In the evening on Thursday, June 29, just one day before the state budget deadline, Senate Republicans passed a school voucher bill that would siphon $100 million state tax money into unaccountable private and religious schools. Brand new "PASS Scholarships" were amended into Senate Bill 479, an unreated bill, which passed by a vote of 29-21.

And these new vouchers have Betsy Devos’s fingerprints all over them.

Hours before the Senate passed the voucher bill, dozens of organizations and individuals, including out-of-state millionaires and billionaires who have been working for decades to defund and dismantle public education, delivered this letter on June 29th to Governor Shapiro and state lawmakers, urging them to support vouchers in Pennsylvania.

These millionaires and billionaires, including Betsy DeVos, do not care about Pennsylvania students. Instead, they are hoping to be able to use our children as pawns in their national ideological war against public education.

We need to send a strong message to Governor Shapiro and to state lawmakers that we do not want a Betsy DeVos voucher plan in Pennsylvania.

We do not want our elected officials to cozy up with out-of-state millionaires and billionaires and do their bidding.

Instead, we want our lawmakers and our governor to get to work for Pennsylvanians to pass a budget that will take steps toward fixing their broken and unconstitutional school funding system by investing the commonwealth’s PUBLIC schools in the 2023-2024 state budget to give ALL of our children a shot at a bright future.

Please tell Governor Shapiro and state lawmakers  to reject the DeVos voucher bill and instead fund our public schools.