Pittsburgh Public Schools officials are expected to propose a $735.9 million budget for 2025, barring any cuts to programming or school closures.
District leaders gave school board members an early look Monday at next year’s budget, which will be formally presented to the board next month.
The $735.9 million budget — a 2.64% increase from 2024’s adopted budget — could shrink if schools are closed and staff positions are cut. But chief financial officer Ron Joseph said he didn’t want to base the preliminary budget on forthcoming decisions about the district’s footprint.
School board members will hear consultants’ final recommendations for possible school closures and grade reconfigurations on Tuesday, Oct. 15. No vote to consider or enact those recommendations has been scheduled.
“I think it would be foolish to build a budget based on actions that have yet to be voted on,” Joseph said.
Yet many have clamored for any information about the financial impact of the school closure scenarios under consideration. Initial recommendations presented by consultants with Education Resource Strategies, a Boston-based firm, included permanently closing nine school buildings and repurposing seven more, in addition to phasing out magnet programs and restructuring grade configurations.
PPS superintendent Wayne Walters told WESA that “there will be a financial impact that would benefit students,” though he did not offer any specifics.
The district is expected to close out 2024 with an operating deficit of $834,623 — far lower than the $30 million deficit projected when school board members first adopted the budget.
The projected 2025 budget would include a slightly smaller deficit of $23.3 million. The remaining fund balance, at $28.7 million, would not comply with the board’s fund balance policy, which requires a fund balance equal to at least 5% of projected expenditures.
Joseph’s figures did not include any tax increases, though he said the district could reduce its deficit by approximately another $10 million if taxes are raised by 5.3%, the maximum amount the state will allow for PPS.
The district is forecasting local and state revenues that remain relatively constant in 2025, with savings created by reimbursements for and recent changes to the state’s calculation of cyber charter school tuition. PPS is also projected to bring in an additional $12 million in earned income tax, despite declining real estate tax revenue due to property assessment appeals.
District officials plan to budget close to $8 million — a $4 million increase — for property tax refunds. Joseph said the district has paid $8.1 million in refunds so far this year.
2025 also marks the first year PPS will not have federal COVID-19 relief funds to depend on. The district had until the end of September to spend $100.2 million in federal pandemic aid from the American Rescue Plan, the last in a series of COVID-19 stimulus packages that bolstered district revenues for the last few years.
The district committed more than $4 million to mitigate student learning loss through tutoring and after-school partnerships. As of April, $17 million had been allocated to improve the district’s facilities, including air conditioning installations and the construction of an aqua-therapy pool for students with multiple disabilities.
“We wanted to be deliberate in terms of lessons that we learned from the past to not build in recurring expenditures,” Joseph said.
At least another $23 million was spent to maintain services and pay salaries. But with those federal funds used up, district superintendent Wayne Walters says school leaders are evaluating the effectiveness of some programs.
“We have been thinking about that not only for our programs, but our curriculum, through our thinking about the data that we're looking [at] and what we're seeing from the impact of that data,” Walters said.
The superintendent said the district is examining the impact of removing certain programs and enlisting outside providers, as well as the impact of funding or supplementing programs in other ways.
