The Butler School Board’s rejection of a student activity fee for the 2011-12 school year won’t necessarily kill the issue forever. No one can predict what a future board might implement amid bad fiscal conditions that are predicted to continue.

Despite the Butler board’s decision Monday evening, activity fees, sometimes known as “pay to play,” seem to be a coming reality — and not an unreasonable one for the future.

While some districts might impose such a fee with no exemptions, most probably will make provisions for waiving or reducing the fee for children of economically disadvantaged families — which is appropriate.

Butler board members had been discussing a reasonable $30-per-activity fee that would have been waived or reduced for students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches.

The fee had been expected to generate $35,000 to $45,000 — not a lot of money but enough to retain two or three of the 18 or 19 paraprofessionals who are scheduled to lose their jobs, based on the district’s proposed 2011-12 budget.

The job of the paraprofessionals in question was to provide reading and math support to children from low-income families.

Federal Title 1 funding for the positions has been reduced over the past three years and, through the just-completed school year, the district had used reserve funds and federal economic stimulus dollars to keep the paraprofessionals on the job.

However, the state subsidy reduction called for in Gov. Tom Corbett’s proposed 2011-12 state budget, coupled with Butler School District teachers’ apparent rejection of Corbett’s call for a one-year pay freeze to help ease the local effects of the subsidy reduction, caused the district to include elimination of some of its paraprofessionals as a means for balancing the district’s 2011-12 spending plan.

Most, if not all, of the paraprofessionals could have been retained if district teachers had agreed to make the salary sacrifice that Corbett is seeking. Instead, members of the Butler Area Education Association apparently have opted to continue standing firm on behalf of their own self-interests, in the process failing to acknowledge the generosity that the school board has bestowed on them, in the current early bird sweetheart deal as well as under previous contract agreements.

Barring a change of attitude, the district’s teachers relegated to the “fiction shelf” the findings of a 2009 national poll that U.S. teachers are more interested in student achievement than their paychecks.

The teachers’ reaction to Corbett’s call for sacrifice — and the challenges that the teachers’ refusal has brought for the district — should be remembered by board members and district taxpayers the next time contract negotiations begin.

This year was an opportunity for the teachers, their union and their union’s leadership to help the district’s financial well-being. Instead, the teachers, perhaps in some cases merely in compliance with their leaders’ directives, agreed to just a halfhearted accommodation by way of a small increase in health care coverage contributions — a mini-concession that received accolades in excess of what it deserved.

The 2011-12 fiscal year will be remembered for the messages it delivered and the priorities that it confirmed.

Unfortunately, the priorities revealed here in some of the school board’s budget decisions, as well as the teachers union position of “never enough,” aren’t what taxpayers, parents and students had wanted to see.

All considered, the proposed activity fee should have been implemented, allowing two or three of the paraprofessionals to continue to help those students who need their skills and special attention.