Submitted by Andrew Bowman
On Thursday, April 10th, the West Shore School Board held the first of their two meetings for the month. Unlike most meetings, which are focused on business items that are acted on within the meeting and usually have immediate consequences, this meeting primarily concerned and concentrated on future actions in the form of two information items: The 2025-2026 School Board Budget Report, and Policy 123.2 “Sex-Based Distinctions in Athletics”.
The bulk of the meeting was devoted to the first topic. The discourse on the topic began with a presentation from Treasurer Stevie Jo Boone which laid out the current financial situation the district is in and what can be done about it. As Treasurer Boone explained, the district originally faced a $10 million budget deficit for the upcoming academic year, but through various budget optimizations, the gap has been shrunk to roughly $7 million. In order to make up this difference, the district has three options it can use in various amounts: raise taxes, cut expenses, or use money from the district’s reserves. To that end, three plans were presented, each one defined by the tax increase that residents of the district would face should the proposal be enacted. Plan 1 is the Zero Tax Increase scenario. According to Boone, this is a goal that the district can accomplish whilst still funding the programs required they are legally required to, but it would require serious cuts to a large variety of support staff such as security personnel, mental health support staff, and social workers, and programs such as TechEd, theater/drama, JROTC, and marching band. The full list can be seen below.
This revelation spurred a long discussion on the targets of any budget cuts should the school district need to undertake any. Board member Heidi Thomas pointed out that absent from the list are any administrative staff, which Superintendent Dr. Todd Stoltz and Assistant Superintendent Matthew Gay were questioned about by other board members. While Dr. Stoltz said that he had no good answer as to why such cuts were absent from the list, Mr. Gay indicated that administrative staff made unnecessary by the cuts would likely be axed, and both of them reaffirmed district staff that personnel cuts would only be made as a last resort should equipment and program cuts not close the deficit. This then led into discussion about the long-term effect that this scenario would have on the district’s financial health, as it would require the treasury to lean heavily on the district’s reserves for the 2025-2026 school year and result in compounding lost revenue totaling $45.1 million as the district can only raise taxes by 4.79% each year. If allowed to play out, this scenario could result in the district following in the footsteps of the Cumberland Valley School District, which did not raise taxes for the 2013-2014 school year and is now facing such a tough financial situation that their credit rating was downgraded this year. Due to these factors, Treasurer Boone recommended against this plan.
Plan 2 represents an opposite extreme: full tax increase and minimal district reserve usage. Unfortunately, even in this scenario, the district would still have to make cuts to the tune of $3.2 million, something that could be stalled with the use of the district’s reserves, but with the deficit projected only to grow, this would be unwise as a long-term strategy as it could quickly lead to the depletion of the district’s reserves. That is not to say that such funds couldn’t be used, and Plan 3 offers a mixed approach to pull all three levers in balance with a 3.2% tax increase, $1.4 million in cuts, and up to $3.1 million of reserve money to cover the rest of the deficit. After much discussion, the district members seemed to prefer these options, though they did acknowledge that none of the options were ideal for the residents of the district. This led to a discussion of cybercharter schools, whom use money that the district is required by state law to pay for each student enrolled in the cybercharter schools to fund incentives such as gas cards to get more parents to enroll their students in cybercharter programs, creating a feedback loop draining ever-increasing money from the district.
After this lengthy discussion, attention turned to Policy 123.2 “Sex-Based Distinctions in Athletics”, which can be viewed in its entirety in in this article’s supplement. The policy was written at the last committee meeting, and according to members of the public at the board meeting who gave comments, was rushed through the drafting process, with questions of board members being unanswered. The policy itself attempts to address the frequent right-wing talking point that the acceptance of non-cisgender identities is a clear and present danger to women’s sports, and to that end, creates a set of rules that would prevent a cisgender male who has hit puberty from playing on a team designated for women. There are some provisions for cisgender males, and by extension transgender females to play on teams designated for women, however they come with restrictions on competitiveness and only apply if there is no equivalent alternative for cisgender men. The board stated that this policy will be sent back to committee for a rewrite on April 17th, and noted that the policy will comply with recent executive orders. All public comments at the board meeting opposed the policy, though electronically-submitted comments were mixed.
Opinion
I highly recommend anyone in the district to attend the next board meeting and voice your opposition to the policy to ensure it does not get voted through.