“I’m thinking about moving out of Whitehall. I cannot afford another 5.3% increase,” Whitehall resident Patricia Beveridge said during the Whitehall-Coplay School Board meeting April 28.

The board voted unanimously to pass a proposed $103 million budget for the 2025-26 school year. That proposal currently includes a 5.3% property tax increase. While that number is not set in stone at this point, residents are worried.

“What are we gonna do to trim this budget? It’s not fair to struggling families that are struggling to make ends meet every day,” resident LoriAnn Fehnel said.

The district budget includes $59.9 million in local revenue, $34.9 million in state revenue and $1.5 million in federal revenue.

“I asked for a line-by-line budget for each building, each program — anything that can show us where our tax money is going to,” Fehnel said. “At the end of the day, we gotta put these people first. We can’t have people lose their homes because you decided to raise taxes again.”

The district also gets $30,000 in revenue from sales and insurance recoveries, putting the budget at $96.3 million in revenues.

“It’s outrageous and unacceptable,” another Whitehall resident said.

“This board has not even discussed the tax increase as of yet,” school board member George Williams said. “The only activity we had about the tax increase was setting the number for the proposed budget.

“The proposed budget is just a process we utilize to move along the process to then get a presentation from the administration of what the budget will look like with that number or other varieties of tax increases,” he added.

Williams said 5.3% was utilized because that was the highest number they could go for a tax and stressed it is not necessarily set in stone.

“We are going to work on whittling that down,” he said.

On May 12, the administration will present the budget and ideas. They will discuss what would need to be cut to bring the proposed 5.3% down. Williams suggested the meeting be held 5 p.m. and that the finance portion be done last so as many residents as possible can attend.

In other business, the school board appointed a new athletic director for the 2025-26 school year.

Jeff Pukszyn was approved, effective July 1, with a yearly salary of $110,000. Pukszyn previously worked 29 years with the Moravian University football program and was head coach for 12 seasons.

Current athletic director Bob Hartman will be retiring at the end of the 2024-25 school year.