The Butler County Area Vocational-Technical School saw some notable push back on its budget proposal this fiscal year, which could signal that battles are in store for the jointly-operated school’s future funding.

In total, five of the seven districts voted to approve the $7.25 million budget as a board, with Knoch and Seneca Valley School districts dissenting. The 2025-26 budget was ultimately approved in a 48-13 vote by the districts’ school board members, a count tallied at the vo-tech school’s joint operating committee meeting April 3.

The process of approving the vocational-technical school’s budget is a long road for the school’s administrators — its executive director, Regina Hiler, typically speaks with each school district school board individually to go over costs and needs. Knoch and Seneca Valley school board members cited fiscal responsibility as reasons for dissenting the budget proposal. This coming school year’s budget is a 7.59% increase from the previous year.

The school districts’ contributions to the vocational-technical school are also based on how many of their students attend the school, so each district allocates a certain amount from their own budgets to the school.

We’ve raised these questions before: Do some school boards intend on grandstanding every budget season regarding the costs of this contract they approved? And if the budget were in real danger of not passing — if more than two districts planned to vote against it — would boards still vote no?

The cost isn’t going to decrease into the future. The bill isn’t going to become less expensive year over year.

While the vote to approve the vocational-technical school’s budget still earned enough school district and individual school board member votes to be put into effect, the school could face this push back again. After all, members of the two dissenting school boards may not have had their issues cleared up simply because the rest of the districts approved of the budget. Who’s to say they won’t have similar issues when the vote comes around next year?

The vocational-technical school is educating the future trade workers of Butler County — 1,062 students are enrolled from seven school districts.

These school districts should work out their issues sooner rather than later, to ensure their problems with the vocational-technical school are addressed.

John Conrad, the Butler Area School District school board member who heads up the vocational-technical school’s joint operating committee, made a call for these conversations to take place at the group’s most recent meeting.

“If there are issues that are concerning your school boards, and they have concerns about how we are doing things and how we ought to do things, we need to discuss those issues,” Conrad said.

We agree with Conrad in that respect. The issues should be discussed, now.

— ET