The number couldn’t possibly be right, Marc Gosselin thought: $160.

That was the total discretionary budget he was handed as the brand-new principal of Anna Lane Lingelbach Elementary, a public school in Germantown.

That’s all he’d have to pay for a whole year’s books, supplies, staff training, after-school activities, and incidentals — small but important items like postage and pizza parties.

“You can’t even buy groceries for $160, let alone run a school for 400 kids for a year,” Gosselin said.

TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer Principal Marc Gosselin takes a cell phone photo of a missing ceiling panel and leak as he walks the hall at Lingelbach School

For many, Tom Wolf’s election as governor is a turning point, a change that could finally address years of Philadelphia School District cuts so deep that a school has just 40 cents to spend on each needy student.

And though Lingelbach’s situation is the extreme, public schools around the city grapple with similar problems.

On a recent day at Lingelbach, it was plain how much some schools have been left to their own devices.

Coming into the year, Gosselin zeroed in on students’ reading levels — just 42 percent were meeting state standards. He wanted to administer short tests to gauge children’s reading fluency.

“You can’t even buy groceries for $160, let alone run a school for 400 kids for a year. We are so far below just the baseline that you need to run a school.” Principal Marc Gosselin

But there was no money to buy the test — or even paper to copy it. Gosselin, 36, a calm, boyish-looking power lifter, found a few free online resources, and ran them off at State Rep. Stephen Kinsey’s office.

“We had to beg, borrow and steal to do this, but it’s important,” he said. “We need to know how kids are reading in order to design interventions for them.”

And because Lingelbach staff is stretched so thin, Gosselin helped to administer the test himself, sitting with students on Wednesday, flashing them smiles and reminding them to “read quickly but carefully, OK?”

In one first-grade class, a boy sitting across from the principal struggled, stumbling over nearly every word. Where one classmate read 80 words in a minute, the boy read 20.

Typically, that child would work with a reading specialist, but Lingelbach has none. Computer-based interventions are available, but they can’t match what a teacher would provide, Gosselin said.

Some help is on the horizon — when the School Reform Commission canceled the teachers’ contract last month, ordering benefits changes that it said would save $54 million annually, Lingelbach was awarded $46,000 and told to expect more next year. But the cash hasn’t arrived yet, and a court battle over the legality of the SRC’s move means payments promised for February and April are iffy.

If he got that money, Gosselin said, he’s would begin to buy Google Chromebooks for his students and add after-school help for the ones who struggle. It’s not a reading specialist, he said, but it would be a start.