Rocket Report

Rocket Families and Staff,

We’re launching a new regular email, “The Rocket Report,” to help all families, staff, and residents stay updated on important school district operations, including the budget, assessment results, major facility projects, and more. These updates will be shared via email and also posted on our website to ensure broad, transparent access to accurate information.

Not everyone can attend School Board or Committee meetings, but we believe everyone deserves to be informed. Our goal is to provide consistent, clear communication so you understand the challenges, opportunities, and decisions facing our district. We also welcome you to read the School Board Meeting and Board Committee Meeting Minutes available on our website under About Us – School Board.

Thank you to all who attended Monday evening’s School Board meeting. We appreciate the time you took to be there, and we were truly encouraged by the positive engagement and thoughtful comments from the community. Our students who spoke represented themselves and their peers with great eloquence, passion, and care. Your voices are important and appreciated. When our community comes together with the shared goal of supporting students, we all benefit.

This year’s budget development is particularly difficult. We’re facing a $3 million deficit for the 2025-26 school year. The reality is that our operating costs continue to rise, but our revenues, particularly local tax revenue, have remained relatively flat. In three of the past five years, we have implemented 0% tax increases to lessen the impact on our community. As a result, the district’s five-year average tax increase is just 0.66%, well below inflation, but this approach has significantly drawn down our general fund balance. At the same time, state and federal funding levels remain uncertain.

Our responsibility is to meet the needs of students while being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. That requires hard decisions, thoughtful prioritization, and a willingness to make changes, even when they’re difficult.

Our leadership team and School Board are doing everything we can to limit the impact on classrooms. We’ve already identified $600,000 in non-staffing reductions, trimming back maintenance, transportation, technology, and supply budgets. But staff salaries and benefits make up nearly 70% of our budget. While furloughing staff would be a more extreme step, and one we want to avoid, we are instead taking a hard look at all staffing vacancies from retirements and resignations to see where we can responsibly reduce costs without compromising student experience.

Each position is being carefully evaluated through the lens of student impact, educational programming, and long-term fiscal health. These aren’t decisions we take lightly. It’s about being financially responsible and educationally sound. We remain committed to providing a high-quality educational experience for all students.

We need your voice to help bring fair cyber charter school funding reform to Pennsylvania. Because of this broken funding model, SGASD and other districts are overpaying millions to cyber charters that are spending those dollars on things unrelated to educating students. This drains local education budgets and shifts critical resources away from our students.

It is important to note that this issue is not about limiting school choice. It's about pro-fiscal responsibility. The call for reform is solely focused on ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly and that cyber charter schools are funded based on actual costs.

We have much more information to share with you about this topic and how you can help. Be on the lookout for an email next week. In the meantime, if you’d like to dig into this topic right away and learn how you can help, visit our new webpage, Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School Funding Reform.

Funding a school district is complex, and we know you may have questions about how tax dollars are used, what impacts the budget, and why certain financial decisions are made. We highly encourage you to visit the FAQ section on the Business Information webpage. It provides answers to common questions about property taxes, school funding, and budget planning.

We’ve received several questions from the community through meetings, emails, and other outreach. Below are responses to some of the most common topics:

• Will we have a marching band director next year?
• Yes. While the music teacher who resigned also served as marching band director, these are separate roles. The marching band director position will be filled.

• Will New Salem Elementary lose its PE teacher?
• No. A PE teacher did resign, but we will ensure New Salem continues to have a full-time PE teacher.

Some suggestions we’ve heard regarding a future maintenance facility have included using the ESC (Educational Service Center) or the old Jackson Street building. On the surface, these ideas might seem practical, but unfortunately, neither is a real solution.

• Why not the ESC?
• The ESC is simply not suited for maintenance operations. Converting it would require major renovations, including structural changes, HVAC and exhaust systems, and code upgrades, just to meet basic safety and functionality standards. It would cost more to retrofit the ESC than to build a proper facility, and it still wouldn’t serve our needs well.

• What about the Jackson Street building?
• That location was always a temporary solution. It lacks the access, layout, and efficiency needed for our maintenance team. Like the ESC, bringing it up to standard would require extensive work, and even then, it wouldn’t solve the long-term need for a multipurpose, stand-alone facility.

In both cases, reusing outdated or poorly suited buildings would not only cost more in the end but would result in long-term inefficiencies that hinder our ability to serve students and maintain facilities safely and effectively.