That sound you heard last week across Pennsylvania was a collective "phew" from school administrators who have been setting their budgets in the dark for far too long.

For years, they have been unable to predict just how much money they could count on getting from the state.The school-funding process lacks "consistency, predictability, sustainability, adequacy and fairness," wrote former Solanco School District Superintendent Martin Hudacs in an LNP op-ed in March.Now there's hope in sight, and for that, we laud the bipartisan, 15-member Basic Education Funding Commission.The proposed formula would award funding based on a district's number of students. It gives funding boosts for poverty (measured both by severity and concentration in a school), students with limited proficiency in English, and a district's charter school enrollment.The formula also takes into account each district's ability to raise local tax revenues, a district's median household income, and the difficulty of realizing economies of scale in sparsely populated rural districts. It's a sound and transparent formula, and we hope the General Assembly passes it as part of the budget process this summer.For now at least, we're just pleased that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle came together to write this badly needed school-funding formula.Affluent districts have been able to weather the budgeting uncertainty by simply drawing more from their richer tax bases. But this has left Pennsylvania with the worst school-funding disparities in the nation.According to The Washington Post, per-pupil spending in Pennsylvania's poorest districts is 33 percent lower than in the wealthiest ones.No one wants to force the wealthier districts to spend less if their taxpayers are happy to provide local revenues, Democratic state Rep. Mike Sturla says. Rather, the goal is to "raise the bottom up."This seems to be the right approach.We also think the commission's recommendation that new school funding not be subject to a provision known as "hold harmless" is sensible.Under "hold harmless," no school district gets less than it did the year before.School superintendents here, whose growing districts stand to get more funding under the proposed formula, want to see the "hold harmless" provision eliminated. The commission acknowledges there might need to be a transitional period, so that districts with falling student numbers have time to adjust to their new reality.The important thing is that this proposed formula, over time, will make our school-funding system much fairer.The Basic Education Funding Commission also included in its report a list of recommendations for the General Assembly. Among other things, the commission would like lawmakers to create incentives to encourage school districts to consolidate (500 districts is just too many).We found the recommendations compelling, and urge you to read the commission's full report online.And urge your lawmakers to adopt the proposed school-funding formula for the children all children of the commonwealth.Lancaster Online