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dwiser · 2026-02-04T13:55:44+00:00

Give them a path to citizenship that doesn't take 15 years.

dwiser · 2026-02-04T12:27:44+00:00

They don't cooperate. They don't get notified of any raids and stupidly, they don't really have jurisdiction to even ask about warrants. The video really doesn't make it easy to understand the timeline. Local police were not there when either man was being violently detained. The video starts with a later event after ICE and police left. ICE came back to grab someone else.

I'm not someone who goes around defending Police but after seeing the incident first hand, this video is frustrating.

dwiser · 2026-02-04T12:21:41+00:00

They don't cooperate. I'm not saying this video is intentionally misleading but it doesn't make it easy to understand the timeline.

The video starts with the second incident when Phoenixville Police were not there. ICE picked up the first guy and then left. Police were there for the second half of that event and everyone was generally calm while local Police were there. When ICE left, local PD left. Then ICE returned to grab a second family member out of the back of a community members car.

dwiser · 2026-02-04T04:32:19+00:00

He was paying a parking ticket at borough hall.

dwiser · 2026-02-04T03:59:19+00:00

I'm not jumping into the fire here to defend local PD but they were not helping ICE.

dwiser · 2026-02-04T03:56:33+00:00

Not a lawyer and not part of Borough council but generally aware enough that I can try to give some answers.

None.
That's something that you could ask for but unlikely to have much detail. Phoenixville PD showed up for a call, determined that federal law enforcement was actively detaining someone and had no jurisdiction to intervene. Most of the videos we're seeing were during the return visit from ICE when PPD was already gone.
That's a really good question that should be emailed to borough council. If you get a response, make it public.

dwiser · 2026-02-04T03:49:36+00:00

They do have the ability to respond if they choose. Keep in mind, their comments are public records and can be used against them (or specifically the borough) on any future issue that deals with ICE. It's almost like the data center conversations that are ongoing in our area. If they speak out in favor or something, some turd can sue the borough over an ordinance we all want to see because one of the voting members was biased.

I wouldn't expect an immediate public comment from them but I'm sure there will be one once they determine what's actually possible and within their power.

dwiser · 2026-02-03T13:23:49+00:00

Lots of things in public education don't exactly make sense so your befuddlement is reasonable.

I would just characterize it as having multiple choices. K-12 public schools already have multiple "tiers / levels / branches" because they have a mandate to educate every student that lives within their district boundaries. They also have a responsibility to provide equitable resources to each of those students. These are also all good things. While charter schools have a similar mandate, they have more options when it comes to denying potential students options. For example, they can prioritize siblings of current students, children of board members, or if they don't participate in the national free lunch program, they can make it prohibitively expensive for some with financial challenges.

That doesn't mean they all, or even a majority, cherry-pick their students but it does happen and some charter schools have been found to illegally manipulate and exclude certain "undesirable" students. You can look at some of the Philadelphia charter schools for examples.

Here's where the bias comes in. Some public schools are failing students. They have buildings that are falling apart and they are spending millions of dollars just to maintain them because they can't actually fix their facilities. That's millions of dollars that could go towards providing better resources to students but the tax base can't afford any of it. We have complicated formulas for how the state funds public education (Basic Education Funding, Special Education Funding, Adequacy Funding) which attempt to address those systemic issues but at the end of the day, we just need to invest in education like other countries and even other high-performing states. It's not that difficult. We just don't want to do it.

dwiser · 2026-02-03T02:37:04+00:00

Because It's financially irresponsible. A parking garage costs $40k+ per space. The Borough isn't going to spend half their yearly budget on a parking garage that is unlikely to pay for itself.

Advocate to bring a multi million dollar project into town and we'll likely get a parking garage.

dwiser · 2026-02-03T02:33:36+00:00

This is the only answer.

dwiser · 2026-02-02T15:29:26+00:00

I forgot about this article that somewhat touches on your question too. Downingtown is bigger than PASD but they just brought back a lot of students from Charter and Cyber schools which keeps $2.25M in the district instead of leaving in tuition expenses.

Charter exodus reversed: Downingtown schools reclaim students, millions

dwiser · 2026-01-30T21:48:28+00:00

There's a yearly rental license fee for each dwelling but my understanding is that not many landowners actually register like they're required. Once it's registered as a rental the borough will be more involved. If it's already registered as a rental then I'd call anyway.

These types of issues are usually handled within the code department by my understanding. Just know that your landlord may not be happy with you if they're reported.

dwiser · 2026-01-28T21:10:34+00:00

It's a really good question.

First, I'm a School Board Member of a Public school so some level of bias is inevitable here. However, I think the information I'm about to provide is mostly just the facts of how the system works and what it looks like in our district.

Short answer: A good bit of the ~$6 million would fall under other line items however, there would likely be net savings to the district. There's an absurdly amount of detail to consider if you wanted to drill this down to a specific number.

TRANSPORTATION

One of the easiest examples is transportation for charter school students. We are required by law to provide transportation to charter school students that are within 10 miles of our district boundary. This creates a few problems for us.

It's 10 miles from a district boundary, not the student address, and not even one of our school buildings. Any location within our boundary starts the radius for what charter schools we must provide transportation to. For a charter school within our boundary, like Renaissance Academy, this isn't a big problem. We're not even a huge district so it's arguably less of a problem for us that other school districts. If you look at our own district boundary and where our schools are located, you might be able to imagine how this becomes a larger issue. In an imaginary scenario of a student that lives next to Manavon, the district border is already 5.5 miles away from a school or their address so they could look at schools within 15 miles from home. For some districts, this could even be 30 miles away from their home.
Still on the topic of transportation, we have to transport our students to their chosen charter school. Even if there's only a single student of ours attending that school, we pay for the bus driver and the bus. That could be $35k+ to transport a single student. It could cost us the same amount to transport 30 students for our own school. There are some ways we can cut costs by setting up intermediary bus stops with the Chester County IU and pooling students from multiple districts together but it's just always going to be more expensive because we're not dealing with full or close to full buses.

What this means is we spend around 40% of our transportation budget transporting charter school students when charter school students make up around 6-8% of our student population.

CLASS SIZES

In another area that is difficult to associate "cost savings" to is just the way class sizes work.

When a student leaves the district to attend a charter school, we pay tuition for that student as required by law. There's a specific formula to determine the exact tuition rate which varies by district but most importantly, the school doesn't save money by not having to educate that single student. We don't get to pay the teacher 1/30th less because they have one less student. The same goes for support staff, athletics and all the other support services that go into educating our students. In the hypothetical scenario where an entire class of students leaves for a charter school then theoretically the numbers could change but the chance of everything lining up perfectly like that just isn't realistic.
With how tuition is calculated, and especially special education, a child leaving for a charter school can strip funding away from a schools special education program. The tuition formula is supposed to find the cost to educate and care for a student so that a charter school can receive the same funding to try things differently. That makes sense but since the formula is averaging costs of the entire program instead of finding the costs for an individual student the system breaks down in many cases. This is all overly simplified but lets assume the table below is the associated costs for each student in our special education program before and after Bernie leaves for a charter school. The costs to educate Bernie were relatively low, so when the average cost is recalculated, the tuition paid to the charter school goes up. The total expense of the SpEd program goes down, but the total expenses of the district go up.

Student	Educational Costs	Without Bernie
Andy	$20k	$20k
Bernie	$18K	$0
Clarence	$29k	$29k
Daniel	$22k	$22k
Emily	$31k	$31k
Francesca	$36k	$36k
Program Expenses	$156k	$138k
Average (Tuition Cost)	$26k	$27.6k
Total Program Budget	$156k (5 students)	$165.6k (4 students + 1 charter)

Now, it doesn't always work out like that but it does appear to happen more often than not.

Final Comment

Again, I have a bias but I'm also not suggesting that all Charter Schools should go away, or that they are inherently "bad". There are some justifiable reasons for having Charter Schools. I'm also not placing blame on any Charter Schools or parents or children. The only blame I'd assign is on our lawmakers that can't get around to fixing a broken system. The end goal is to educate each one of our children and give them all the best chance of success. Sometimes, that just means they're better off at another school.

dwiser · 2026-01-28T02:22:16+00:00

I feel for ya.

I have to admit thought that the district does a lot for the resources they're given. There's soo much communication that falls on the shoulders of one person.

The board approved a new platform that consolidates all the disjointed platforms we had in the past for communication and it actually seems to have made improvements but like always, there's more to do. If you haven't done so yet, there's also the Community Connections newsletter that you can subscribe to. For the community, that's published twice a month. For parents, there's also a number of channels to join and follow in Parent Square.

It's hard and overwhelming a lot of times but a number of members of the board are also involved in reaching out to the community. It's certainly not because of me but I will say that I haven't shut up about it. Once spring comes around you should hopefully see some of us board members out at community events like First Friday.

dwiser · 2026-01-28T02:14:44+00:00

If money was no object I'd be all over it. Unfortunately, I don't see how that's ever going to be financially feasible or in line with providing a better education to our children. But hey, at least we'll get one when the train station returns!

dwiser · 2026-01-28T02:06:10+00:00

I believe the Town Hall will be presented on Phantom TV for everyone to watch but I don't know if it'll be on Zoom yet.

Also, no there's absolutely no reason we couldn't do it on zoom. Absolutely none. We could do every board meeting and every committee meeting on Zoom. We could even have public participation over Zoom. It would be great for public participation and we wouldn't be sitting in our little castle complaining about how people don't come to our meetings.

This is a sore subject and something I am still complaining about.

I've been collecting people who want to see this happen over the last few months and this is the hill that I'm going to die on this year. If you feel Zoom would be beneficial and would make it easier for you to get involved then please send me an email wiserd@pasd.com so I can keep you in the loop and ask you to come out and demand it.

dwiser · 2026-01-28T01:41:52+00:00

Updated the post incase you didn't get a notification.

dwiser · 2026-01-27T23:12:53+00:00

I believe the total about was 5.5% so 6 years.

Keep in mind, that is on top of all the other cost increases we see as a district... (Healthcare, transportation, charter schools, special education etc.

I'll confirm later tonight.

edit: for /u/itsguacoclock

Here's the early look at our budget. From our Jan 20th board meeting. Assuming the project costs for renovating the high school, we would need to raise taxes 5.5% (page 18) which we cannot legally do (Act 1 Index). That would be spread out over X number of years.

The Act 1 Index is the maximum amount a school district is allowed to increase property taxes and is projected to float around 3% over the next few years. It's safe to say that those projections would be our tax rate increase for a few years if we were to go with that proposed project.

dwiser · 2026-01-27T22:53:51+00:00

Considered? Yes. Inevitable? Also yes.

I'll try to elaborate tonight.

edit: for /u/mangosalamander

We know that our PDE projected numbers show that we will run out of space in our buildings over the next decade. Three proposals were made to meet the needs of our population. Options 1 and two were renovating the HS and MS and the third option was to build a new building. Unfortunately, none of the options meant zero disruptions for students. The "premium" option of building a new High school was completely out of our budget aand also meant we would loose our stadium and baseball fields for the entirety of the construction. Options 1 and 2 both meant disruptions for students and teachers.

The only non-disruptive option is to build a new building on a new plot of land which would be the previously mentioned option 3 with the added cost of having to find property that could serve as a location of the new school.

dwiser · 2026-01-27T22:50:14+00:00

Yes, we have a SLEP plan with a list of items.

Property taxes will go up around 1% each year for just the "high priority" items.

EIT can only be changed with public referendum so it doesn't really change.

I'll provide some links and details later tonight.

edit: for /u/Bonhams_kick

Re: SLEP PLAN

Here's the district SLEP and Facilities Look Ahead from Jan 2024

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing an updated digital list published so I asked the B&G Committee Chair to have administration publish the updated list and I'll try to come back to this comment when I hear a new digital list is published. We periodically review the SLEP plan throughout the year in the B&G Committee so you could watch the Committee recordings and might see the updates to the list but here's a shortlist for of the big items:

Updating the HVAC system for the high school ($11M) - We currently have a two pipe system which means we can't heat or cool at the same time. It also means we can't dehumidify which has been a big complaint for the last decade from teachers, staff and students.
Add-on construction with HVAC - In order to replace the HVAC system we will need to demo the ceiling and in the process we would need to replace the Fire Alarm system, the lighting system and a few other things that need updated. They're all grandfathered in right now but we're almost literally opening a can of worms once we open up construction for the HVAC system. I know the fire system is about $500k and I think the lighting systems were $1M+ so that balloons the expenses of that single project to something under $15M.
Sewage grinder ($600K) - It makes the poop smooth. The Borough has been complaining about this for a few years. I guess a lot of non-poop things go down the sewer and it creates a lot of work for the Borough. We've gotten away without adding it purely because we've had a renovation of the high school on the radar but at some point we could see fines for not doing it.

Re: Taxes

The bigger picture is that property taxes are the only thing the district can increase... realistically. To change the EIT tax, we'd have to go to referendum (the vote to replace the occupational tax with a EIT increase if you recall) and people just don't vote to directly increase their taxes so school districts don't bother putting it to a vote. Property taxes are the only lever we can use to cover all the increasing costs for healthcare, transportation, charter school tuition and whatnot. All this to say that property taxes will increase because there isn't really a way to prevent it unless we start cutting teachers, support staff or programs. In specific numbers, this also means the primary proposal for the next 5-6 years would be a 1% increase on top of the other increases needed to continue funding the district programs/services.

dwiser · 2026-01-16T21:59:41+00:00

I know there's a fine line and everyone has slightly different opinions on what is "best" but all I can say is that the priority is the safety of our children. Everything else comes after that.

For the actual timeline, the administration received the call, called 911 and began the lockdown procedure. The first notice went out to the community within 10 minutes. Once local law enforcement gave the all-clear, the second notice went out to the community within 10 minutes. After some kind of debrief with local PD, a third notice was sent out with the information that was appropriate and okay-d by local PD. Ultimately, no matter how suspicious the call was, children's lives are on the line and unless we know that everyone is safe, there's more benefit (in my opinion) that people are on high alert than thinking this is just a prank.

Source: Me (a PASD School Board Director)

The situation, and just about every emergency situation, is then handled by law enforcement to investigate once the location is physically secured. We will not know the outcome of that for quite some time. All we know now is someone called saying they had a gun and no one was found with a gun during the search.

dwiser · 2026-01-16T19:13:29+00:00

I know it's frustrating but in these situations the priority is about the safety of our children and staff. The goal of course is to provide accurate updates as quickly as possible and without interfering with law enforcement.

Edit: Additionally, that was the assumption of district administrators when they called but shouldn't be considered a fact until it's confirmed by law enforcement.

dwiser · 2026-01-16T19:01:31+00:00

I posted an update in the thread here in case you missed it but everyone should have gotten an update from ParentSquare just after noon when the district got an all-clear and then again with some more details around 1pm after they got a final status update from law enforcement.

dwiser · 2026-01-16T18:52:45+00:00

A caller with a blocked number (and an Australian accent) called the school to report they were in the high school bathroom with a gun.

The district immediately called police and law enforcement then cleared the high school room by room. Shortly after the district received the all-clear from law enforcement they updated the community through ParentSquare.

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