Pity our kids. 

While they are dutifully prepping themselves for a new school year, their elders — i.e., elected officials — are pretending it is still the middle of summer. 

There is no state budget yet, so more than a month into the state’s fiscal year school districts don’t know what sort of funding they will be getting. 

The rub is Governor Tom Wolf’s and the Republican-led legislators’ absolutely inimical view of what deserves increased funding — and who deserves to be taxed to sustain it. While budgets are complex things, from a purely educational perspective it’s the governor who seeks to restore the deep cuts to education made by his predecessor Tom Corbett, and the state legislators who are balking. 

Apparently the legislators were the only ones who didn’t see Wolf’s election — and Corbett’s trouncing—  as a public mandate to focus on improving education and educational outcomes statewide instead of evicerating them.

We’re sure those legislators would say they are pro-education too ... but Pennsylvania has no fair education funding formula in place, and throughout  the Corbett years the state  share of school funding dropped to a shameful 30 percent.

The schools (and students) most penalized by this parsimonious  history are, of course, low-income ones. There is a tremendous funding gap between wealthy and poor districts ... according to the National Center for Education Statistics, it is the widest funding gap in the nation. 

Since one in six Latinos in the nation lives in a high poverty neighborhood — and the poorest zip code in Philadelphia is majority Latino — the issue of fair funding for schools is instrumental in beginning to address overall economic and social disparities in our community

In other education-related business, the state Supreme Court has also said it will hear the School Reform Commission appeal of a lower court ruling that prevented the SRC from cancelling teachers’ contracts — but no date has been set yet. 

The SRC — almost as deeply unpopular as Corbett was — has been a big part of the political discussion in Philadelphia recently. Many want to see it dissolved and replaced by an elected or combination elected and appointed school board. Proponents of such a dissolution speak of empowering communities of color (neighborhoods where the effect of the Philadelphia School District’s ongoing crisis has been felt most grievously) through election to a local school board.

Latino representation on school boards in Pennsylvania is an ongoing issue — according to the Gender and Multicultural Leadership database, the commonwealth has only three Latinos serving on school boards, despite increasing Latino student enrollment. 

At this time of year we get lots of photos of Philadelphia businesses and non-profits filling bookbags with school supplies for children who cannot afford to purchase them. They are great initiatives, and very necessary given how expensive supplies are, and how scarce they’ve become at Philly schools. 

But the photos are also a reminder to push our legislators to more — more generous, more inclusive, more equitable — funding for education. It is mid-August and our children prepared, ready and willing to go to school. 

It is time to pass Governor Wolf’s budget.