Stafford Board of Supervisors Chair: "Are We Willing to Make Tough Decisions?"
Supervisors and School Board members met Thursday to discuss a bleak budget situation.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The Chair and Vice Chair of the Stafford County Board of Supervisors went on record this week to say they will not support any cuts to the budget that has been proposed for the school division for next fiscal year.
“I want to go on record saying that I’m not going to cut a single dime from the schools,” said Deuntay Diggs, chair and George Washington district representative, at a work session on Thursday evening.
Vice Chair and Griffis-Widewater representative Tinesha Allen also announced that she “[doesn’t] intend to cut anything from the schools.”
Thursday’s work session followed a joint meeting of the School Board and supervisors at which there was an air of hopelessness, just as there was at a joint meeting of elected officials in Fredericksburg City earlier this week.
Superintendent Daniel Smith said that a budget amendment proposed by Governor Glenn Youngkin to reduce instead of eliminate a cap on state-funded support positions in public schools would result in a $4.2 million decrease in state funding for Stafford schools.
The General Assembly implemented the cap on support positions 20 years ago as response to the Great Recession, according to the Virginia Mercury. Legislators this session approved removing the cap, which would have resulted in $223 million in new funding for public schools, but Youngkin’s budget amendment would claw back $183 million of that.
On Wednesday, the General Assembly rejected Youngkin’s amendment, Smith said, which means the proposal goes back to the governor in its original form for him to accept or veto.
A veto would result in a $12.7 million reduction in state funding for Stafford, Smith said. Youngkin has until May 2 to take action.
Other budget woes for the school division include unfunded mandates such as required new instructional materials for English, math, science, and history standards of learning; support for implementing 504 plans for a growing number of students (more than 2,000); and increased staffing standards for English language instructors and school counselors, Smith said.
The Board of Supervisors has advertised a 5-cent increase in the county’s real estate tax rate and County Administrator Bill Ashton’s budget would provide $5 million in new funding to the school division.
But Smith said that amount of new funding will only allow the division to provide 1.5% salary increases for staff and will result in a net loss when taking into account inflation and health insurance increases.
A $5 million increase, coupled with potential loss of state funding, would result in a $33 million budget gap, Smith said. The division would have to look at increasing class sizes, not meeting staffing standards, reducing some programming, and deferring maintenance and technology upgrades, in order to have a balanced budget as required by law.
School Board members on Thursday thanked supervisors for stepping up school funding over the past three years. They said today’s problems are the result of insufficient funding going back almost two decades.
“I think this problem goes back at least 15 years,” said Rock Hill representative Patricia Healy. “Before, we could make do, but we didn’t have the same population in Stafford County or in the schools that we do now.”
Griffis-Widewater representative Elizabeth Warner said the current situation is “a perfect storm” that has caused an existing hole to deepen.
“We need a plan to get out of the hole and it can’t be with a 0% tax rate [increase],” she said. “It just can’t be.”
At the supervisors’ work session following the joint meeting, Diggs asked his colleagues to state publicly whether they are willing to have difficult conversations about funding the schools and the county’s tax rate.
“I want to have those hard conversations,” Diggs said. “We all know it’s going to be difficult. What I’m trying to get at is, how are we going to lower the tax rate? What I’m hearing is, it’s next to impossible.”
Falmouth representative Meg Bohmke said she is also “willing to make tough decisions to give more to schools.”
Allen urged members of the public to reach out to Youngkin and ask him to support the General Assembly’s budget.
Ashton told supervisors that, starting as soon as the current budget negotiations are over, he and his staff are “committed to looking at alternatives” to improve school funding and “county budgets in total.”
One possibility is a revenue-sharing agreement between the Board of Supervisors and the School Board. Prince William County has such an agreement; it allocates 43.2% of tax revenue to the county and 56.8% to the school division.
“We’ve had preliminary conversations and are looking forward to that challenge,” Ashton said. “We will get to work on these concepts almost immediately.”
Rock Hill supervisor Crystal Vanuch was not present for either of Thursday’s meetings.
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