Districts like Butler Area School District are paying attention, with frustration, over the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s failure to pass a budget on time.

Brian White, Butler’s superintendent, addressed the board Monday, July 14, on how the General Assembly missing its budget deadline, and recent federal spending developments, could affect the school’s finances.

Butler Area’s school board passed its 2025-26 budget on June 9. At the state level, legislators are well past the June 30 constitutional deadline to approve a state budget.

“We have to have a budget done by June. We are required to do that,” board President Al Vavro said. “The state and federal governments can play games until they fight each other and argue with each other, and that’s ridiculous. You have a checkbook. How are you supposed to write checks if you have no idea what your balance is? We don’t know, and it’s very frustrating.”

Butler’s approved budget has total expected revenues just under $118 million — $56.4 million of which is projected to come from state sources.

White is critical of state legislators’ inaction, saying it adds a lot of difficulty in figuring out how to pay for existing positions and adds the potential of affecting schools’ savings.

“If that budget is impacted, if we get half a million dollars less from the state, what do we do? What we’d have to do is dip into our savings. That savings is also how we take care of a roof repair. That savings is how we take care of a crack in the sidewalk. That savings is how we take care of security issues,” White said. “So we’re spending money we didn’t plan to spend.”

The board approved the hiring of 20 new employees Monday night, something that White said is “predicated on our budget we passed in June.”

“This is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. This isn’t good governance to operate like this. They had six months to talk about the budget, they waited until late May to start talking.”

At the board’s Monday night meeting, White also addressed how recent federal developments could impact school funds.

He said the district will see secondary impacts, such as cuts to SNAP, that don’t affect the school directly, but impact families.

White also addressed the U.S. Department of Education’s announcement on June 30 it is delaying distribution of Title 2 and Title 3 funding. Butler would have received allocations of around $360,000. Title 2 funds are used to support faculty professional development. Title 3 funds help support English language instruction to students who don’t speak English as a primary language.