The eyes of educators, school board members and university leaders from across the state will be turned to television screens late Tuesday morning.

That’s when Republican Gov. Tom Corbett will make his second budget address and shed some light on how much money the state will spend on education in the 2012-13 school year.

“It could be all over the place. My office pool money is on 5 percent less,” said Sal Nicosia, president of the Penns Valley Area school board. “But who knows?”

The reductions this year aren’t expected to be as drastic as last year when the end of federal stimulus money, a multibillion dollar budget shortfall, and a refusal to raise taxes led Corbett to push for more than $1.1 billion in education cuts.

Corbett has offered few public clues in advance of Tuesday’s address. And education leaders received a discouraging sign in December when his administration released figures showing that, halfway through the fiscal year, the state had a $487 million shortfall.

“With revenues not coming

into where we had hoped for this year, we’re going to have another difficult budget year,” said state Sen. Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, who voted in favor of the cuts last year and is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Corman said he doesn’t have any inside knowledge about Corbett’s plans, but he said he wouldn’t be surprised to see the governor propose cutting higher education again. And Corman doesn’t expect the cuts for public school districts to be as large as last year.

“Whether they get more money remains to be seen,” Corman said. “They may end up treading water.”

Pennsylvania school districts lost about $860 million in state funding for the 2011- 12 school year, and locally, Centre County schools took a hit of about $5 million.

“We already believe that there’s a crisis. He cut $860 million last year and look how many districts suffered,” said Lucy Harlow, a Pennsylvania State Education Association spokeswoman who’s based out the central region office. “We saw locally where programs were cut, and across the state, close to 10,000 teachers and support staff were furloughed.”

According to a survey released in September and conducted by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators and the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials, 70 percent of districts in the state increased class sizes.

For this coming year, superintendents, business managers and board members have already had to make guesses about how much money their schools will receive.

State law required school districts to approve their preliminary budgets for the 2012-13 year by the end of January, ahead of Corbett’s proposal.

It’s a timeline that Bellefonte Area school board member Robert Lumley- Sapanski called “ludicrous.”

“We had hundreds of newly elected school directors required to make budget decisions at their first official voting meeting,” Lumley- Sapanski, who’s also the president of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, wrote in an email Friday.

Lumley-Sapanski voted in favor of a preliminary budget for Bellefonte that assumes state funding will essentially remain flat.

“I’ve heard so many different scenarios,” said district Business Manager Ken Bean. “Really, I don’t have a clue at this stage. Even after that, it becomes a political game in Harrisburg as to what the final budget’s going to be.”

Around the county, predictions vary:

•Philipsburg-Osceola is assuming that state funding will drop by 4 percent, or $537,000. The district was the only one in Centre County not to raise taxes last year, and leaders there are hoping to do the same for the 2012-13 budget.

“We rely on about 60 percent of our funding is from the state. So what Corbett decides to do will directly impact what we will do,” said district spokeswoman Dena Cipriano.

•Penns Valley is assuming that it will receive the same level of basic education funding, but the approximately $80,000 the district receives through accountability block grants will be cut entirely.

And even with a 5.69 percent tax increase — the maximum possible for Penns Valley — the district is facing about a $727,000 budget shortfall.

“Following the (g)overnor’s budget address, we will re-evaluate the entire budget to determine which expenditures areas can be reduced with the least impact on educational programs,” the district’s business manager, Jef Wall, said in an email.

“However, a budget shortfall of this magnitude could result in program reductions or cuts, reduction of workforce, increased class size, deferred maintenance and capital projects and/or deferred technology upgrades, just to name a few.”

•Bald Eagle Area School District is estimating that its basic education funding will remain flat.

•State College Area School District lost $1.9 million in state funding last year, laid off about 20 full-time employees, and cut another 40 or so positions.

For the 2012-13 budget, Business Administrator Jeff Ammerman is estimating that the district will lose about $500,000 in basic education funding. The district is facing a budget shortfall between $1.4 million and $2.7 million.

At a budget meeting in December, three board members called those assumptions “conservative.” But board member Jim Pawelczyk disagreed with that assessment.

“The term’s realistic,” he said. “It’s not a conservative budget.”

Penn State funding

Penn State, like other state-related and state universities, could also see budget cuts.

In March, Corbett proposed cutting Penn State’s budget from $318 million to $165 million.

“Since he was comfortable proposing a 50 percent decrease last year, my guess is he’ll be comfortable asking for a decrease this year,” said Corman, who opposed those cuts.

Lawmakers and the governor ended up agreeing on a 2011-12 budget that cut funding for Penn State by 20 percent, to $279 million. But in January, Corbett announced plans to cut an additional 5 percent, or $11.4 million, from Penn State because of a budget shortfall.

Later that month, he came to the university’s board of trustees meeting, urged members to defer building projects, and said he would support legislation to broaden Pennsylvania’s open records law to include more information from Penn State.

State Rep. Scott Conklin, D-Rush Township, said he supported expanding the open records law to include Penn State, but he criticized Corbett’s approach.

“We do agree ... there should be more transparency within the system,” Conklin said, “but to use our young people as a bartering tool is not the way you do business.”

Ed Mahon can be reached at 231-4619. CDT staff writer Jessica VanderKolk contributed to this report.