On a Tuesday in early November, Megan Keogh stood before her class of 18 third-graders here with a simple but devastating question: What would you miss most if school shut down?
The first few answers were expected: Friends. Gym class. Recess. Teachers.
Then a student raised his hand to share: His mom sometimes runs out of food, but when he comes to school, he knows he’ll get at least two meals that day.
“You think that, but you never hear a child say it,” Keogh said.
Those comments became the text of a letter each student handwrote to the state senator representing the district. Each one read: “I am frustrated because our school deserves to stay open.”
This conversation may not seem like typical classroom fare for 8-year-olds. But Keogh had just learned from the district superintendent at an all-staff meeting the night before that the school system was rapidly running out of money.
State lawmakers were to blame—they were required by law to approve a state budget by July 1, but for the sixth time in the last decade, they’d blown past the deadline, this time by more than four months.
The Morrisville district, which enrolls 950 students and operates on an annual budget of $27 million, had already missed more than $5 million in expected state payments since the school year began in late August. If the situation in Harrisburg didn’t change by Christmas, Superintendent Andy Doster told staff, only one solution would remain: On Jan. 29, school buildings would close, and staff would be out of work.
Federal law required Doster to give staff two months’ notice of potential job loss. But he moved the announcement earlier when he realized Nov. 29 fell during Thanksgiving break.
“You can’t tell people the week of Thanksgiving that they may not have a job in 60 days,” Doster said. “That’s just a very inhumane thing to do.”
But then, on Nov. 12, nine days after Doster became the first superintendent in Pennsylvania to publicly signal that the state budget impasse could be catastrophic for school operations, state lawmakers abruptly announced they had finalized the state budget at last, with more than $900 million in new funding and close to $17 billion overall allocated for K-12 schools that collectively enroll more than 1.7 million students. The governor signed the budget into law later that day.
Crisis averted. Right?
Relief mixes with frustration among district leaders
The day after state lawmakers approved the budget, good spirits and regular business were visible across the main Morrisville school district building, which houses grades 3 through 12.
A student and two staff members puttered around the school garden. A delivery driver strolled through the front entrance carrying a box of athletic uniforms. A throng of 4th graders mobbed the elementary principal for hugs during a lunchtime cafeteria visit.
It's not like they settled it, now it's over and schools can wipe their hands clean of it. This is going to linger for a long time.
As the district’s leaders gathered around a conference table for a morning meeting, Doster lifted his U.S. Army polo and got some laughs. Underneath was a black long-sleeve shirt that blared in massive lettering “DO YOUR JOB"—the phrase he had blurted out when a TV interviewer during the budget impasse had asked for his message to lawmakers.
Still, administrators were feeling less jubilant than might be expected from people who had just found out they wouldn’t be losing their jobs or bidding farewell to their beloved students in the new calendar year.
“Instead of relief or happiness, I was more angry,” said Luz Waters, Doster’s administrative assistant. “How do we get to this point? Why was it necessary? There’s so much more work to be done.”
Part of the hesitation was a matter of logistics. The state budget was now law, but Doster was still awaiting a dispatch from the state detailing how much money his district could expect from it. The transfer of funds was still four to six weeks away. Items the district had held off on buying and staff it had held off on hiring during the funding shortfall would take even longer to show up, if at all.
“It’s not like they settled it, now it’s over and schools can wipe their hands clean of it,” Doster said. “This is going to linger for a long time.”
A partisan split keeps money from flowing to schools
Pennsylvania’s budget troubles in recent years can be attributed in part to the partisan split of its legislature, with a Republican majority in the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House.
Such a divide is relatively rare: Only two other state legislatures—Michigan and Minnesota—currently have it, and 2018 was the last year when control was divided between the chambers of more than three state legislatures.
The state has a $3 billion surplus and $7 billion in rainy day funds. But Senate Republicans rejected Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposal to increase overall spending, and argued vehemently for a state budget that leaves those stockpiles intact.
House Democrats approved a measure in August that would have kept money flowing to schools while the broader budget debate continued. But the Senate declined to take it up. The four-month mark came and went with no apparent break in the stalemate.
The situation escalated to this dire point in part because of obscure policies that vary substantially across the country.
In some states, failure to pass a current-year budget means the state rolls over its previous year’s spending levels. That’s the case in North Carolina, now the only state that still hasn’t passed a fiscal year 2026 budget.
In Pennsylvania and , though, no such mechanism exists to automatically extend the previous year’s spending levels. Without an approved state budget or another legislative agreement, school districts and other institutions that rely on state funding get nothing.
Pennsylvania is also one of at least 13 states that block federal funding from flowing to school districts until the state makes its own appropriations.
With no approved state budget, that policy robbed Pennsylvania school districts of hundreds of millions of dollars Congress appropriated in March for education during the current school year.
Morrisville’s share of that federal sum amounted to $1.2 million, including $370,000 to support low-income students, and $200,000 for students with disabilities.
Federal funding makes up just a small portion of the funds held up by Pennsylvania’s budget delays, though. All told, more than $5 billion in state payments to schools was held back during the 139-day standoff, according to a maintained by the Pennsylvania State Education Association.
The result of this convergence of factors was a cascade of financial struggles. Districts with lower-than-usual cash flow . One district in order to keep operating after new revenue ran out. Another due to a leaking water storage tank that cost $90,000 to repair.
Many of the state’s charter schools, meanwhile, as their only source of funding—pass-through payments from local school districts—dried up.
“We spend a lot of time as districts trying to think about how to plan for multiple fiscal years,” said Hannah Barrick, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials. “We just completely eliminated any certainty from all aspects of this.”
The status quo of school funding has long been a problem
In some ways, Morrisville weathered the recent fiscal storm with less disruption than other districts in the state, some of which had to , , , and .
Doster had been workshopping a plan for the Morrisville district to borrow $8 million, but didn’t finalize the loan before lawmakers resolved the impasse. Teachers shared classroom supplies after Doster temporarily pulled back on new orders. Finding private providers of disability services with open slots for students with IEPs was more challenging than usual, because many of those providers were also struggling with getting less money than usual from the districts they support.
But it wasn’t just the gradual reset to the status quo that had the Morrisville team reluctant to celebrate the state budget’s passage. It was the status quo itself.
In 2023, a Pennsylvania judge declared that the state’s approach to school funding violates the state constitution—specifically, the requirement for a “thorough and efficient system of public education.”
Plaintiffs in Pennsylvania—two advocacy groups representing school districts statewide—modeled their case on successful efforts in other states to challenge lawmakers’ investment in public education, including New Jersey and Vermont in the 1990s, Kansas and Washington state in the 2000s and 2010s, and New Hampshire and New Mexico in the last decade.
Those court decisions rested on vast, longstanding funding gaps between predominantly poor and predominantly wealthy school districts—even when they’re right near each other.
The Morrisville district—where more than half of students come from low-income families, 22 percent of students qualify for special education services, and 31 students are unhoused—is one such victim of this system.
Pennsylvania last school year supplied Morrisville schools with base funding of $3.5 million, or roughly $3,700 per student. The adjacent and more-affluent Bristol Borough district, which shares a ZIP code with the Morrisville schools, got nearly $8 million, or roughly $7,200 per student.
Local tax collections are roughly equal across the two similarly sized districts. The communities are so close together that some Morrisville students live across the street from students who attend Bristol Borough schools. Families in the Morrisville district have higher poverty levels than in the Bristol Borough district, but their shared ZIP code skews the funding allocated for each through the state funding formula.
The court agreed that politicians have a legal obligation to address disparities like these. But getting lawmakers to implement reforms, and ensuring those reforms actually achieve their intended goals, can take years. In Pennsylvania, that work is only beginning; similar legal challenges are still underway in Kentucky and Wyoming.
As efforts to equalize educational opportunity in Pennsylvania inch forward, there’s even been talk in recent years of the Bristol Borough district absorbing Morrisville’s three schools.
But even with the enticing prospect of avoiding current financial constraints, Doster opposes the move.
“I think a community then loses its identity,” he said.
Morrisville was among the districts hit hardest by the budget impasse
Local conditions play a big role in determining which schools have the greatest need for state support.
Slightly more than one-third of public school funding in Pennsylvania comes from the state—.
That means those schools widely acknowledged to have higher needs than their wealthier peers were hit hardest by the recent budget standoff.
The Morrisville district, as current administrators tell it, spent much of the last decade digging itself into a financial hole from which it’s only begun to pull out.
Pennsylvania state law says school districts can keep reserves equivalent to 8 percent of their annual operating budget. But thanks to spending decisions that predate Doster’s hiring, the Morrisville district instead started this school year with no reserves and a deficit of roughly that amount.
Last May, Doster learned that, in light of the district’s ongoing financial struggles, its credit rating would drop. A few weeks ago, he got a call alerting him to expect another downgrade stemming from this fall’s state budget crisis.
Those changes could mean higher interest rates for future loans like those Doster might have had to take out if the state budget impasse had worn on much longer. Taking on debt to fund upgrades for the district’s 1940s-era buildings could be trickier, too.
“The districts that are being hurt the most are exactly the districts that the state has been trying to help and lift the most,” Barrick said.
School leaders worried about how news of a possible closure would land
Pennsylvania isn’t the only place where school districts have recently had to cover for massive, unexpected funding gaps.
Michigan schools had already begun when state lawmakers passed a budget in early October, more than four months after state law requires schools to pass balanced budgets of their own.
In North Carolina, where lawmakers , school systems with more students enrolled than last year are making do with state funding levels that haven’t accounted for enrollment growth. Teachers there who were expecting a promised pay raise now have to work months into the current school year without knowing if they’ll get it.
And nationwide, in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s unprecedented disruptions to education funding this year, school finance officials are growing increasingly wary of assuming federal grants will flow as scheduled or at all. Many districts are already crafting budgets for next school year that assume key formula programs will be zeroed out, even as Congress has yet to weigh in.
In Morrisville, district leaders were focused during the state budget impasse on how the political situation was affecting people.
Doster initially planned to announce the possible district closure to students during an assembly the same week he told staff. But he changed course after getting emails from parents worried that such a convening could worsen their children’s mental health.
“One of the things that I have always tried to remember in my roles as an administrator is that while I have kids of my own, and I work with other people’s kids, they’re not mine, and I’m not their parents,” Doster said. “So when a parent speaks out against something that they feel strongly about for their child, it’s my job to listen.”
But students aren’t oblivious. Doster and his colleagues faced questions in the hallway, in their offices, even at Dunkin’ Donuts: “Where am I going to go to school?” “How will I graduate?” “What should I say on my college applications?”
One high-schooler took matters into his own hands. When Mason Wargo, 17, heard about the possible closure from his high school transition teacher, he asked to visit the school counselor’s office, then called the offices of three state lawmakers and urged them to work faster.
“I don’t know whether they actually passed over my message or not, but I hope they did and I hope it did something,” he said.
Wargo was concerned the closure would prevent him and his peers from having enough credit to graduate in May—and that the teachers who had helped him toward that goal would lose their livelihoods.
“My teacher told me that the superintendent was really nervous telling all of his staff they might be out of a job,” he said. “I can understand that feeling. It’s not a good one. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, and I just hope this kind of stuff doesn’t happen again.”
Indeed, Morrisville staff worried for their families. One administrator was already gaming out how she would pay for her daughter’s college tuition.
Nicole Gober, a high school counselor, and her husband, a 6th grade social studies teacher, were facing the possibility of having no household income if the district shut down.
“While it was scary in some ways, at the same time, I think it gave us an avenue to speak up, too, because I don’t know that we all realized how bad it really was,” Gober said.
Preparing for the next crisis
Even before the state budget was finalized, Doster had begun scrawling numbers for next school year’s district budget on a whiteboard in his office. Ordinarily, this process would have started even earlier, in mid-October.
On top of everything else he’s weighing, Doster is now paying extra attention to moves that will prepare the district should yet another state budget impasse arise next year.
He worries that families with means will move their children to nearby districts with more resources, and that the district will lose staff who fear instability.
“It has absolutely had a net negative effect on the culture and the morale of the district,” Doster said. “People that can leave and go to a more affluent district with a little bit more security will leave, and then it will become even more difficult for us to attract teacher candidates when we have openings.”
The morning after the state budget passed, though, those concerns were distant in Keogh’s class as she told her students the school would stay open after all.
“They were jumping up and down, they were cheering, they were so excited that they had something to do with it,” Keogh said. “For them to have a place to go, that’s going to give them food, that they know at least one person here loves them, it’s huge.”
