Freeport DME

BUFFALO TWP — While incoming seniors carried out a tradition painting their parking spots outside and the football team practiced for the upcoming season, the Freeport Area School District board was inside the high school wondering how bills will get paid.

“I can’t answer your questions on where we get free breakfast,” superintendent Ian Magness said. “We’ve used funding for that for the past five years. I don’t have answers to that without a budget.”

Magness expressed frustration at the board’s Wednesday, Aug. 6, meeting over the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s failure to agree to a 2025-26 state budget, 37 days past deadline.

Freeport Area School District previously passed a $39.7 million budget in June. Of the expected revenue, $16.95 million is expected to come from state sources.

“Even though the federal government finally released title 1 dollars, and this might be the last year that we receive those, those are still being held up by the state because that’s the path it goes through. Why? Because we don’t have a budget,” Magness said.

Magness told the board Wednesday night that, due to the budget impasse, his district has yet to receive $2.5 million it would have expected to get from the state up to this point.

“Our district has not received, as it would by this time, over $2.5 million. Because the state and these folks in Harrisburg are, frankly, falling short of their obligation to provide our kids an appropriate, free public education, and we don’t have any word now as we start school in two weeks,” Magness said.

At the time its 2025-26 district budget was passed, Freeport had a total fund balance of roughly $7.73 million, something Magness said Freeport was fortunate to have as districts with less savings grapple with how to cover things like payroll expenses and other immediate expenditures as the school year inches closer.

“There are districts right now, as we speak, probably in board meetings like this, that are approving TAN’s, tax anticipation notes, because they don’t have the fund balance to simply make payroll, because we don’t have a state budget. They’re going out and borrowing money, taxpayer dollars, to pay interest on that until we get a budget. This is insanity, and it’s unacceptable,” he said.

Magness also pointed to proposed reform of cyber charter funding as an issue causing gridlock in state budget negotiations.

He called the amounts cyber charters have received through funding formula loopholes “outrageous,” and said the district has advocated to “make it a fair playing field,” for public schools.

“We’re OK with school choice. Make it a fair playing field and stop moving the field goal posts,” Magness said. “It’s actually going up this year, so every taxpayer sees $150 our of their tax bill that doesn’t even come into this school to help us provide our education It goes straight out the door to these companies running cyber charter schools with zero accountability.”

Freeport has had to stare down numerous financial related concerns in recent months. The district approved its own $55 million high school renovation by a 5-4 vote.

This occurred at a time when other schools have had to deal with concerns over what role the federal Department of Education would have in providing funds, something board member Christine Davies called “a very serious problem” for her school district and others during Wednesday’s meeting.