We are in the season when weather gets warmer, daylight last longer and people across our region get to enjoy more activities outside.

Unfortunately, we also are in the season when residents of our region’s school districts learn if their property taxes are going up — as, in some cases, they are.

We understand that school boards face tough decisions and are faced with the same pressures stemming from rising prices that confront families and businesses. We recognize that it likely would be irresponsible to take an obstinate, unyielding position against every property tax increase in every school district.

We also remain skeptical that shifting this burden onto working Pennsylvanians with an increase in the state’s personal income tax is the appropriate solution.

Instead we urge our state and our state’s leaders to help our school districts make such tax increases less frequent and smaller in scope.

Once avenue to explore, which we have encouraged on this editorial page in the past, is consolidation. We still believe that Pennsylvania has too many school districts and that our education system could eliminate the duplication or even triplication of expenses through careful, cautiously paced mergers of school districts.

We believe our state government has options to incentivize this sort of fiscally responsible streamlining.

Another avenue is to reduce, or rather redirect, wasteful state spending into our school districts. It is, as we have acknowledged at the times, one reason we frequently have criticized budget proposals that envision the state government having a heavier hand in more and more aspects of life in Pennsylvania.

The courts, which several years ago ruled that the state’s system of funding public education has systemic unconstitutional disparities, would seem to agree. We remain disappointed that our state government has not addressed that funding system with greater urgency.

Our school districts need leadership from state officials. More importantly, our state’s taxpayers need that leadership too.