For information on submitting an obituary, please contact Reading Eagle by phone at 610-371-5018, or email at obituaries@readingeagle.com or fax at 610-371-5193.
Most obituaries published in the Reading Eagle are submitted through funeral homes and cremation services, but we will accept submissions from families. Obituaries can be emailed to obituaries@readingeagle.com.
In addition to the text of the obituary, any photographs that you wish to include can be attached to this email. Please put the text of the obituary in a Word document, a Google document or in the body of the email. The Reading Eagle also requires a way to verify the death, so please include either the phone number of the funeral home or cremation service that is in charge of the deceased’s care or a photo of his/her death certificate. We also request that your full name, phone number and address are all included in this email.
All payments by families must be made with a credit card. We will send a proof of the completed obituary before we require payment. The obituary cannot run, however, until we receive payment in full.
Obituaries can be submitted for any future date, but they must be received no later than 3:00 p.m. the day prior to its running for it to be published.
Please call the obituary desk, at 610-371-5018, for information on pricing.
It is now October, and the state of Pennsylvania still does not have a budget passed by the Senate and House of Representatives for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
Back in March, Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed a budget of $5.1 billion that included the second round of adequacy funding for schools, which was promised to rectify decades of underfunding of schools in this state. This also was in answer to a lawsuit and court opinion that stated that every child in Pennsylvania deserves a fair and adequate education, which is not happening now. The budget capped cyber charter school tuition at $8,000 per student, which is adequate for online education. Funding was also provided to support public transit. The budget was to be passed by June 30, 2025.
Budget conversations were held in March through July and revealed that the Senate was concerned with the overall cost of Shapiro’s budget. The House passed a budget in July that was $1 billion lower than the governor’s proposal and continued to include the second adequacy installment for underfunded schools, an increase in overall basic education funding, and supported public transit funding by using a higher amount of sales tax revenues toward public transit.
Apparently, this budget did not cut enough funding to make the Senate happy. They passed their budget in August, which was flat with no additional funding for anything, including education, even though they had agreed to fund schools on an ongoing basis to equalize education across the state.
Pennsylvania is $4.5 billion behind in school funding. The Senate passed a transit bill, which would take money from the Public Transportation Trust Fund, which is set aside to pay for capital expenditures such as new train cars or buses. This budget would add no money to equalize education, no cap on cyber charter tuition which receives outrageous amounts of money from local public school district budgets, and no increase in basic education funding, placing PA schools further behind.
The Pennsylvania Senate has failed to keep their promise to the school children of this state.They are failing our communities by withholding their approval for a new and fair budget. Their flat budget proposal places the schools at a deficit and public transportation in a desperate situation. For example, Philadelphia schools have had to borrow $1.5 billion so far to keep their schools running, which will mean they will have to pay $30 million in interest payments.
Other school districts across the state, (the number is unknown) have had to seek lines of credit or loans, such as the School District of Lancaster, taking a $35 million line of credit with the loan costing $200,000 in fees and interest, and Central Fulton School District taking a $7.1 million dollar loan.
Non-profits across the state that rely on public funds are floundering, and public transit is seeing major cuts in services. Fifty-two thousand school children in Philadelphia use SEPTA to get to and from school. How can the Senate know this information and withhold the needed funding from these agencies? This behavior appears to be unethical, mean-spirited, and shows apathy toward the suffering of citizens and the ramifications the General Assembly has created.
Forty-seven states in the USA have passed their 2025-26 budgets. We need the lawmakers in Harrisburg to come together and live up to the court order they were given by the Commonwealth Court to provide funding so that each student in Pennsylvania is offered a fair and adequate education, not just those living in wealthy communities. The students that need the most receive the least. This is wrong and needs to be rectified. It has been too many years that students have gone through various underfunded school systems and failed because their needs were not met due to lack of funding. Reading and math classroom assistants and other specialists were unavailable to them because of budget concerns.
The Pennsylvania General Assembly needs to stand up and do their jobs. They must pass a budget that fully funds our public schools. They must continue to close the gaps in educational funding by passing the 2nd installment of adequacy funding. The General Assembly knows what is lacking and cannot back away from the educational inadequacies that our state has fostered for many years. It is embarrassing for a state-governing body to hold education in such low esteem when it is the most important thing we do for our children and our state’s future. Please do the jobs you were elected to do!
Dr. Myra Forrest is a lifelong educator and former school district superintendent. She is an education advocate at the Pottstown Regional Community Foundation.