the brain builds connections for functions like attention, memory, and learning. Marijuana’s effects on attention, memory, and learning may last a long time or even be permanent, but more research is needed to fully understand these effects.”

We’d like to see research that reassures us that developing brains aren’t harmed irreparably by marijuana use.

Beyond the health implications, we’re disturbed by the instinct in Pennsylvania government to reach for quick fixes: Widen the availability of gambling. Legalize marijuana.

The Pennsylvania Legislature has failed to deliver substantive tax reform that would not only offer relief to older and overburdened property owners — beyond those who qualify for property tax rebates — but would remedy the revenue gaps between low-wealth and high-wealth school districts.

In our polarized state government, tax reform that would achieve those aims seems unattainable. So we understand the practicalities of turning to marijuana legalization. But there has to be a better way. We urge the governor and lawmakers willing to work across the aisle to find it.

GET HELP

This editorial briefly mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs immediate help, contact the following organizations:

— National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

— Those who are deaf or hard of hearing can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline via TTY at 800-799-4889.

— Lancaster Crisis Intervention, 717-394-2631.

— If you are LGBTQ+: thetrevorproject.org/get-help.

— Veterans who are in crisis can call the toll-free Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and then pressing 1, by texting to 838255, or chatting online ( lanc.news/help4vets ). This service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. All calls are confidential.

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. February 19, 2024.

Editorial: Every Pa. election should be contested

According to a Post-Gazette report by Ford Turner, 83 of a sampled 98 incumbents running for reelection to the state’s House of Representatives are running unopposed in the primary. In almost all those cases, would-be candidates see no use in giving up time, energy and political capital to lose an election they are fated to lose.

It’s a rational decision for people considering a run for office. It’s a bad phenomenon for democratic politics in our state.

In Allegheny County, for example, 14 of the incumbent state representatives kept their seats in the 2022 elections. In the four cases of elections following special elections, the district elected a member of the same party. In the one case when a primary challenger defeated the incumbent, the party kept the seat. Only one of the 20 districts switched parties as well as representatives.

The open seats with no incumbent aren’t much better. With many open seats, one party can be said to be the incumbent party and it almost always wins. The only question voters have, and only if they’re members of the incumbent party, is which candidate will win the primary and therefor the election. And since primary voters tend to be more hardline than other party members, they tend to pick more partisan candidates.

For example, the 63rd district, northeast of Pittsburgh, is a rural, heavily Republican district. The current representative, Donna Oberlander, ran unopposed in 2022 and 2020, after winning three-quarters of the vote in the two previous elections, and running unopposed before that. Five candidates are running in the Republican primary, one in the Democratic. The Democratic candidate has only the tiniest of chances of being elected.

In other words, in normal election years, all the incumbents running unopposed will win, almost all the incumbents facing a challenger will win, and even when the seat is open the same party will win. An earthquake in national politics can shift state and local politics as well, but in terms of offices like state representative, historically not that much.

Opinions vary on how good or bad this is. The office-holders themselves and people involved in the political system argue for the value of incumbency, because incumbents know how the system works and have good relations with other people in office, both needed to get things done, and they know their districts well.

Critics point to the other side: that they can get too comfortable in office, too used to doing deals, too caught up in partisan politics (see: Harrisburg), and too distant from their constituents and their constituents’ concerns, because they don’t need to worry about losing their office.

Both have a point. The responsibility for making sure that incumbents stay rooted in their home districts is the voters’. No possible structural change will reduce the desire to stay in office very much.

But we again point to the value of opening state primaries to independent voters, who tend to be much more moderate than the party’s primary voters. There are over 90,000 independent voters in Allegheny County. Their presence among the actual voters will encourage incumbents to consider more centrist points of view and more bipartisan efforts. It might also encourage new people to enter politics, and that would be a boon.

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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. February 19, 2024.

Editorial: The fight over cyber charter money

Cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania are a different animal from the run-of-the-mill public school.

A charter school is still a public institution. It doesn’t play by the same rules, however. It could have a different goal or a different method — like focus on a nontraditional curriculum or an unusual teaching method. It doesn’t have the same school board oversight, although local boards are part of the charter approval process.

A cyber charter is similar with the key difference of having no physical classroom. Instead, students are issued computers — sometimes tablets, too — and log onto their classes from home.

Charters of all kinds still get public money for operation, but they get it through the districts where the students live. What does the district spend per child on education? That provides a baseline for the “tuition” a district pays the charter school for each child. It might be as low as $8,600 or as high as $26,500 depending on where you live.

A physical charter needs to put the money toward teachers and instructional materials, but also a building and desks and the other tangible aspects of running a school. A cyber charter doesn’t.

To be fair, there are other costs an online-based program needs to maintain in a way a physical school doesn’t. More servers, more tech support, all the equipment a regular school district or physical charter might put off for a year are the equivalent of a roof or plumbing. They are the infrastructure that makes it work.

But do they cost the same? Do they require the same investment from districts or the state?

Gov. Josh Shapiro has proposed changing the way cyber charters are funded. Instead of varying by geography, every district would pay a flat $8,000 per student. (Let’s keep in mind, this is only a proposal right now.)

The plan is something that appeals to the districts. Jeannette School District, for example, would save $420,000 a year under the plan — about 30% of the $1.4 million it pays now. Allegheny Valley School District would cut its cyber charter costs by about 50%.

Cyber charters bristle at the idea and point to the way their expenses increase in other areas because of the lack of physical space — including reimbursing families for internet costs. Timothy Eller, senior vice president of outreach and government relations for Commonwealth Charter Academy, suggested it was unconstitutional and in conflict with the governor’s promise that no school will see a funding decrease.

Leveling the playing field for all districts makes sense. It is questionable whether dropping cyber charter funding below the lowest amount paid previously would be beneficial to those students. Could it incentivize some schools on the $26,000 payment end to offload low-performing students to cyber charters as a cost-saving measure?

Other districts question the lack of transparency about budgeting or being held to different standards than charters.

Perhaps providing a fair solution is to ask cyber charters which issue is more critical to their mission. Would they rather have the higher funding and not be subject to the same accountability requirements as school districts — or take less money and clear the same hurdles?

Or maybe the state could spend less time pitting different schools against each other and do what a court has already told it to do: find a better, fairer way to structure school funding across the board.

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Scranton Times-Tribune. February 18, 2024.

Editorial: Stop keeping secrets at Penn State; publicly debate proposed Paterno honor

Should Beaver Stadium’s football field be named for the late Penn State coach Joe Paterno? That’s a topic worthy of public discussion. Regrettably, the people who will ultimately make that decision aren’t interested in sharing their views with the public.

The circumstances surrounding Paterno’s firing in 2011 are undoubtedly making the university’s board of trustees skittish about having this debate in the open. As reported by the nonprofit investigative newsroom Spotlight PA, the board met twice behind closed doors last month to discuss naming the field after Paterno, who coached the Nittany Lions for 45 years before his ouster for mishandling child sex abuse allegations against longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

This is not the first time the 38-member board of trustees has apparently violated the state Sunshine Law, which requires most government-related bodies to deliberate and vote in public. In fact, the board faces a lawsuit filed on behalf of Spotlight PA in Centre County Court seeking an injunction that would force it to follow the law. The suit alleges several closed-door executive sessions in 2023 could not be justified under the exemptions allowing for private meetings outlined in the Sunshine Law.

Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, told Spotlight PA that discussions over the naming of the football field likely do not qualify for an exemption.

“The public is entitled to see how decisions are made, not just the final vote,” Melewsky said. “That’s why deliberation is expressly required to be public.”

The closed-door discussions of renaming the field for Paterno follow a well-established pattern at University Park, where vital issues in the public interest have long been debated out of the public view.

That sense of impunity and insularity contributed directly to the egregious mishandling of allegations against Sandusky, which went unreported to police by university officials, including Paterno, for a decade.

After Paterno’s death in January 2012, three university officials, including former Penn State President Graham Spanier, served time on child endangerment charges in connection with the Sandusky case.

Many at Penn State and across the commonwealth undoubtedly continue to revere Paterno, who brought two national championships to Happy Valley, emphasized the academic achievements of his players and donated generously to the university. A library at the main campus still bears his name.

But if those seeking to honor Paterno posthumously by naming the field in his honor cannot or will not defend their position in a public forum, perhaps their behind-the-scenes campaign should be abandoned.

In any case, the board of trustees should affirm that it will abide by the Sunshine Law in the future and acknowledge the great toll that secrecy at Penn State has already taken on Sandusky’s victims, the university and Paterno’s legacy.

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