Jim Thorpe Area School District is expecting a $417,000 increase in funding next year under Pennsylvania’s newly enacted $50.1 billion state budget, which includes major changes in education funding and cyber charter school costs.

The additional money comes from a mix of higher state allocations and a reduction in cyber charter tuition expenses, district officials said Wednesday night.

“It looks like we’re going to receive about $417,000 more than last year,” Business Manager Brian Off said. “That’s the early proposal estimate, because the state’s change to cyber funding — which had been proposed as a flat fee — is now an additional deduction from the PDE-363 form. That’s how we calculate our per-student costs for cyber and charter tuition.”

Off said the district currently pays about $4.2 million annually to cyber and charter schools, but the new state budget will reduce that cost.

“There’s an increase in our special education funding, an increase in basic education funding, and a decrease in cyber expenses for a net impact of $417,000,” he said.

The funding changes follow Wednesday’s passage of Pennsylvania’s long-delayed state budget, which Gov. Josh Shapiro signed into law after a 134-day impasse. The $50.1 billion plan includes more than $900 million in new funding for public education statewide — with $565 million dedicated to adequacy and tax equity payments, $105 million for basic education, $40 million for special education, and about $175 million in savings for school districts through cyber charter reform, according to the governor’s office.

Statewide, the cyber charter overhaul is projected to save districts tens of millions of dollars. At the local level, Off explained that Jim Thorpe does not issue checks directly to cyber schools.

“The state withholds the funding through a process called redirection of funds,” he said. “Some schools do pay directly, but we never have. We just let the state redirect it out of our funding.”