Conventional wisdom would mean that fracking should boost the local economy more, resulting in higher property rates for those rural communities, and local funding would increase to those school districts. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association calculated that almost 58% of school-district revenues came from local taxes and 38% came from the state, for the 2017-18 school year. The authors write that this result seems counterintuitive since Pennsylvania provides a low share of state funding to school districts compared to other states, and relies more heavily on local funding from property taxes. Wells can leak copious amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

Some of those school districts with a prevalence of fracking wells, like Canon-McMillan School District, are experiencing a spat of rare cancers.įracking also has been linked to a myriad of health issues, like asthma, fatigue, high-risk pregnancies, migraines, and skin disorders.

About a third of Pennsylvania’s school districts are rural, yet about 56% of the fracking wells are in those rural districts. Of the 167 rural school districts in Pennsylvania, 94 contain fracking wells. “Evidence from our analysis suggests that, on average, districts experiencing unconventional drilling had lower per-pupil revenues, locally raised per-pupil funding for schools, per-pupil income, and per-public property wealth than very similar districts that did not experience unconventional drilling,' reads the study. Schafft dig into the school district revenues in areas that were home to drilling rigs in between 2007-2015. Titled “A ‘Resource Curse’ for Education?: Deepening Educational Disparities in Pennsylvania’s Shale Gas Boomtowns,” authors and Penn State education department professors Matthew Gardner Kelly and Kai A. Industry boosters claim the economic growth and jobs, especially in rural areas, that come with the growth in the fracking industry is too good to pass up, even if health and environmental problems follow.īut a new study from Penn State University is shedding light on some of those claims, with a focus rural school districts where fracking is occurring, and it's not positive. But their main argument, and one that is often repeated by Republican and many Democratic politicians, is economic. Natural-gas industry boosters make several arguments for why natural-gas drilling, aka fracking, is beneficial for Pennsylvania.

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