The Upper Moreland Township PBA is primarily the sole representative of collective agreements for contract negotiations and also supports the Community through various activities throughout the year, including organizing and participating in public events, community support and providing donations to families in distress. However, we can try to influence the amount of money that the Commonwealth has to allocate to school districts. If the federal government authorizes school vouchers, we must work with our national legislation to ensure that our representatives know that they are harming our public schools. We must also ensure that they know that we do not support an extension of the EITC programme, which also releases public school funds. These legislative initiatives are hidden methods of re-re-reducing public school funds to private schools and private interests. And while we often think that our representatives think they are working in our common interests, sometimes that`s just not the case. The comparison brings to an end a negotiation process that has sometimes become unstable, with many school district parents in place at board meetings to encourage board members to pay what they are worth to teachers and to criticize board members for not showing appropriate financial support, respect and support to teachers and other union members. The Upper Moreland PBA wants to announce that we will once again award two separate scholarships of $1,000 each. To obtain the scholarship, the applicant must reside in Upper Moreland Township and obtain his bachelor`s degree in June 2020 and go to university in the fall of 2020. While she admitted that the « end result is good news, » holly Rooney, a school district parent, said the school board had not done enough during the negotiation process « to ensure that its policies and plans are implemented by recruiting a team of highly effective educators, administrators and support staff…
School boards are most effective when they focus their time and energy on using this authority to govern at the strategic level, determine what schools in the community should accomplish, take steps to achieve these goals, recruit professional staff to achieve them, and provide the resources to achieve all of this. Of course, the BEFC formula only determines the percentage to which a district is entitled to what is available and not to what is actually available. The amount of distribution depends on a number of factors, but recent legislative proposals have raised some additional concerns. At the national level, betsy DeVos, Minister of Education, is a supporter of private school cheques. School cheques are worth a certain amount of money and parents would choose the school that is attending their child. Many people fear that these coupons will deprive public schools of additional funds and pass them on to private schools. In last night`s liaison reports, the Director of the Board of Directors, Paul Tkacs, spoke about the current legislation proposed by the Palestinian Authority on these types of vouchers. If you are not familiar with The Act 1 Index, this is a property tax relief law, passed in 2006 by the Pennsylvania legislature, that sets a cap on the annual increase that can be provided for property taxes. If the county wants to raise property taxes more strongly than this amount, it must first obtain voter approval. While many of Obermoreland`s surrounding school districts have chosen to do so, Upper Moreland has not experienced it in recent years. That may be an option for next year, but I am sure it would be achieved with mixed support.