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Council Plans More Tough Questions for School District In The Fall

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- City Council's debate over how much new cash to send to the School District ended this past week with approval of about three-quarters of what the District had sought.

But Council leaders are withholding some of the new money for the schools in order to pose more questions in the fall.

Even with approval of the new money for schools, Council President Darrell Clarke is continuing to voice his displeasure with the answers provided by District officials during hearings. So council is withholding $25 million of the $70 million approved in new school funding. This will mean District officials will be back before Council in the fall:

"Because of what I'd like to characterize as the lack of responses from the School District," said Clarke, "we would like to get a reasonable answer to a lot of those questions about their fiscal situation."
One of the key unanswered questions, Clarke says, is how the District plans to solve its structural deficit that has led to annual hat-in-hand requests to City Council.
"Simply coming to the taxpayers, asking for an additional $100 million a year in school taxes, without coming up with a solution to dealing with the structural deficit, I don't think is appropriate."
District officials and the Nutter Administration say the surest way to solve the structural deficit is for Harrisburg lawmakers to approve a new statewide school funding mechanism such as that proposed by Governor Wolf.

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