Littlestown Area SD highlights special-education aide, in-house security and records digitization as budget priorities

Staff member 1, a district staff member, presented priority budget requests to the Littlestown Area SD board focused on staffing for special education, adding an in-house security officer, equipment replacement and a document-digitization project.

The most immediate personnel request was for a teaching assistant to support a high-school emotional support classroom. “These are just requests that rose to the top of priority,” Staff member 1 said. Staff member 3, who described classroom operations, said the emotional support room serves students with behaviors that impede learning and that students “might be there 15, 20 minutes. They may be there an hour until [the teacher] gets them into a mindset of learning again.”

The presenters said the number of students moving up from eighth grade and exact caseload figures were not specified at the meeting. Staff member 3 explained the role of the assistant: to help with behavior monitoring, redirection, note-taking and test-taking so the teacher can both run the emotional-support classroom and participate in regular education instruction. District staff noted there are “higher tier classrooms” that require more one-on-one and small-group support and that, with rising enrollment in some cohorts, the current single-teacher staffing model is “no longer sustainable.”

District staff also flagged a staffing change tied to external funding: the contract for a security officer funded by the PCCB grant ends this year. “The PCCB grant ends this year, so does our contract end,” Staff member 1 said. The presentation said the district would have to “bring that in house” to keep a second security officer on payroll after the grant expires; staff added that the PCCB funding historically supported one security officer and that additional PCCB funds for 2025–26 were not guaranteed.

On potential funding, a district speaker said adding a full-time site security officer to payroll would have ongoing costs and observed that “if we commit to adding a site security officer, it would be very responsible for us to add a tax increase to cover” the position. The board did not take a formal vote on any tax action during the discussion; funding sources for the new positions were described as under review.

Operational requests included establishing a multi-year replacement cycle for maintenance equipment and uniforms, with staff noting several major pieces of maintenance equipment will approach end of life in the next three to five years. Staff member 1 described that planning as intended to avoid service interruptions by replacing equipment before it fails.

District leadership also proposed a district-wide document-management and digitization project. Staff member 1 said cost estimates were not yet determined and that the district must decide whether to digitize records only going forward or to pursue retroactive digitization of historical documents as well. The meeting included a reminder that student records retention may be long-term: “student records, I believe, [are kept] 99 years,” Staff member 1 said; staff treated that as a retention requirement mentioned in the discussion and noted the storage and access implications.

No formal motions or votes were recorded on these budget priorities in the transcript provided. Board members and staff discussed the need to identify revenue to sustain recurring personnel costs and to refine student-count data and cost estimates before returning with formal budget proposals.

Looking ahead, staff said they will refine head counts, clarifying thresholds for special-education classroom sizes and complete cost estimates for equipment replacement and document digitization before bringing specific budget actions back to the board. The district did not specify timelines or dollar amounts for the requests during the recorded discussion.