Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
$203M budget draft would see 6.5% tax hike
ROYERSFORD >> With a unanimous vote at the Jan. 22 meeting, the Spring-Ford School Board adopted a $203 million preliminary budget for the 2024-2025 school year that, if unchanged, would raise property taxes by 6.5%.
In addition to approving the preliminary budget, which will be revised several times before final adoption by the June 30 deadline, the board also voted to allow the administration to apply for exceptions to the tax cap, or index, imposed by the state. Citing the financial burdens of special education and contributions to the state retirement fund, the district asked for permission to raise the tax millage by an additional 1.53%.
The vote does not ensure the tax rate will go that high, but merely preserves the option for the administration as it continues to work to reduce the looming tax increase, according to James Fink, the district’s chief finance officer.
“Our goal is always to be at or under the index, which is 5.3% in 2024-2025,” Fink wrote in response to a MediaNews Group query. “A preliminary budget is a starting point, and we spend the time between the preliminary budget and the proposed final budget working to reach that point.”
Fink said the preliminary budget for 2024-2025 calls for spending $12,818,320 more than the budget now in effect.
“Wages and benefits are the most significant piece of any organization like ours; in our case, they account for roughly 70% of the budget yearly,” according to Fink, and this year the district and board will be negotiatdiscussion,” ing a new teacher contract.
“And those conversations typically impact any budget he wrote.
In addition to personnel costs, “special education services, charter schools, transportation costs, and other non-personnel-related drivers comprise the remainder of our budget,” Fink wrote.
There are no plans to cut any educational programs in the preliminary budget.
“The school district follows multi-year planning schedules for curriculum and technology,” he wrote. So, while the district is not adding ‘new’ programs, there will be planned updates to both curriculum and technology.”
The planned $17.4 million renovation and expansion of Spring City Elementary School “has no impact on the 2024-2025 budget,” Fink wrote. “Spring-Ford takes advantage of debt service gaps when considering major renovations, like the
Spring City project or the high school expansion. The business office operates a multi-year planning schedule, can forecast where debt service drops will be, and makes long-term plans to maximize those debt service drops.”
Paradoxically, predicting budget figures from one year to the next can be difficult thanks to Pennsylvania’s school budget timetable which requires a preliminary budget by February, even though the state budget on which so much of all 500 school budgets depend, is not outlined by the governor until February and is often not made public by the legislature until May or June.
“There are challenges,” Fink wrote. “The business office starts planning the proposed preliminary budget four months into the fiscal year and only two months into school year operations, making it difficult to find accurate, usable data to know if the current budget is taking traction.”
And because “the first draft of the state budget doesn’t typically come out until February, it makes it difficult to ascertain what the subsidies might look like,” Fink wrote. “This is an election year, and there may or may not be further discussion of property tax reform. So, there are challenges. Pennsylvania Department of Education extended the special education eligibility age to 22 this year after our school year started, increasing our 2023-2024 special education budget by $622,000 so far. That was a surprise. We can plan more appropriately for 2024-2025, but a mandated change costing the district more than $600,000 was unexpected.”
The next meeting of the school board finance committee, where the public can get a more detailed look at budget talks, is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 13, at 6 p.m. in the district office conference room.