Keep school district in 161st House District
Under the proposed redistricting maps, voters in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District would be split into three different legislative districts, thereby diluting our voting strength in any newly created separate district. In particular, Swarthmore would be part of Springfield and Media. Those townships are able to finance their school districts in a very different manner from Swarthmore. Specifically, Swarthmore has a very small commercial base, which makes our school taxes highly dependent on the value of our residential property. Accordingly, our small borough regularly lobbies the legislature to remedy this problem by reducing dependence on local funding of public schools. Were Swarthmore subsumed within a district that is "commercially rich" (i.e., a commercially wealthy district that does not rely on residential property values for school funding), Swarthmore's voters' interests would greatly diverge from the interests of the district's other townships. The representative of such a proposed district would never present our interests to the legislature and thus we would not have advocacy in Harrisburg. I urge the redistricting committee to keep the towns and boroughs of our school district together in the same legislative district, the 161st House District. Please do not take us apart.