We’re up against a demographic crunch in central Butler County — in the Butler School District, to be specific — and the community needs to consider adopting a long-term approach to address the crunch before it turns into a crisis.

The district just weathered its biggest one-year dip in enrollment in 14 years, according to the final figures presented to the board.

Deborah Brandstetter, director of business services, said the districtwide enrollment for 2016-17 is 6,583. That’s 287 fewer than the previous year — 6,870 enrolled in 2015-16.

Two years ago the enrollment was 7,093, which means the district has lost 510 students over the past two years — that’s a two-year enrollment decline of 7.2 percent.

It’s part of longer trend of declining enrollment in the district, a reflection of an aging overall population in Western Pennsylvania. Over the past 14 school years, the district lost 1,872 students Brandstetter said.

The declining enrollment is about to affect other sectors of our community, particularly as local employment figures improve and demand rises for entry-level and part time jobs often filled by high school students and recent graduates. Fewer young people will be available to fill these retail and service jobs.

And if few young adults settle and work here, that means fewer of them raise their children here, which leads to still-smaller kindergarten classes in the near future.

And thus the vicious cycle perpetuates itself.

As a community, we must ask: How do we orient our collective outlook to attract young families to live and work in our community? What do we offer to families with children?

Part of that answer must be competent schools. But they must be affordable schools too.

Looking at the raw numbers — a $104.4 million budget and 6,583 students — we’re spending $15,859 per student this year. That’s a lot of money, especially for a retired homeowner on fixed income, who continue paying property taxes even though their children grew up and graduated many years ago.

It’s one of the reasons the prospect of ever-rising property taxes in the face of declining school enrollment becomes so unpalatable to the residents who are left paying the property tax. An aging population finds it hard to justify increasing tax bills and rising faculty and administrative payrolls, especially when their children have grown up, graduated and moved away for any of countless reasons.

It also helps justify the push to rely less on property tax and replace some or all of it with an income or sales tax.

Elsewhere on this page is a letter from school board member Leland Clark, vice chairman of the finance committee, emphasizing the need — and the challenges — to control school budget costs in the year ahead.

Clark’s letter sets a proper tone for a community beset by unique pressures — and blessed with unique gifts as well. We must exercise fiscal restraint — tax dollars are to be collected sparingly and spent reluctantly.

At the same time, we must be willing to look ahead into our community’s future, see where we are heading and make intelligent adjustments to correct our course as much as we can.

That’s called vision. Many villages suffer and deteriorate for lack of it.