A tentative 2003-04 budget of about $24 million was unveiled during Monday night's Grove City Area School Board meeting, which would raise the tax rate by 2 mills.

But by the end of the meeting, Superintendent Robert Post said he hoped to find $150,000 -- the value of a mill -- to cut that increase in half.

With the proposed budget up by more than $1 million from this year, but with no increase in staff or supplies, board members pointed to increased costs in health-care coverage for teachers as the main culprit for the increase.

"That's the thing that makes this budget so difficult for me. We've increased no teachers. We've added no staff. A lot of that increase was handed to us," said board member Doug Thomas, referring to not only increased health-care costs, but higher payments toward teacher retirement funds. "Because the stock market is bad, we've had to share the costs. The difficulty lies in something that is somewhat out of our control."

What Thomas referred to is the teachers' contract that he helped negotiate that has the district paying all the healthcare costs, which board President Stephen Gould said had risen about 27 percent over this year. "They are getting a benefit that almost no one in (private business) gets," Thomas said, adding that he would be interested in reopening some of the contracts in the future and revisiting this issue.

But Thomas made it clear that it was nothing personal against the teachers.

"We have teachers that care about our kids," he said.

Without health care, retirement costs and negotiated salary increases, the district budget actually went down by 1.2 percent, Post said before the meeting. "I know it's a difficult decision for the board members," he said of the possible impending tax increase. "It's going to be heart-wrenching no matter what you decide."

"We are spending money as frugally as we possibly can," Thomas said.