Up until 2005, my wife and I had worked hard and built our own business in order to save for our retirement as well as purchase three properties: one as our primary residence, one for vacations at the Jersey Shore and yet a third for my our aging mother. We have been and continue to pay school property taxes on all three properties, despite the fact that we are only permitted to vote in one district where our primary residence is located. This was fine as long as we continued to work and we were willing to overlook the unfair situation of taxation without representation until December 2005. In 2005, I became severely ill with liver disease due to HepC and was placed on the liver transplant list. I began to receive Social Security Disability after receiving a liver transplant in December 2006. After several months, I returned to work under the trial work period and hired workers to deliver the contracted services I had initiated, so we were able to continue to "work" and fund our retirement accounts up until June 2009, when the business ceased operations due to the economic downturn and the worsening of my medical condition. We had to let four workers go and I was forced to go back on Social Security Disability, which by the way only paid a small fraction of what we previously had earned while working, it has now become our only source of income, other than some interest and dividends income. On a personal note, I was raised in a Catholic family and attended Catholic school from K-12, which was paid for entirely by my parents. I attended the local community college at a cost of $250 per semester, and received an Associate's degree in life sciences which transferred to Temple University pharmacy school. I received grants and student loans to pay for my degree as well as an additional two years for an MBA, all of which I paid for myself. Now we are seeing more and more Catholic schools closing due to increasing costs and decreasing enrollments because parents are not able to afford to pay both their local property taxes and for the private school tuitions. Now we see parents who lack a choice of where they educate their children because the local school districts have a stacked deck against private and parochial schools and we have parents who are faced with ever increasing school property taxes and other expenses while attempting to adjust to a significantly smaller income which has not been increased for two years. Now, in addition to having to pay taxes on properties where we cannot vote, we are having to do so under extremely difficult conditions based upon our increasing expenses and fixed income and continue not to have a choice for those parents who wish to choose a private or parochial school for their children. School property tax reform is now a major priority for us and for many other Pennsylvanians who are on fixed incomes and who have already raised their families.