Oley Valley Weighs $1.8M in Solar Grants for 3 Schools

The Oley Valley School Board is expected to vote Tuesday on asking the state for $1.8 million to put solar panels on the roofs of all three of its schools. Three draft resolutions posted to the district's October board documents folder each request a $600,000 Solar for Schools grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development: one for a 700-kilowatt rooftop array at Oley Valley Middle School and one each for 1,092-kilowatt rooftop arrays at the high school and the elementary school.

The vote is not the board's first step on solar. The district's own minutes show it approved a resolution to apply for the same grant in February, heard a "3rd Party Solar" presentation in March, and in May tabled four contracts with a company called Oley Valley SD Solar Partners, LLC, covering those three roofs and a ground array behind the elementary school. Oley Valley does not appear on any of the three lists of Solar for Schools awards the state has announced this year, and the state has since budgeted another $25 million and reissued the program guidelines in September.

The board's Oct. 7 committee agenda carried the item as one motion, "To approve the resolution to apply for a Solar for Schools grant," under the Property & Transportation Committee's action items (agenda). As of Sunday the district had not posted an agenda for the Oct. 20 voting meeting; the agenda link on its school board page still opened the Oct. 7 committee agenda.

Three resolutions, one per school

The three documents are nearly identical and follow the sample resolution DCED prints in its program guidelines (Appendix II, p. 10). Each says the district "hereby request[s] a Solar for Schools Program grant of $ 600,000 from the Department of Community and Economic Development" for a specific project:

• A "700kW rooftop array at Oley Valley Middle School" (Middle School resolution).
• A "1,092 kW rooftop array at Oley Valley High School" (High School resolution).
• A "1,092 kW rooftop array at Oley Valley Elementary School" (Elementary School resolution). The elementary and high school documents list the same array size.

A kilowatt, or kW, measures how much power a system can produce at its peak; a 1,092 kW array is a little over one megawatt. The resolutions do not say what each array would cost or how much of each school's electricity it would cover.

Each resolution designates Superintendent Aaron Weston and Business Manager and Board Secretary Changming Wang "as the official(s) to execute all documents and agreements" with DCED. The guidelines require exactly that: a resolution adopted by the governing board that requests the grant, names two officials to sign, describes the project and states the amount (Exhibit 7, p. 9). The three-resolution setup matches a program rule: DCED's FAQ says the department allows "one project per application," with a project defined as work on a single site or campus or connecting to a single meter.

Ten months of solar on the agenda

The board's posted 2025-26 minutes trace the project back to January:

• Jan. 20: the meeting's presentation slot lists "Solar Proposal," with no presenter named. Among the guests listed in person is Shannon Crooker (minutes). A June news release from the state House Democratic caucus identifies a Shannon Crooker as Pennsylvania director of Generation180. The three October resolution files list "Shannon Crooker" as their author in the documents' file properties; the district's minutes do not say who prepared them.
• Feb. 17: the board voted 8-0 "to approve the resolution to apply for a Solar for Schools grant," on a motion by Brian Weidner seconded by Donald Haas (minutes, motion 21). The minutes do not say which school or how much.
• March 17: the presentations slot lists "3rd Party Solar" (minutes).
• May 12: the board tabled, 9-0, four motions to approve a "Solar Energy Power Service Agreement and Access License Agreement with Oley Valley SD Solar Partners, LLC, subject to solicitor review and approval," one each for roof-mounted systems at the elementary, middle and high schools and one for "the ground array located behind the Oley Valley Elementary School," each "acknowledging the provided cash flow analysis" (minutes, motions 3 through 6). The cash flow analysis is not posted. The minutes list "Solar slide deck and photos" under the Property & Transportation Committee's information items.

A power service agreement is the kind of deal in which an outside company owns and installs the panels and sells the school the electricity, rather than the district buying the system itself. The guidelines allow grant money to flow to such arrangements (p. 3). Nothing posted since May says whether the tabled contracts were revived, revised or dropped, and the district has not posted minutes for its Sept. 22 meeting.

Oley Valley is not among the districts in DCED's May 20, July 21 or Sept. 15 award announcements; the July list did include two $360,000 grants to the Wyomissing Area School District. On Aug. 25 the state announced "an additional $25 million in the 2026-27 budget" for the program, and DCED's current guidelines are dated September 2026. Whether Tuesday's vote is a fresh application into that money, a refresh of the February resolution or a step toward the tabled contracts is not stated in any posted document; the minutes of the Sept. 22 meeting, which might say, are not posted.

What the state pays, and what the district would owe

Solar for Schools is a state grant program created by Act 68 of 2024, the Solar for Schools Act, and run by DCED. The money pays for buying and installing solar equipment, energy storage, permit fees and utility interconnection at schools, according to the program page. School districts, intermediate units, career and technical schools, charter schools and community colleges are among those that can apply.

The state does not pay for a whole project. The grant cap depends on a district's market value/personal income aid ratio, a Pennsylvania Department of Education figure that measures a community's wealth; the lower the ratio, the wealthier the district is considered and the smaller its share of state aid. Districts with a ratio below .5 can receive "the lesser of $600,000 or 50% of project cost" (guidelines, p. 3). Oley Valley's 2026-27 ratio is 0.373, according to the Department of Education's aid ratio workbook (SD tab, Oley Valley SD row), so $600,000 is the most the district can ask for per project, and the state would cover no more than half of each one.

That math has a consequence the resolutions do not spell out. If the district wants the full $600,000 for each array, each project would have to cost at least $1.2 million, and the other half would come from the district or, under a power service agreement, from the company that owns the panels. Local school taxes are the biggest piece of a Berks property tax bill, as our guide to how the bill is split explains, and the board has not posted a budget document for the solar projects.

Applying does not mean winning. DCED scores applications on, among other things, how much of a school's existing electricity use the array would replace, whether the equipment is made in the United States, how soon the project could start, and whether the school has a plan to use the panels in classroom lessons (p. 6). Funding is split across three regions; Berks is in Region 2 (p. 5), which the program page lists with $17,520,972 available. Before applying, a district needs a solar site assessment from a qualified installer, a roof assessment by an engineer or qualified vendor, and a letter showing it has talked to its electric utility (pp. 8-9). The installer who did the site assessment cannot be hired to build the system (p. 1). Any work started before DCED approves a grant makes the project ineligible (p. 5).

The guidelines let a district bid the work under either the Separations Act or the Guaranteed Energy Savings Act (p. 4). The second is the same law Kutztown Area School District is using for its $5.23 million elementary HVAC project, which we covered in September. Neither DCED's program page nor the September 2026 guidelines list an application deadline, and the June House release said applications would be taken until the money runs out; applications go through the state's online Single Application for Assistance at grants.pa.gov (p. 5).

The paperwork carries an Oct. 15 date

Each resolution ends with a certification block in which Wang, as board secretary, certifies that the resolution was "duly adopted by a majority vote of the School Board Directors at a regular meeting held October 15, 2026," signed "this 15th day of October, 2026." The district's 2026 meeting calendar lists no meeting that day: committee meetings Oct. 7 and Oct. 13, then the board meeting Oct. 20. The district's October calendar shows the same, with PSAT testing and a STEM advisory meeting on Oct. 15 and the "School Board Meeting" at 6 p.m. on Oct. 20. The board's October meeting last year fell on Oct. 15, 2025, according to the minutes folder.

The Drive folder shows all three files modified Oct. 13, and their file properties show the elementary and middle school documents created Oct. 12 and the high school document first created Jan. 26, six days after the January presentation. Nothing the district has posted explains the Oct. 15 date or whether the signed copies will carry the actual adoption date.

What else is on the slate

The Oct. 7 committee agenda sets up the rest of Tuesday's likely vote list, though without an Oct. 20 agenda we cannot confirm which items carried over. It included:

• A contract with Conrad Siegel for Affordable Care Act employer reporting, "not to exceed $6,000 (same as prior years)."
• First readings of ten policies, including 249 Bullying/Cyberbullying, 805.2 Security Personnel and 803 School Calendar.
• Ratifying the hiring of Indhira Tapia as a full-time accounts payable/accounts receivable employee at $20.10 an hour, effective Oct. 5.
• Special-education placement contracts with Cottage Seven Education at $250 per student per day, four New Story schools at $485 per day, and Buxmount Academy at $292.84 (special education) or $217.70 (general education) per day.
• An emergency snow-removal agreement with Summit Valley Outdoor Solutions, and a discussion item on raising the PrimeroEdge school-meal deposit limit to $500 per transaction.

The October documents folder also holds a 2027 board meeting dates list, modified Oct. 15, that keeps board meetings at 6 p.m. in the high school library, and an expenditure summary for Sept. 18 through Oct. 15, modified Oct. 16.

If you want to go

The board meets Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 6 p.m. in the Oley Valley High School Library, according to the district's 2026 meeting calendar, which says all board meetings are held there unless otherwise indicated. The high school is at 17 Jefferson St., Oley, and the district office number is 610-987-4100, per the school board page.

The board's regular meetings put public comment near the top of the agenda: the Aug. 18 minutes list "Introduction of Guests (Public Comment)" as item 5, before the approval of minutes. Those minutes list nine directors: Jeff Boyd, Candice Corle (board president), Jamie Freed, Donald Haas, Mary Harris, Andrew Kline, Darrell L. Markley, Zachary Moore and Brian Weidner. Weidner chairs the Property & Transportation Committee that carried the solar item, with Haas as its other member, per the Oct. 7 agenda.

The district streams board meetings on its YouTube channel, linked from the board page. The Oct. 20 agenda, when it posts, should appear behind the Agenda link on the board page. The next committee meeting is Nov. 4, per the Oct. 7 agenda's upcoming-meetings list.