DV school board passes budget

The Delaware Valley School District School Board voted on a 2024-2025 DVSD general fund budget reflecting a 3.5% tax increase at a meeting Thursday night, May 16, with seven members voting yes and two voting no.

The final proposed budget was set at $96,891,560. The public can review the budget on the school district’s website and submit comments for roughly 30 days after its passage.

According to the budget, the net tax increase based on the median home rate will be about $24. The tax increase was expected to be 3.9%, but two unexpected resignations of veteran teachers allowed the district to reduce the tax increase to 3.5%, Superintendent Brian Blaum said.

Along with fellow board member Derek Smith, Carl Will voted against the budget because he said the tax increase would deal a blow to business owners in the region. “On a commercial tax bill, this could be $1,000, $1,500, maybe even more,” Will said. “This is just too much for them.”

Acknowledging that it may be an unpopular suggestion, Will suggested using the $138,000 spent on adult education for additional instructional assistant support because adult education is “not necessarily something that we need to be spending money on.”

Secretary William Hessling said the expense for adult education is offset by revenue from tuition charged based on participants in the program and reimbursements.

“We try and make that totally break even,” Hessling said.

Board President Pam Lutfy said she was “glad to see that it does break even” because supporting lifelong learning is a part of the district’s mission statement.

Board member Jack Fisher said that after looking at expenses carefully, he concluded the budget was done “exceptionally well.”

“Cutting anything from this budget I think would just work against the idea that we want to be the number one school district in the state or ... in the country,” Fisher said. “You don’t do that by just arbitrarily keeping your budget the same as it was the year before.”

Board member Christine Agron said the district is “getting hit with the same inflation everybody else is,” adding, “It’s not something we do lightly, and we do understand the impacts that it has on our taxpayers and certainly on the local businesses.”

The district has “whittled down” excess spending on items like PSSA snacks over the years, board member Jessica Decker said. “If there are ways to get the tax increase down, I’m all ears, but I don’t believe that there’s any way to do that without cutting programs, and I don’t support cutting programs.” Decker said the board did not increase the tax last year because they “did not feel that the community could handle it.”

“We can’t have a zero [percent increase] forever without cutting programming and I think it would be a huge disservice to our students if we had a zero this year or if we went anywhere less than the 3.5% proposed,” she said.

If a plan by Governor Josh Shapiro goes into effect, it is possible that the school district could receive more money, board member Rosemary Walsh said. However, the money is not a guarantee. “I think we need to be cautious and try to do the best we can here with the information that we have at the moment,” she said.

The board needed to have the budget finalized Thursday because it must be before the public for at least 30 days and be adopted by June 20.

“There’s, unfortunately, not a lot of leeway,” Agron added.