MILL HALL — Keystone Central School District Superintendent Dr. Francis Redmon offered comments regarding the state budget passed and signed by Gov. Josh Shapiro last week.

The $50.1 budget, which was approved Wednesday after four months of being at an impasse, includes an increase in education funding in some areas. Though, according to Redmon, some may not have as large of an impact on KCSD as hoped.

Following the passage, Spotlight PA reported the budget included a $178 million reduction in public districts’ reimbursements to cyber charter schools.

According to Redmon, the district is waiting on further information about this adjustment.

“We do not yet have enough information about what those reforms will look like to know exactly how that will impact our budget this year, although we do anticipate some decrease in our costs for cyber charter school payments,” Redmon said.

Last year, the district spent roughly $7.6 million on payments for students located within the district’s boundaries who elected to attend a cyber charter school, according to Redmon.

The budget also included more than $500 million in new funding for the poorest schools to help close an “adequacy gap.” KCSD was one of these schools identified in a lawsuit in 2023.

Redmon said the district is seeing a 0.33 percent increase — about $314,000 — in funding for its three largest funding areas. These areas are Basic Education Funding (BEF), Special Education Funding (SEF) and Adequacy Funding (ADQ). Though increased funding is good, Redmon said it won’t be able to keep up with inflation.

“The small increase from the state is far outweighed by the typical inflationary increases. In speaking to legislators, what I heard is that there is an expectation built into the state funding system, that is, increases in local taxes are used to offset increased costs,” Redmon told The Express. “While there are significant increases in Adequacy Funding this year, and many districts benefit from this, KCSD received only a very small portion of that increase.”

Redmon explained each of these three areas makes up the vast majority of state funding for KCSD and is a combination of “base” funding and “dynamic” funding.

“The base amounts of each of these are set; we receive at least this base amount every year. Note that last year, the state “reset” the base to a new level. The dynamic portion of the three funding areas is determined by formulas, one for each area,” he said. “The formulas are a combination of factors, containing things like our tax rate, the number of students we have, median household income, the proportion of households living below the federal poverty level, and many more.”

Other areas the district receives funding for are transportation, PSERS (the state retirement system), Safety and Security, Facilities grants and others.

According to Spotlight PA, the budget includes $125 million for school facilities and $100 million for school mental health and safety, but otherwise only boosts the state’s general school district subsidy by $105 million, or 1.3 percent.

Though funding isn’t quite to the level hoped, Redmon said the district is glad the budget has reached a conclusion after four months.

“We are very happy that the budget impasse is over, and the state’s budget has been passed,” he said.