Charles Suppon has big plans for the Tunkhannock Area School District. 

At any given time, the northeastern Pennsylvania district’s chief operating officer can rattle off statistics about fields in which its schools excel: arts, AP classes and softball, as well as on-the-job training programs for future farmers, welders and more. Goats and chickens roam the high school’s courtyards, where students also tend to koi fish; in the hallways just beyond, high schoolers tinker with tractors, build furniture to sell and offer free tax services for the broader community.

But Suppon speaks with vigor when he talks about the five-megawatt system he hopes to install across five solar arrays on the district’s buildings and surrounding property. The solar panels will heat the district’s pool and serve as the basis for new curricula and jobs training classes on the solar industry. For a rural district of around 2,000, Tunkhannock is punching above its weight class, he believes. 

“We’re a smaller school district doing big things.” 

Suppon’s district is in a bright red portion of Pennsylvania northwest of Scranton, narrowly outside one of the state’s more prolific natural gas regions. For him, solar is simply a pathway toward cost savings—just as natural gas, from which the district earns royalties off several leases, has been. Tunkhannock believes it could save upwards of $1 million a year by switching to solar, money that could be used for student initiatives. 

“It was always a financial decision,” Suppon said. “We wanted to be able to offset our energy costs, produce our own energy, and only pay distribution [fees] back to the grid.”

There’s one catch: Tunkhannock’s plan to go solar is contingent upon winning more than $1 million in funding from the state’s Solar for Schools program. Currently in its inaugural year, Solar for Schools was born from a bill that faced an uphill battle in a legislature where environmental bills often die by attrition—a battle that required its creator, progressive Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia) to reach across the aisle and help marry what are often competing interests in the state—labor, education, and climate.

But that money for Tunkhannock might not come through because of the stiff competition for the limited funds. While last year’s state budget gave the Solar for Schools program $25 million to disperse to school districts, the program received applications that add up to nearly four times that amount from schools and districts large and small, rural and urban, and conservative and liberal. 

“I was pleased, but hardly surprised,” Fiedler said in an email to Capital & Main of the demand.

The disparity between the grant program’s budget and the size of its application pool mirrors a broader reality within the state Legislature: Despite clear and growing demand for solar energy, the political will to meet it has yet to catch up. 

A 2022 poll of more than 1,300 Pennsylvanians conducted by Vote Solar Action, an advocacy group urging pro-solar legislation at the state level, found that 65% of Pennsylvanians support large-scale solar farm development in the state. More than 80% said they support rooftop solar, while 73% support natural gas and 52% support coal. 

“I [have] visited nearly every corner of the state, from Waynesburg to Bethlehem, and in every place I met folks who wanted to save money on electricity, create good local jobs, and preserve the beauty of their communities,” Fiedler said. 

Yet the state lags far behind most others in solar development: Pennsylvania currently ranks 49th in the nation for its........

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