MERCER COUNTY — Less than one percent of Pennsylvania’s public school districts are on board with the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit program that would provide tuition money for students in schools labeled as “failing” to go to a neighboring district.

Only three public districts in the state agreed to accept students from neighboring “failing” schools and none in Mercer County.

Sharon Superintendent John Sarandrea said he wasn’t surprised by that.

“Why would anybody want to participate in the profitizing and privatizing of public education by being a cannibal and eating up students from other school districts?” Sarandrea said.

Sarandrea this week said he knew of fewer than 5 families who’d inquired about transferring their children from Sharon schools under the program.

Students in failing schools could attend only neighboring public districts, for Sharon that’s Sharpsville and Hermitage and for Farrell that’s Hermitage and West Middlesex, but since none of the local public districts signed up with the state by the Aug. 15 deadline that’s not an option this year.

Local public school leaders have offered several reasons for not signing up to accept these potential transfer students. In Sharpsville, Superintendent Mark Ferrara said there were too many unanswered questions in the details. He told the school board earlier this month that he was particularly concerned about class sizes. The district can’t discriminate, or pick one student over another.

West Middlesex Superintendent Alan Baldarelli also pointed to “too many variables.” Among his concerns was how accepting new transfer students would affect the two-dozen plus non-resident students who already pay tuition to attend West Middlesex schools.

Baldarelli said it could result in a lottery system for all tuition-paying students, regardless if families pay that tuition on their own or use a state-sponsored scholarship to pay the bill. It might force out families already established in the district.

“It would hurt the kids who have already been here,” Baldarelli said. “Two many things just didn’t make sense.”

Out of the state’s 500 public school districts, only Clarion Area Junior-Senior High School in Clarion County, Neshannock Township School District in Lawrence County and Schuylkill Haven Area School District in Schuylkill County will take kids in 2012-2013 under the program.

The program has been embraced by the state’s private and parochial schools, 600 of which have offered to accept students under the program.

Five of them are in Mercer County. Four private schools in Crawford County and four in Venango County also signed up. No private schools in Lawrence County are on the list issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

The list of schools that will take in students from the “failing” list is longer than the “failing” list itself, which included schools in Sharon and Farrell and infuriated leaders there.

Farrell Area Schools Superintendent Lora Adams-King when the list was made public said she was “insulted and offended by what politicians with a hidden agenda have done with this.”

She and Sarandrea both noted that students at their schools met state performance targets last school year.

Sarandrea noted that of the 415 schools on the list 133 of them were said to have made Adequate Yearly Progress by the state.

 “How can you be making progress and underperforming at the same time?” Adams-King asked.

Some officials see it as a further attack on the public system by Gov. Tom Corbett in the wake of two years of funding cuts.

“The list was simply a way to try to save private schools and to get as many students as they can out of public schools and lower their subsidies,” Sarandrea said.

Sarandrea said the real impact of the initiative would not be felt until next year, after businesses have a chance to make donations and parents have more time.

State officials rushed the program, Sarandrea said, announcing the list of “failing schools” at the end of July and giving an Aug. 15 deadline for other districts to say they’ll take the tuition students from those schools.

He suspected it will be a topic of discussion when superintendents gather at the Midwestern Intermediate Unit IV, Grove City, next month for their regular meeting. It will be the first since the list was unveiled by the state.



Herald Staff Writer Joy Leiker contributed to this story.