State school funding formulas amount to "educational apartheid," Sto-Rox school board member Ed Maritz said Thursday night.

"It's a civil rights issue," Dr. Maritz said during a board budget session. "We are penalizing children just because they live in a poor community."

Sto-Rox borrowed $3 million to pay its bills last year, laid off 11 teachers to make this year's budget balance, and is facing another budgetary crisis.

Business manager Chuck Lanna projected revenue of $22.1 million, almost $460,000 less than the current year's because of expiring short-term funding programs and the uncertainty of the state budgeting process.

The board members are reluctant to raise taxes beyond the current 25-mill rate, already the seventh-highest in Allegheny County. And even if they do, a mill of taxes brings in only about $250,000 from Stowe and McKees Rocks.

As they educated three new board members on the realities of school funding, administrators and longtime board members made it clear where they believe blame lies.

"The average school district has 12 percent special education students," Superintendent Fran Serenka said, "and each district gets $5,000 per child based on that percentage. We're at 28 percent, twice that plus some. But we still get money based on 12 percent."

The result, Mr. Lanna said, is that the district spends about $3.5 million annually on special education, and gets $1 million in state funding. Scaled up to actual numbers, it would get $2.3 million.

"This board levies 8 mills in property taxes to make up for that inequity," Dr. Maritz said.

In fairness, the state does try to equalize funding for poor school districts, and the state's basic subsidy is the biggest revenue line in Sto-Rox's budget at $8 million. But it still leaves the district well short of what the state itself -- in its landmark 2007 "costing-out" study of education -- said the district needed.

"This district is still $2 million below" what the state study said it needed, Dr. Serenka said.

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