Trends & peers: what Dallas SD spends and taxes

The budget is a plan. This page shows the audited year-end numbers every PA district reports to the state, ten years of them, and how Dallas compares with its neighbors on both sides of the ledger: what it spends and what it collects. Newest actuals available: 2024–25.

The district’s unassigned fund balance went negative in 2022–23

PDE AFR actuals · years shown below

A district’s unassigned fund balance is the part of its General Fund not already committed or assigned to something, the closest thing to a savings account. Dallas held about $5.0M in 2020–21. Four years later it is negative $9.6M.

Two notes on the measure. This is unassigned balance only: the state file behind this chart reports committed, assigned and unassigned, but not nonspendable or restricted funds, so it is one part of the balance sheet rather than the whole of it. In Dallas’s case the committed and assigned categories are both zero in 2024–25, so nothing shown here offsets the deficit. Figures are in raw dollars; the table view also lists them in 2024–25 dollars.

Spending over ten years, adjusted for inflation

PDE AFR actuals · years shown below · inflation: CPI-U, fiscal-year average

Measure Dollars

Total spending

General Fund expenditures, all categories

Enrollment (ADM)

Average Daily Membership, resident students

Average Daily Membership counts every resident student the district is financially responsible for, including those attending charter and cyber charter schools. A student who leaves for a charter stays in this count, because the district keeps paying their tuition. The decline shown here is therefore a change in the number of school-age children living in the district, not a measure of students transferring out. It also means the per-student figures are consistent: charter tuition is in the spending, and charter students are in the count.

How Dallas compares to its neighbors

PDE AFR actuals · 2024–25 · per-student figures use each district’s ADM

Cost per student across Luzerne County districts (plus Tunkhannock Area, just over the county line), from the same statewide file. The dashed line is the median of all ~500 PA school districts.
Current expenditure is the default here. It excludes debt service and capital projects, so a district part-way through paying off a building does not appear to spend more on students than it does. Total per student adds those costs back in.

The revenue side: tax base and tax rate

PDE aid-ratio & tax-rate files · market value 2023 (STEB) · tax revenue 2024–25 actuals

Why posted millage is not compared here: each county assesses property at a different fraction of market value, so rates are not comparable across county lines. Tunkhannock Area posts 87 mills and Dallas posts 15, but Tunkhannock taxpayers are not paying six times as much. The rate views below instead use equalized mills, which is tax collected divided by market value. That is the method PDE uses.

Who funds the schools: local taxpayers vs. the state

PDE AFR actuals · 2024–25 · share of total revenue by source

Inside the biggest lines: detail the budget PDF does not carry

PDE AFR actuals · 2024–25 · sub-program detail as reported by the district to PDE

The public budget stops at “Regular Programs” and “Special Programs.” The district’s year-end reports to the state go one level deeper. This is that level: actual spending, most recent year available.

Charter school tuition

PDE AFR tuition schedule · years shown below

Dollars

The adopted budget compared with recent actuals

2026–27 adopted budget (PDE-2028) vs. PDE AFR actuals