EXETER \u2014 The Wyoming Area Board of Education introduced its proposed budget for the 2026-27 school year Wednesday. The budget, if adopted unchanged in June, would raise taxes in an attempt to bridge what was identified as an increasingly alarming deficit facing the school district.<\/p>\n
Wyoming Area Superintendent Jon Pollard said the district would continue to research cost savings, but the district was constrained by rising costs what he argued was insufficient state funding<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to work on ways to try to reduce (expenses), but again we\u2019re very limited,\u201d Pollard said after the meeting.<\/p>\n
The proposed budget increases revenue 3.24% over what was budgeted last year to $48.34 million and increases expenditures 3.86% to $49.7 million. This results in a $1.34 million deficit that will in turn diminish a budgeted district fund balance from $3.18 million at the end of the coming 2025-26 school year to $1.84 million at the end of 2026-27.<\/p>\n
The Wyoming Area school board voted 7-1 for introduction. School board member Peter Butera cast the one vote in the negative and later declined comment.<\/p>\n
Tom Melone, whose firm provides business-manager services to Wyoming Area, warned of a possible situation in which revenues routinely fall short of its expenditures. (Last year, the school board voted 5-4 did not impose a tax hike short of the maximum possible and there was a budgeted deficit of $1.01 million.)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re dealing with a (structural deficit) it gets very difficult to make that up at that point in time,\u201d Melone said.<\/p>\n
To help cover the deficit, the Wyoming Area school board is set to increase local revenue, which includes property tax revenue, 4.09% to $26.12 million, or 54.58% of the district\u2019s total revenue. The Wyoming Area school board is set to hike the property tax rate itself an aggregate 4.8% if the budget secures final approval\u00a0 \u2013 though how that tax hike manifests will differ across county lines.<\/p>\n
In Luzerne County, the Wyoming Area tax rate would increase 3.94% to $22.1281 per $1,000 of assessed value. Under this rate, a Wyoming Area resident who owns a home in Luzerne County assessed at $150,000 would have their school district property taxes increase this year $128.69 to $3,397.04.<\/p>\n
In Wyoming County, Wyoming Area homeowners will see their taxes increase 9.86% to $119.4070 per $1,000 of assessed value. A Wyoming Area resident who owns a home in Wyoming County assessed at $15,000 would see their taxes increase $160.74 to $1,791.11. (Homes in Luzerne County tend to have much higher assessed values than their Wyoming County counterparts.)<\/p>\n
Both of these tax bills could be offset by the homestead exclusion \u2013 property tax breaks for farmstead owners and homeowners generally funded by state gambling taxes. Wyoming Area received $820,496 in funding for homestead exclusions last year, which reduced property taxes for each eligible Wyoming Area homeowner in both counties by around $173.<\/p>\n
Melone emphasized the disparity in tax hikes in Luzerne and Wyoming counties is something outside of the Wyoming Area school board\u2019s control. State law imposes a \u201crebalancing formula\u201d on school districts spanning multiple counties that requires tax rates in a district\u2019s different counties adhere to a fixed ratio. The formula takes as inputs the assessed value of a district\u2019s ratable tax base in a county, which is generally determined by county assessors; and the latest market value of that tax base, as measured by the State Tax Equalization Board.<\/p>\n
Together, these rebalanced tax hikes are projected to generate an additional $837,151 in revenue. If the school board were to reverse course and impose no tax hike in the final budget it adopts in June, the Wyoming Area budget deficit would widen to $2.17 million.<\/p>\n
How much help Wyoming Area will receive from Harrisburg to begin to close any deficit remains unclear. The proposed budget currently projects that the commonwealth will allocate Wyoming Area $20.98 million in state funding \u2013 a total that amounts to 43.41% of budgeted total revenue. This figure includes none of the increases in education funding Gov. Josh Shapiro requested from the General Assembly with his proposed budget in February. Melone projected that if the General Assembly were to accede to the governor\u2019s full request, then Wyoming Area\u2019s state funding would rise $441,790 to $21.43 million.<\/p>\n
Melone noted that the state share of Wyoming Area\u2019s total revenue trails far behind other schools in the Wyoming Valley, some of which get the majority of their funding via Harrisburg.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can do your own math, if that (state revenue share) number even approached 50%, what that would do to our spending plan,\u201d Melone said.<\/p>\n
Any gains in state funding or tax revenue would have to help handle a set of growing expenses. Salaries are set to increase 2.64% and benefit costs will rise 6.63% to $19.05 million and $14.04 million, respectively. The large majority of the latter expense increase is driven by a 14.17% hike in healthcare expenses.<\/p>\n
Wyoming Area is also facing steep hikes in the tuition it pays to cyber charter schools, which has more than tripled to $2.83 million since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
Tax Trends<\/p>\n
The tax increases in this year\u2019s budget are part of a longer trend. If a 4.80% aggregate tax hike is included in the final 2026-27 budget, Wyoming Area school board will have enacted a tax hike on its Luzerne County homeowners every year for at least the last 16 years; and a tax hike on its Wyoming County homeowners every year for 13 of the last 16 years imposing the equivalent of 3.34% and 3.24% tax hikes in Luzerne and Wyoming counties, respectively, each year, outpacing the annually compounding CPI inflation rate across the U.S. of 2.68% in that time frame.<\/p>\n
The need to continually increase taxes is being driven by the long-term erosion of the Wyoming Area ratable tax base. According to Melone\u2019s presentation, the Wyoming Area tax base has declined from an assessed value of approximately $1 billion in the 2015-16 school year to a projected assessed value of $984.58 million in the 2026-27 school year. Melone estimated that the compounding effects of tax-base erosion has cost Wyoming Area a total of $4.04 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know this quite candidly is a story that we constantly hear, but it is part of the issues that we deal with,\u201d Melone said.<\/p>\n
Citing its relatively low state funding, Pollard argued that the state officials were not fulfilling its obligation under the seminal 2023 ruling from the Commonwealth Court on fair school funding for disadvantaged schools.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would argue that (fair funding) wasn\u2019t fully accomplished,\u201d Pollard said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXETER \u2014 The Wyoming Area Board of Education introduced its proposed budget for the 2026-27 school year Wednesday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[227,182,803,139,28,178,180,179,802,4488,4489,804],"class_list":["post-199312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-education","tag-local-news","tag-luzerne-county","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-cvc","tag-west-pittston","tag-west-wyoming","tag-wyoming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}