With district leadership citing continued financial concerns, East Aurora District 131’s school board has voted to put a tentative $272.4 million budget for the coming school year on display for the public to review — with plans to adopt a final budget in September.
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Accounting for an estimated $265.6 million in revenues for the year, the district is expected to be about $6.8 million short of what it plans to spend.
Alongside the budget, the district is also talking about cost-cutting measures for the present and future, particularly as enrollment is on the decline.
The budget that was approved by the school board Monday for public review — in advance of it being voted on next month — is for the fiscal year that began on July 1 and extends through June 30, 2027.
The district’s total estimated expenses amount to about $272.4 million, according to the tentative budget.
A little over half of that is set to go toward salaries, and another 14% toward benefits, per the budget. The rest is slated to go for things like purchased services and supplies and materials.
Those figures do not include $9 million in planned capital projects, which are slated to be funded through the selling off of lease certificates, according to a district presentation.
On the revenue side, the district is expecting to bring in about $265.6 million for the 2026-2027 year.
The district is primarily funded by the state, which provides about two-thirds of its total revenue. The rest is slated to come from local and federal sources.
At the district’s school board meeting on Monday, Associate Superintendent and Chief Financial Officer Michael Engel pointed out that one source of trouble when it comes to the district’s revenues is a recent shift in its designation from the state for the Evidence-Based Funding grant program.
East Aurora had long been deemed a Tier 1 district for the Evidence-Based Funding grant program, but last year was adjusted to Tier 2.
Evidence-based funding, or EBF, became law in 2017. Essentially, the Illinois State Board of Education combined multiple grant programs for school districts into one and now distributes it as “evidence-based funding.” The goal of the program is to provide equitable funding for districts in low-income communities and help them achieve adequate funding levels.
The funding relies on a distribution formula with tiers ranging from 1-4. A lower tier designation indicates that a district needs and receives more state assistance, according to the state board.
Engel said state grant funding has remained flat, while the amount of federal funding the district has been receiving has been on the decline in the past few years.
As for local revenue sources, Engel said things like property tax abatements and foregoing levying the full amount it is able to has cost the district around $21 million since 2008 — a claim which board member Annette Johnson took issue with at the meeting, saying the district wouldn’t have had the same levels of property tax base growth if it hadn’t brought the tax levies down.
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In total, the district is currently expecting a shortfall of about $6.8 million between its estimated expenses and projected revenues for the 2026-27 school year.
The district has “very healthy fund balances,” Engel said at the meeting, and deficit budgets in recent years have been common in school districts. Nevertheless, he said, the district needs to focus on reining in the budget, particularly as enrollment has gone down.
Some of those efforts have already begun, he pointed out. For example, the district has already saved around $7 million from staff retiring and not replacing retirees with new hires, Engel said.
Future efforts to solve the district’s financial issues include things like bringing paraprofessionals back in-house and securing grants, according to Engel’s presentation.
“We have to take everything into consideration and consider the entire ball of wax,” East Aurora School District Superintendent Bob Halverson said at the meeting on Monday. “How are we going to right-size to make sure that that fund balance isn’t depleted, so we can continue to serve our students in the most effective and efficient way, while honoring our taxpayers at the same time?”
According to Engel’s presentation, student enrollment in the district has declined by over 17% from 2018 to 2025. All the while, the number of district staff members has increased.
Some of that increase in staff came from the need to provide “wraparound services” in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Halverson said at a school board meeting in July. But continuing that level of staffing, Halverson stated, is “not fiscally responsible moving forward.”
The tentative budget is available for viewing online and in-person at the district’s Administrative Center, at 310 Seminary Ave. in Aurora, from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., per the district.
The public hearing for the budget is slated for the school board’s Sept. 21 meeting, at which the budget is also set to go for final approval by the board.