Betsy DeVos—and members of Congress who do not take action to stop her—are in the process of looting PA public schools by taking federal funding away from the poorest students in the state in order to provide well-off children in private/religious schools a windfall of federal funding.

If DeVos is allowed to push her school privatization agenda, public schools that educate Pennsylvania’s poorest students will lose approximately $50 million in federal COVID-19 aid.

Through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief or ESSER in the CARES Act, Congress allocated a total of $471 million to be distributed to PA school districts and charter schools. This funding is distributed based on the number of students enrolled who qualified for federal Title 1-A funding in 2019.

The CARES Act also specifically states that school districts are to set aside an equitable share (equitable services) of this federal funding for private/religious schools based on the number of low-income students attending private/religious schools who participated in 2019-2020 Title I-A programming.

On July 1, Betsy DeVos issued an Interim Financial Rule that carries the force and effect of law, instructing school districts to provide a share of CARES Act funding to private/religious schools based on the TOTAL number of students in those schools, not just students eligible for Title I.

If this IFR is not nullified by Congress, approximately $50 million in federal CARES Act funding that Congress intended to support poor and vulnerable students in Pennsylvania will be diverted to support well-off students in private schools.

Please contact your members of Congress and ask them to swiftly nullify the DeVos’s IFR and ensure that one-time, emergency funding will reach our most vulnerable students--in whatever type of school they attend.