Everyone deserves to live with dignity, and with the passage of Pennsylvania’s 2024-2025 budget this summer, my colleagues and I in the legislature are taking meaningful steps to advocate for every person who calls our commonwealth home to be able to live their life that way.

Some of the most important investments in the fight for dignity for all are set to take center stage as the school year begins.

Our budget addresses the historic Commonwealth Court ruling that our funding system for public education is unconstitutional, in part, by investing $500 million in historically underfunded districts. Here in the 4th District, that means an additional $136.6 million for the School District of Philadelphia and an additional $1.1 million for the Cheltenham School District.

Another budget win for our students and their dignity is the inclusion of my proposal to provide millions for districts to remove lead from their drinking water.  Every child deserves clean drinking water at school. 

The budget also creates a new $5,000 scholarship for students attending colleges and universities in pursuit of careers in high-demand occupations. This scholarship combined with the state grant of $5,750 can make higher education more affordable. As a board member of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, I am excited about the impact these education investments will have.

Another way the budget is helping build a PA where we can all live with dignity is by passing my initiative to protect independent pharmacies from harmful practices of pharmacy benefit managers. This legislation is expected to cut back on the closing of community pharmacies.

Having a safe and affordable place to call home is key to living with dignity, and my proposal to fund affordable housing with up to $100 million by 2027 was approved. This will help create thousands of affordable housing units. 

While these budget wins are crucial steps forward for my dignity agenda, there unfortunately are ways in which the budget misses the mark.

To combat the extreme economic inequality depriving many Pennsylvanians of their right to live with dignity, we should have seized the opportunity to raise our paltry $7.25 minimum wage. Alas, increasing the minimum wage that we adopted in 2009 was not among our budget wins. I won’t stop fighting and advocating for a raise in the wage. The more than 1.3 million Pennsylvanians paid below $15 per hour and hundreds of thousands earning below $11 per hour deserve better and change is long overdue.

We also did not pass my legislation to update the incentives to transition to renewable energy to address climate change. Instead, we are stuck with measures we adopted in 2004, and not tapping into the solar energy market as we should, despite it now being the cheapest source of energy. 

We also failed to pass the Fairness Act, which would ban discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity.  While the courts and certain state regulations have advanced in that space, a PA law is still needed.

And despite the popularity and success of the Whole-Home Repairs program, which provides grants of up to $50,000 for low- and moderate-income families to preserve their homes, we failed to fund it.

These budget shortcomings can in part be attributed to the nature of working in a divided legislature. With a Democratic-led House, a Republican-led Senate, and a Democratic governor, securing wins for all parties is hard to come by. However, I’m committed to continuing to build upon our successes and am looking forward to finding common ground among both parties to enact policies that support a life lived with dignity for every Pennsylvanian.