Nearly Half-Billion Dollar School Budget Includes 'Major Win' Says Mitchell
By Martin Davis
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Budget season has been bloody in Spotsylvania the past several years. New Superintendent Clint Mitchell, however, is confident that this year both the Board of Supervisors and the School Board are on a more productive path.
“I know the perception is that the Board of Supervisors hasn’t funded schools,” Mitchell said on Tuesday evening. However, “I haven’t seen or heard from them … that they do not want to fund schools.”
His optimism is grounded in more than wishful thinking.
The division held a series of meetings starting late last summer to educate the public about the budget process. At the time, Mitchell said on Tuesday evening, “we were pushing a revenue-sharing with the Board of Supervisors.”
It’s an approach he moved away from, however, in favor of a process that he says would prove to be less “adversarial.”
“We Pivoted from revenue sharing because I wanted to implement a different process for this year’s budget season,” he said Tuesday night. “Part of this included me working side-by-side with each board member [and] working with their counterpart at the Board of Supervisors.”
This included seven meetings, including five with board members and Board of Supervisor members together, as well as two separate meetings with the county’s chief financial officer and county administrator.
Rather than try and ask the supervisors to fund everything the school district says it needs, Mitchell settled on a tiered approach.
“We have a major gap of about $46 million,” he said Tuesday evening, “and I know that because of the heavy lift and major ask, the Board of Supervisors will not be able to fund that outright, considering that they have all the other departments … they have to fund.”
Instead, Mitchell said the district had decided to “do the work in advance” and create a roadmap “so that in 2-3 years we have eliminated that big ask we’ve been asking for the last two years.”
A survey of parents, teachers, staff and board members about the most pressing budget issues yielded what the district called “consistent” results across stakeholders:
Competitive salaries to hire and retain high quality teachers
Class size reductions
Competitive salaries to attract and retain high quality support staff
School safety and security
Expanding academic support programs across all level
Following that lead, the district put forward a budget for 2026 for $499 million, which includes a gap not of $46.6 million — representing the total amount the district is short to meet its needs — but rather a gap of $20.9 million, which would meet the priority needs the survey had identified.
Mitchell then announced that “We have about $15.5 million committed from the Board of Supervisors.” That represents an amount almost double what was secured last year. Mitchell called this a “major win.”
Closing the Gap
The need to shore up teacher salaries and hire new teachers is particularly critical for the School District at the moment. According to Phillip Trayer, the district’s chief financial officer, the district has some of the highest pupil-to-teacher ratios and highest student-to-administrator ratios in the state.
Complicating the pressure this puts on teachers in the classroom is that that the county’s greatest competition for teachers comes from neighboring Stafford County. Trayer said that Stafford’s pay scales “significantly outpace ours,” and that it would cost $27 million to align Spotsylvania’s scales with Stafford’s. The district wants to “incrementally chip away at the variance to keep our teacher scales close enough to mitigate the temptation” to leave Spotsylvania for Stafford.
To address these salary gaps the district’s proposed budget includes a 3% cost-of-living bump for all employees, which would come from state funding. There would also be step increases for teachers and paraeducators, a 2% merit bump for staff members not on the step scale. And a market adjustment for principals and assistant principals that includes step adjustments. (See chart below)
In addition to shoring up existing teachers there is the need to increase the number of teachers in the district. New hires are needed to bring the district in line with the state’s Standards of Quality requirements which are set by the state Department of Education.
In total, the district needs to add 78 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) positions to meet SOQ, state, and federal staffing compliance adjustments. These positions are necessary because of the district’s changing demographics.
Over the past 10 years, while total student enrollment has remained fairly constant at around 24, 000 students, the percentage of English Language Learners has jumped from 5% in 2014-2015 to 15% in 2024-25. Similar jumps are evident in students with disabilities 4.7 percentage points higher than a decade ago, and economically disadvantaged students are up from 35% of the population to decade ago to 46% in 2024-2025.
The district will need 78 new hires broken out as follows:
15 for special education low-incidence teachers; 31 paraeducators to support them
25 English Language Learner teachers
7 career investigation instructors
Next Steps and More Information
The next budget meeting will be January 27, which will be a school budget work session and public hearing.
All documents and presentations from Tuesday evening’s meeting are available here.
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Excellent article on major adjustments to the failed budgeting process of the past. A visionary pathfinder able to turn optimism into reality may succeed. Selecting Dr. Mitchell as the new superintendent is the this School Board’s best decision since the ouster of Mark Taylor as superintendent. Both the School Board and the Board of Supervisors may achieve ‘wins’ from Dr. Mitchell’s optimism, energy and determination to achieve solutions past SB’s and BOS’s could neither dream of or find a path to success.
I’m confused. Where and when does the half- billion come to play?!? Or is this wishful thinking?! Otherwise, I think this is a great plan and I thank Dr. Mitchell and all the other participants for trying to work this out professionally and seemingly without rancor