Despite the fact that the school year is already underway, the state budget -- including a multi-billion dollar education appropriation -- is still tied up in lengthy political negotiations in Harrisburg.
And this lack of funding might prevent the already floundering Pennsylvania public school system from buying much-needed supplies and refitting for the new year.
The debacle began last March, soon after Democratic Governor Ed Rendell took office. He made the unprecedented move of attempting to pass two budgets, the first a bare-bones budget created simply to meet the state constitution's deadline.
The second budget, which he planned to propose within weeks of the first, would allocate money for a variety of projects, including education, health services and economic stimulus.
However, the Republican-controlled legislature threw Rendell's plan off course when it passed the initial budget in a record two days.
According to Rendell Press Secretary Kate Phillips, Rendell then line-item vetoed the education appropriations "because he wanted to force a debate on education funding in Pennsylvania."
And months later, that debate is still going on.
Currently, a version of the bill exists in the House, and a different one in the Senate, but neither house is compromising to create a document that all of the state officials agree upon.
"No one could have anticipated that the negotiations would take this long," Phillips said, adding that Rendell's actions might have been different had he been able to predict that the crisis would not be resolved before the fall.
At present, public schools across the state have already missed the first subsidy payment and may miss the second, scheduled for later this month.
According to Phillips, the Department of Education has emergency funds in place to make sure that no school must close its doors, but it is well past crunch time for negotiations to be settled.
"The school year has started, and there is no education funding," she said. "But this is something [Rendell] isn't willing to compromise on. Our education system needs to be reformed."
Regardless of the need for reform, a working budget would certainly help in the short term.
"Rendell's plan hasn't panned out so well," said Scott Bair, director of research at the Pennsylvania Economy League, an independent non-profit organization.
"Who knows what would have happened if he put it all together in one package?" he said. "It wasn't a good move, but it probably wasn't a bad one either. We'd probably be in the same place if he did it all in one."
But Bair shied away from placing blame on one party or the other, saying instead that it was the widespread political infighting that has held the budget up so far.
"If you want to assign blame, well, it takes two to tango," Bair said. "But so far, neither of them has even come to the dance."
The Republican state party spokesman did not return calls for comment.
