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And thus ends Pennsylvania&#8217;s year of the fudge-it budget, not with a decisive denouement, but with the oozing of an open sore.As <a href="https://www.timesleader.com/news/529149/state-budget-finished-not-hardly" target="_blank">an article</a> in the Times Leader pointed out Thursday, even when a final state budget crossed the finish line, there was little final about it. Harrisburg is shelling out money while seemingly playing a shell game.Yes, area school districts got more education money than in 2014-15. But they didn&#8217;t get transportation subsidies, and they&#8217;ve been told some reimbursements owed this fiscal year &#8211; July 1, 2015, through June 30, 2016 &#8212; won&#8217;t come until next fiscal year.Try telling the bank you&#8217;ll be making May&#8217;s mortgage payment in July.Actually, the mortgage analogy works better with the fiasco of the state&#8217;s PlanCon system for reimbursing construction and renovation costs. Districts borrow money, file reams of paperwork and are promised an annual amount from the state. The payments typically coincide with a district&#8217;s repayment of the money borrowed.For reasons not necessary to recount here, the new budget has no money for PlanCon payments. It&#8217;s as if you and your spouse agreed to contribute specific annual amounts toward the mortgage, but your spouse, with no valid excuse, reneges.&#8220;It&#8217;s a promise the state made,&#8221; Hanover Area School District Business Manager Tom Cipriano said. In Hanover&#8217;s case, it&#8217;s a promise made some 15 years ago when the district built a new high school and renovated other buildings. Failing to keep that promise this year will cost Hanover Area $210,000 &#8211; wiping out its extra $194,675 in Basic Education Funding.There&#8217;s also the strange case of Gov. Tom Wolf saying he heartily endorses a new &#8220;fair funding formula&#8221; devised by a bipartisan commission for doling out state dollars more equitably, yet refusing to use that formula with this year&#8217;s money.Wolf instead is using a &#8220;temporary restoration formula&#8221; he claims is necessary to get funding for all school districts back to the levels they were in 2010-11 &#8211; a move the Republican-controlled Legislature has already condemned as likely illegal.Can we say &#8220;enough!&#8221; yet?The posturing has become preposterous, the reasoning irrelevant, and for one simple reason worth stressing: We are deep into the budgeting season for 2016-17.School districts already have, by law, either promised to stay within annual property tax increase limits or started the steps needed to gain state exemptions to those limits.With the state&#8217;s credit rating downgraded five times in four years, and with area taxpayers enduring repeated risk of school closings due to lack of state money, clearly Harrisburg is in sore need of a reboot. Hit control-alt-delete and start over.Though the 2015-16 budget still limps incomplete to its inconclusive end, it&#8217;s well past time to shovel the dirt and write the epitaph both sides should embrace:&#8220;Lesson learned; never again.&#8221;

Our Opinion: Fallout from Pennsylvania budget battle continues to disrupt school finances; for shame!