Leechburg schools predict no tax increase next school year

Leechburg Area School District will introduce no tax increase for next school year, district officials said this week, and there will be no budget deficit thanks to the availability of emergency covid funding.

District officials last week presented the preliminary budget for the 2021-22 school year of more than $14.6 million.

The budget’s lack of a revenue shortfall relies heavily on the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) II funds. That’s part of the federal CARES Act focused on assisting schools during the pandemic, said Deana Turner, director of business affairs.

Without the ESSER funds, she said, the district would have a revenue shortfall of $1.1 million.

Turner said the district didn’t gain significant revenue this school year, citing declining property values in the area.

“We’re not a large school district that has infrastructure or homes being built,” she said during a Wednesday school board meeting. “That’s a challenge that I see moving forward as well in the district.”

Further, Turner said the district’s expenses continue to increase — like contractual salary and health insurance increases, for instance. But state subsidies are not increasing, and there is little additional revenue coming in from new businesses or real estate.

Turner said the district has a “stale tax base.”

This is nothing new, she noted. Last school year, the district had a deficit of more than $711,000.

Turner highlighted a number of budget uncertainties in her presentation.

As in many other districts, the pandemic’s economic impact on local tax collection and subsidy payments could hurt the district’s revenues, as well as declining district enrollment and increasing cyber-charter enrollment.

The district also is grappling with uncertain special education costs as students move in and out of the districts, Turner said.

Superintendent Tiffany Nix stressed the ESSER funds are one-time grants allocated by the state — not something the district can rely on in the long term.

“They stress the fact that these are one-time … gifts, and they’re telling us not to balance the budget with this money, because you’re never getting it again,” she said. Next school year, Nix said, “if we don’t raise taxes or if we don’t find different ways to create revenue, when that money goes away two years from now, we’re going to find ourselves $1.5 million in debt, which is a giant deal for a budget our size in this community.”

Leechburg Area schools will receive about $711,000 in ESSER II funds, Turner said, which will be allocated mostly toward salary and wages.

Nix said the district is also projecting to receive about $1.4 million in a third allocation of ESSER funds, 20% of which must be used to address remediation issues in the pandemic.

All of the money must be used by 2024, Nix said. The district has not been notified when ESSER III money will be available.

Nix said no concrete plans have been made for what the third allocation of ESSER funds will be used for, but there are discussions about buying new teaching software to help students catch up on instructional loss and potentially hiring teachers just for the length of the grant for the sole purpose of remediation.

ESSER III also can be used for one-time expenditures for long-term repairs, Nix said. The district potentially could use some of the money for replacing the high school’s aging boiler or updating playground equipment for social distancing, for example.

“It’s all these different pieces of the puzzle, putting it together,” Nix said. “As you see, if we didn’t have (the ESSER funds), we’d be $1 million dollars in debt.

”I refuse to come to you next year and say, now we’re $2 million in debt. We have to use this money very wisely. We need to project in the future as to what we think we need, and then choose what we’re going to use it on.”

Turner said the final budget will be approved in May.