Council Rock finance committee reviews proposed final budget with 2.93% tax increase and multi‑year projections

The Council Rock School District Finance Committee reviewed the proposed final budget for 2025‑26 and a multi‑year projection June 9 that showed deficits increasing if revenue growth trails expense growth.

Tony Rapp, the district’s director of business administration, presented the proposed final budget that maintains current health‑insurance rates and assumes state funding levels available at the time. Rapp said the draft includes a recommended 2.93% real‑estate tax increase for 2025‑26; he noted that the budget does not itemize final contract increases for teachers because collective‑bargaining negotiations were ongoing.

Rapp walked the committee through the revenue and expense assumptions: compared with the prior year the draft budget projects roughly $5 million more in local revenues and about $3 million more in state revenues (largely from retirement and social security reimbursement tied to payroll increases). Total proposed expenditures for 2025‑26 were presented at about $292 million, producing a budgetary deficit of approximately $6.4 million under conservative assumptions.

Rapp then presented multi‑year projections. Under an illustrative scenario in which the district raised taxes 2% in each subsequent year, the projection showed cumulative, widening budgetary shortfalls: roughly $11 million in fiscal 2026‑27, $15 million in 2027‑28 and larger gaps thereafter, with projected negative fund balances in later years if assumptions held. He also showed an alternative using the school funding Act 1 index (a preliminary 3.1% figure for next year), which reduced the multi‑year shortfalls materially but did not eliminate all pressure across the five‑year horizon.

Board members asked clarifying questions about how the budget treats salary increases (Rapp repeated that negotiated raises were budgeted in a contingency rather than included in the professional‑staff salary line) and about the district’s recent pattern of ending fiscal years better than book‑to‑budget projections. Board member Ed Tate and others noted the district historically budgets conservatively and often finishes the year with better actual results than the conservative budget would indicate.

The committee reviewed proposed additional staffing included in the draft budget: two middle‑school literacy specialists, four elementary literacy specialists, partial and full‑time classroom positions at both high schools, and a payroll‑department staffing adjustment. Rapp described the positions as responses to enrollment and program needs and said the budget maps those positions into the proposed expense plan.

The committee scheduled the formal vote to approve the final budget for the board’s June 19 meeting and requested additional materials on multi‑year scenarios and supporting assumptions before that date.

Ending: The committee forwarded the proposed final budget for board consideration on June 19 and asked staff to provide updated multi‑year projections and clarifications about assumptions used in the forecast.