After years of juggling a dwindling savings account and a growing number of expenses, Cleveland Public School District is asking taxpayers for a levy increase to help pay for its staff and programs.
Come November, district residents will cast their ballots on a referendum question asking voters to increase the school’s operating levy by $750 per student. Should the proposal pass, the district’s existing operating levy of $512 per student would be raised to a total of $1,262 per student and would continue to be adjusted for inflation over the next 10 years.
If passed, the referendum would raise the property taxes on a resident with a $200,000 home value by $210 in 2025.
Preliminary estimates say the referendum would bring in an additional $500,000 in revenues for a school district that is increasingly strapped for cash amid ballooning operational costs. In the 2023-24 fiscal year, school expenditures outpaced revenues by nearly $400,000. Cleveland would have been in a similar position for the current fiscal year, were it not for a $400,000 increase in funding from the state legislature which reduced its preliminary deficit to $61,000.
Since 2022, Cleveland has consistently dipped into its savings to offset costs, but the district won’t be able to continue that same strategy for much longer. By digging into its coffers, the school district has slashed the $2 million general fund balance it held in 2022 to just $840,000 as of June 2024. If nothing is done, the school district predicts its fund balance will be wiped out in just two years.
Cleveland has blamed its current financial woes on inflationary pressures increasing the district’s operational costs. The state’s general education formula, which serves as the primary source of revenue for the school district, has not kept pace with inflation over the past 20 years, falling around $1,300 per pupil short of where it would stand if the formula was automatically adjusted for inflation.
In the wake of the passage of 2018 referendum, Cleveland has also experienced a massive expansion to its facilities and programming with the construction of a 65,000 square foot addition and the implementation of new agriculture, STEM, arts and elementary curriculum. The initiative has contributed to a $2.3 million increase in the district’s expenses over the past four years.
The initiative was a boon to student enrollment at Cleveland. Since 2019, Cleveland added 92 pupils to its student rolls and doubled the amount of students open enrolling in the district. The boost to enrollment has largely balanced the district’s additional expenditures, as the district has received an additional $2.3 million in revenues from the state.
But now, Cleveland’s capacity to boost its revenues by recruiting students is constrained by space. A disproportionate number of the new students joining the district have been concentrated in the lowest grade levels, leading the district to expand to three sections for Kindergarten, two sections for first grade and second grade, plus a combined first and second grade class. However, the Cleveland school building wasn’t constructed with three class sections in mind, limiting opportunities available to add new students.
Without the capacity to add to its enrollment numbers, the district’s alternatives to balance the budget are to make significant budget cuts, raise property taxes through the referendum, or pursue a combination of the two.
“There’s going to be big cuts if this doesn’t pass,” School Board member Andy Jindra said at the district’s May 13, school board meeting. “I think we need to make changes regardless and I think that can be communicated too, but this is going to look different if it doesn’t pass.”
If the referendum fails, Cleveland reported that it would need to eliminate $400,000 from its budget for the 2025 school year, which could impact class sizes, staffing levels, support services, classes and programming.
In Finance Task Force meetings with members of the public over the spring, Cleveland officials considered several ways the district could make necessary cuts. The committee looked at reducing elementary teaching staff and raising class sizes to 25-30 students, cutting academic and social/emotional support programs for struggling students, making cuts to art, music, college in the schools (CITS) and career and technical education (CTE) programs, and eliminating extracurriculars.
“We will not ask taxpayers to pay for wants, only those things that we actually need,” Cleveland School Board Chair Scott Miller wrote in a March 21 notice on the district’s plans for an upcoming referendum. “We hope to maintain what we already have: mental health supports, educational programs, and quality teachers and staff. Without new revenue, we’ll face reductions in staff and programs.”
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