$16,300. This is the cost to educate a single student in the Parkway School District during the 2025-2026 school year. While this number may be shocking now, over the next few years, it will only increase as funding stagnates. This stems not from a single factor only affecting Parkway, but a number of causes that are impacting districts across the nation.

Through March and April, Parkway is holding a series of Community Conversations at each of the four high schools. Meetings have already been held at Parkway West and Parkway South, with future meetings at Parkway North on April 27 and Parkway Central on April 30. These discussions aim to bring awareness to the financial pressures that the district currently faces and the challenges looming ahead.

Currently, costs inside the district are outpacing funding sources. This year, funding gaps are being filled by reserve and reallocated funds as well as sweeping budget cuts. This is unsustainable as the future gap, seen in the graph, only widens by millions of dollars.

“We have a real challenge ahead of us, and it’s not being sugar-coated,” Superintendent Dr. Melissa Schneider said. “If we don’t find another way to supplement our funding, we will have to make cuts [with a] large-scale impact.”

One of the first issues covered at the meetings is how Parkway is keeping its finances in the green this year. Currently, fiscal needs are being met through budget cuts. By lowering school and department budgets in addition to reducing professional development and leaving open job positions unfilled, Parkway has been working to lower operational costs for the current 2025-2026 school year. For students, these decisions can affect their everyday lives. With potential cuts to sports, transportation and other vital parts of school life in the future, no student will be left unaffected.

“There are things that we would love to be able to do. We’d love to have a whole fleet of air-conditioned buses. We’d love to have free athletics, where you don’t have to buy jerseys or extra equipment. But this is the financial reality: if the costs keep going up and our revenues aren’t able to match [them], then we may have to cut things that we all expect to have,” Board of Education President Jeff Todd said.

These budget cuts have already been introduced to departments across the district. Theater teacher Amie Gossett noticed that new budget restrictions have limited the funding for her classroom and the programs within.

“[The district] reduced the amount of money that I have for my classroom budget, [but] any of the money that goes into [extracurricular] theater productions all comes from ticket sales. It’s more so affecting my classroom budget, which [impacts] Theatre Production, Let’s Act Together [and] Broadcast. [Those] all run out of that budget,” Gossett said.

While Gossett says the current cuts have not had a major impact on students, she cautions that continued restrictions may cause issues.

“I think in the future, cuts will definitely affect what can be supplied in the classroom, but right now, with the cuts that they made from last year to this year, I haven’t noticed a significant difference,” Gossett said.

With the cuts in both budget and staff, teachers are facing reductions and even the entire elimination of classes and programs they are able to offer. Furthermore, with a smaller staff, teachers are being handed extra classes in addition to their typical schedule, sometimes in subjects in which they have little to no training or experience.

Another concern addressed at the meeting was the impact of schools on home and property values. The standard of education in a region can strongly influence the property value of surrounding homes. Furthermore, a strong school district brings in more new homeowners, and subsequently more taxes, which fund school operations and programs. However, if funding continues to drop, Parkway may lose the ability to provide the high standard of education that draws in new residents. For Parkway, some of the significant factors impacting the budget issues are rising costs in employee healthcare benefits, supplies and a reduction in funding due to the Senior Citizen Property Tax Freeze. This freeze, which reduces property taxes for senior citizens, is expected to reduce funding for the district by $33.6 million over the next ten years.

“It’s often said that a school is representative of the community around it, and the community is representative of the school district within it. It is a partnership. As schools perform well [in] sports, fine arts [and] academics, it helps increase community property values, and that helps homeowners, no matter if they have students in schools or not. For people that have kids in the district, it makes it that much more desirable for them to keep their kids in the district,” Todd said.

School districts carry the power to raise property values and bring communities together, but if they lack the funding to provide these opportunities, the benefits recede. Studies have shown that when a school district cuts its overall budget by 10%, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores fall by about 7% of a standard deviation. This is roughly the same amount as replacing every teacher with a teacher from the bottom 10% of the candidate pool.

While no surveys or forms have been published by the district specifically for student feedback, these community conversation sessions are the best way for students to voice their concerns and their priorities.

“We want your input. Do you want us to make more cuts? What type of cuts are possible? What type of cuts would you support? What would you absolutely not support? Schneider mentioned [that] the last thing we want to do is impact what the students experience in the classroom. We can live without one extra bus, [and] we could probably live without one employee in every building. Could it be two? Could it be three? I don’t know. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. What can we do to make the most [change] without impacting students?” Todd said.

As these changes unfold in the coming months and years, it is important to bring awareness to the student perspective. These may seem like faraway issues that aren’t having any effect on students in the present, but these problems will not go away without an impact on students.

“We have invited students to these [conversations] as well, so I hope students will come up and talk about it, so they [can] see the examples that we gave [here]. That’s what transportation costs us. That’s what athletics cost us. That’s what half of the fine arts costs us. That’s what teachers and administrators cost us. You’d see a reduction in services and a reduction in the quality of the educational product that we can deliver,” Schneider said.

As Parkway confronts a widening gap between costs and funding, the decisions made in the next few years will shape more than the district’s budget. They will define the student experience from elementary school through high school. What is currently a conversation about numbers may soon become a reality felt in classrooms, activities and support systems by students and teachers across the district. With financial pressures unlikely to ease, the question is no longer if changes will occur, but which parts of the educational experience within Parkway will be asked, or forced, to change.