No new textbooks for private, parochial schools

WEST NORRITON TWP., Pa.  September 29, 2009 (WPVI) -- Pennsylvania's budget problem has created funding problems for new textbooks for private and parochial schools.

Week 3 begins at Visitation Blessed Virgin Mary School in West Norrition, it's pre-kindergarten through 8-th grade. The school of nearly 700 students is typical of the plight for roughly 300-thousand catholic and non-public school children statewide who are working so far this term without new math and science text books and workbooks.

That's thanks to the record-breaking budget impasse in Harrisburg.

In the Philadelphia Archdiocese alone 120-thousand school kids have to use old textbooks and copies from the new work books still at the publisher's warehouse.

The school's volunteer mothers have the copy machines running full tilt these days to keep churning out the needed material.

Church leaders say 12-million dollars for services to at-risk children in the Philadelphia Archdiocese are being held up as well. The clergy has appealed to Harrisburg.

10 days after Governor Ed Rendell and top ranking lawmakers trumpeted a breakthrough budget deal to end the 3-month old spending impasse it may be imploding. Tuesday the governor called on the general assembly to go back to work non-stop on the budget.

Whenever a budget is finally passed it will automatically trigger the release of many millions dollars for schools and social service agencies all across Pennsylvania that have been suffering for months because of this historic logjam.

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local/state, vernon odom

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