Fairfax County teachers and other school employees may be getting smaller raises next year because of a $102.5 million budget shortfall.
At a school board meeting on Thursday, Superintendent Michelle Reid said the county’s board of supervisors didn’t provide as much funding as it historically has, and it’s unclear exactly how the district will be funded as part of the Virginia state budget for fiscal years 2025 and 2026.
State lawmakers reached an agreement on a budget package late last week.
As a result, Reid is proposing lowering employee raises from the originally planned 6% to 3%. That decision, though, could have significant consequences, she said.
For one, Virginia’s largest school district won’t see a significant improvement in what Reid called “beginning salaries.” The county will move from seventh place out of eight school divisions in that category to sixth place out of eight.
In Reid’s budget proposal, Board Member Melanie Meren said new spending is focused on improving compensation.
“There’s not much else to cut that would make as meaningful of a change in getting more money available than the straight cutting of the proposed 6% compensation increase, to cut that back to 3%,” Meren said.
When putting together the budget proposal, Reid said she had planned for the Board of Supervisors to transfer about 52.6% of county revenue to the school district, which is the year-over-year average from fiscal 2014 to fiscal 2023. This year, though, it’s slated to be 51.4%.
The underfunding, Meren said, is the result of old state formulas and old tax policies. Last year, a General Assembly Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission report found that Virginia underfunds its public schools and made a series of recommendations for the state to address that.
But, Reid said, the General Assembly “has essentially delayed action on these recommendations by continuing to request further study.”
The school division’s projection for what funding it’ll receive from the state “is based on returning to the funding levels associated with the Governor’s Introduced Budget, presented on December 20, 2023,” according to school board documents.
Based on available state funding in the new budget, Reid said, there’s a chance the full compensation increase could be added back into the school district’s budget.
“What I can say is that, if additional funding comes in from the state in excess of the $12 million needed to close the gap, and if that money or monies should become available, I’ll likely be recommending the restoration of as much of the originally planned salary increase as possible,” Reid said.
There won’t be program cuts or other changes because of the shortfall, at-large school board member Kyle McDaniel said.
“The baseline of services – of class sizes, of programs, of sports, of instruments and arts and all this stuff, the baseline is maintained,” McDaniel said.
The school board is scheduled to vote on adopting the final budget later this month.
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