Pennsylvania Funds Mandatory Child Death Review Program at $242,000, Far Below Shapiro's $2.5 Million Ask

Pennsylvania's child death review program is legally mandatory. It's also broke.

The state budget signed this year gives the Department of Health $242,000 for the Child Death Review program, according to Spotlight PA reporting picked up by AP News and ground.news. Gov. Josh Shapiro asked for $2.5 million.

It's less than 10% of the request.

Counties have only reviewed about half of child deaths in Pennsylvania since 2020, per the same reporting. This is a program state law requires. Counties are supposed to review deaths to figure out what went wrong and stop it from happening again. Without money, that legal mandate is just a suggestion.

An Unfunded Mandate, Officially

This isn't a new problem. An East Stroudsburg University evaluation flagged the program as an "unfunded mandate" back in 2024, citing insufficient state-level support for counties trying to do the reviews.

Policymakers have known about this for at least two years. The budget passed this year still didn't fix it.

Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children's Justice, called the $242,000 figure "an insulting number." Hard to argue with her math. If the ask was $2.5 million and lawmakers landed at under a quarter-million, something got gutted in negotiations.

State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman offered the other side. Future funding increases require "accountability that tax dollars are being used efficiently." That's a fair point in the abstract. Nobody wants to hand a state agency a blank check. But there's a difference between demanding accountability and starving a legally mandated child-safety program down to a token line item while half the required reviews go undone.

Gov. Shapiro's spokesperson, Rosie Lapowsky, acknowledged the number reflects compromise in divided government. Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor, a Democratic-controlled state House, and a Republican-controlled state Senate. Nobody got what they wanted. In this case, the thing nobody got enough of was money to find out why kids are dying.

Christina Phillips, a retired Department of Health employee, told Spotlight PA the real bottleneck isn't just cash, it's data access. "A review is only as good as the information that you have at the table," she said, pointing to the difficulty counties have obtaining victims' medical records. Advocates are pushing lawmakers to combine the Child Death Review program with Act 33, another child-welfare reporting law, to build a more comprehensive system instead of patching the current one piecemeal.

The Lead Testing Rollback, Buried in the Same Budget

While that fight played out publicly, a separate change got slipped into the final 48 hours of budget negotiations with far less scrutiny, according to Spotlight PA's reporting for the Shenandoah Sentinel.

Pennsylvania schools were previously required to report any detected lead level above zero in drinking water to the state, which posts the results publicly. The new provision raises that bar. Now schools only have to report levels above five parts per billion.

Lead has no known safe exposure level for children. That's the established science on lead toxicity that advocacy groups like Pe

Environment cite regularly.

Several statewide associations representing school boards and administrators pushed for the change, arguing the old zero-tolerance reporting standard was unrealistic without more state funding to support testing and remediation. That's a legitimate operational complaint. If schools don't have money to act on results, an aggressive reporting mandate without resources behind it just generates paperwork nobody can fix.

But David Masur, executive director of Pe

Environment, said the fix makes the underlying problem worse, not better. "It means a lot of parents will be in the dark," Masur said, "and every day we know there will be kids out there drinking school water with lead in it even though we know that lead is unsafe at any level."

Masur has history with this law. He was among those who flagged years ago that the Department of Education was misapplying the original 2018 statute, telling districts to report only levels above 15 parts per billion instead of the zero-tolerance standard actually written into law. The department didn't correct that error until recently, per Spotlight PA's review of internal emails.

Schools still aren't required to test for lead at all. They only have to discuss the topic once a year at a public meeting. Testing itself remains voluntary under Act 39 of the Public School Code, passed in 2018.

Two Programs, One Pattern

The Child Death Review shortfall and the lead-reporting rollback moved through the same budget process, negotiated behind closed doors in a divided legislature. Both reflect a pattern where Pennsylvania passes child-safety mandates then declines to fund or enforce them adequately.

What happens next depends on whether lawmakers revisit either issue before the next budget cycle. Advocates want the Child Death Review program merged with Act 33 reporting requirements to build one coherent child-safety data system instead of two underfunded, disconnected ones. No legislative vehicle for that merger has been introduced yet, according to the available reporting.