PA Representative Danielle Otten banner image

Dear Neighbor,

We have a budget! The House and Senate were called back into session last weekend. On Sunday afternoon, the 2026-2027 General Appropriations budget and its accompanying Education, Tax, and Fiscal code bills passed both chambers, and on Sunday night, 12 days past the June 30 budget deadline, Governor Shapiro signed the bills into law.

I voted Yes on this year’s budget because it includes crucial affordability initiatives and education investments on top of an improved education code, public health and safety boosts, and investments to help seniors and working families—all without increasing taxes or dipping into the commonwealth’s Rainy Day Fund. This budget did exactly what a budget is supposed to do: provide for the funding of essential programs and services, including those like public education that we are constitutionally mandated to support and maintain.

The budget includes increases for Medical Assistance, mental health programs, prescription drug assistance and other programs for seniors, and a long-overdue cost-of-living adjustment for retired teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public servants.

Here are some of the highlights included in this year’s plan, including:

Increased funding for CASD and DASD schools,

exciting news for my recess, student teacher stipend, student privacy, and menstrual equity initiatives, and

important wins for projects championed by our Chester County delegation.

Plus, we’ll look at some of the unfinished business we still need to address when we return to session in September.

Investments in Our Schools

This year’s budget marks our fourth consecutive year of substantial investments in public education funding, in keeping with our constitutional mandate to fully fund our public schools. The budget increases overall education funding by $670 million for the 2026-2027 fiscal year, with $565 million going toward closing the adequacy gaps identified in the 2023 PA Supreme Court ruling plus increases in basic education funding, special education funding, and investments in school safety and mental health.

The Coatesville Area School District will receive an additional $5 million over last year’s allocation, while the Downingtown Area School District will receive an additional $1.4 million. Most of Coatesville’s allocation comes from its share of adequacy funding, while Downingtown received above the statewide standard for special education funding.

With this budget, Pennsylvania takes another step toward meeting its constitutional school funding obligation. Since 2024-2025, the state has closed one third of its school funding adequacy gap, leaving a remaining gap of $3.3 billion to be closed over the next several budget cycles.

Recess Bill

One of the very first bills I ever introduced, which I have reintroduced in every session after, to guarantee recess for all K-5 students in Pennsylvania, has finally been signed into law as part of the education code. Recess is crucial to our children’s social development, physical activity, and ability to learn and focus in the classroom. Especially given the growing youth mental health crisis, it’s encouraging to know our children will be guaranteed this crucial time for their mental and physical health, to move their bodies and have fun with friends.

BMI Bill

Also adopted with this year’s education code is the BMI Children’s Privacy bill I introduced this session. School BMI screenings have often failed to protect the privacy of children, with students lined up in a gym or other open area to be measured in front of their peers. And relying on BMI as a standalone metric for evaluating student health can lead to inaccurate assumptions and stigmatize children with a higher BMI. Under the new law, height and weight measurements will be confidential, and schools will not calculate or share students’ BMI.

Student Teacher Stipends

Student Teacher Stipends have been fully funded at $40 million, ensuring that every student teacher will be paid for their work, helping to build the teacher pipeline, expand access to teaching as a profession, and ensure that the next generation of educators can afford to get trained. With an increase of $10 million, funding for the program finally meets its level of demand.

Menstrual Equity

Another bill from my very first legislative session would have required schools to provide menstrual hygiene products free of charge in school bathrooms. While there’s still no requirement for schools to provide these products, we again secured $3 million in funding for schools to provide these necessities.

The school code also includes standardized school mapping protocols to ensure first responders have the information they need to react to emergencies, and Pre-K Counts eligibility also now explicitly includes Intermediate Units, ensuring funding regardless of any federal changes to Head Start.

Cost-of-Living Adjustments Passed

For years, my colleagues and I have heard from constituents about the need for cost-of-living adjustments for pre-Act 9 retirees, who were left out when Pennsylvania last approved a pension adjustment in 2002. The House has passed COLA bills in the last several legislative sessions, only to see them stall in the Senate. But this year, COLAs have finally passed. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, and state employees will finally receive the long-overdue increase they deserve.

This budget included important wins for members of the Chester County delegation and for Chester County families, including an increase in funding for mental health services, food security, and Rape Crisis programs, and investments in nurses, social workers, and the childcare workforce. It continues all seven tax cut programs from last year’s budget, including the Working Pennsylvanians Tax Credit, the Child and Dependent Care Enhancement Tax Credit, and the Property Tax/Rent Rebate Program.

Unfinished Business

While the budget has passed, there is still plenty of work left to be done. In recent years, the budget has been treated like the finish line of the legislative session and used as a vehicle to push controversial policies through, often as points of leverage or negotiation.

But this year’s budget did exactly what it is actually supposed to do, which is to get money to the places that need it, like education, social services, workforce development, and the operation of our state agencies. Now that the budget has passed, we have more work to do to settle the unfinished business that was not included in the budget or code bills.

These issues are better handled as standalone legislation, where they can be debated and passed on their own merit and receive the scrutiny, time, and energy they deserve instead of leveraged to delay a budget agreement or frantically negotiated in order to get the budget through.

Skill Games

With the PA Supreme Court ruling that skill games are legally considered slot machines, they are now subject to the same rules as casino gambling. The court gave the legislature 120 days to pass a new law legalizing and regulating these games before law enforcement can start seizing machines statewide.

Data Center Regulation

The code bills that ran alongside the budget included new reporting requirements for energy and water use for data centers, but this is just one small piece of a massive puzzle.

This session, the House has passed numerous bills to create a comprehensive regulatory framework that would give communities the tools and protections they need to navigate data center development. We have advanced legislation to address energy costs and ratepayer protections (HB 1834), water use (HB 2246 and HB 2150), repealing data center tax breaks (HB 2198), municipal planning (HB 2496 and HB 2151), and transparency and the right to accurate public information (HB 2359).

In addition to the data center legislation we’ve passed, I hope to see movement this fall on my Public Interest legislation (HB 2184), which would require the PUC to consider factors affecting the public interest in utility proceedings, and my Pennsylvania Water Resource Act (HB 2682), which would assess a fee on extraordinary water users like data center operators and use the funds collected to protect the waters of the Commonwealth.

We also have much work to do around public transit funding, minimum wage increases, the care workforce, housing access and affordability, and more.

This budget is a big win for our schools and communities and funds many critical programs, but that does not mean we’ve given up on any legislation that wasn’t included in the budget bill. It simply means we have more to work to do to improve our Commonwealth and deliver for the people of Pennsylvania.