Lower Dauphin School District

Budget Information

Lower Dauphin property owners did not see an increase in their taxes for the  2023-24 school year in the budget approved June 12, 2023.

The $77,210,000 budget held the line on taxes and keep the millage rate at 18.97, which means that a home with an assessed value of $100,000 pays $1,897 in property taxes.

The district was planning to use $5,425,000 from its fund balance to supplement the district’s revenue sources. Using that much from the fiscal reserves will leave $9,497,247 remaining in the district’s rainy day fund.

The budget was challenging with revenue showing growth but still lagging behind the pace of expenditures. Local revenue sources, which include property taxes and earned income taxes, are budgeted to increase 5.98 percent or $2,461,873. The district receives the bulk of its revenue through property taxes and the property tax line grew 3.5 percent from the previous year.

Other factors impacting the budget come on the expenditure side, where the district continued to see increases in state-mandated tuition payments to charter schools and medical costs. Charter school tuition payments are projected to increase $150,000 for next year, resulting in a $2.3 million line item (for reference, costs for charter schools in 2019-2020 were $1.48 million). Medical benefits totaled more than $7.8 million in the 2023-24 school year (for reference, costs for medical benefits were $5.4 million in the 2019-2020 school year).

Overall, the spending plan for 2023-24 represented a 4.34 percent increase over the 2022-2023 budget.

Lower Dauphin Budget (PDE form 2028)