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Standing to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funding, local superintendents are keeping their ears to the ground while they wait for the state’s next move. Virginia school districts are likely to receive $201 million less than they were expecting with foreseen deficiencies in both the FY23 and FY24 budgets, reported The Richmond Times-Dispatch last week.
The Virginia Department of Education discovered an error in the state’s two year budget in December, and later confirmed the news on Jan. 23, coming as a complete surprise to local school districts. “The VDOE finance department has always been very reliable and accurate in their calculations in the past, so this definitely caught us by surprise,” said the superintendent of Rockbridge County Schools, Dr. Phillip Thompson. Immediately after receiving the news, local superintendents started determining their losses.
Thompson believes RCPS is liable to lose a little more than $100,000 of funding for FY23 and about $308,000 of anticipated funding for FY24. “If these were to hold true, we would need to work quickly to make cuts within our budgets to meet this potential reduction in state funding,” he told The News-Gazette.
Lexington City Schools Superintendent Rebecca Walters is preparing to ask the city for more funding as a result of losing money from the state. “For Lexington City, we have estimated that the reduction in funds would be around $19,000 for FY23 and $47,000 for FY24,” Walters said. “We have included the reductions in our draft budget for FY24, which will result in a bottomline increase to our local ask of the city.”
Tony Francis of Buena Vista City Public Schools hopes to receive an updated calculation tool from the VDOE later this week. “I want to get an official number from the VDOE and see exactly what the impact would be,” he commented.
State administration is finding itself in this predicament after a miscalculation of their online budgeting tool. The tool discloses how much state funding districts will receive based on their student body and property tax revenues. The tool failed to reflect changes in revenue after state administration repealed the state’s 2.5 percent grocery tax. While the tax was operative, one percent of these funds were reserved for education, so mistakenly, the VDOE based their budget off inflated estimates.
Small localities and schools in rural communities are likely to bear the repercussions of the state’s error as they rely more heavily upon state funding, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
However, Francis feels optimistic that state administration is formulating a new budget to hold schools harmless for the budgeting error, he said. He believes that any predicted financial impact on schools will be alleviated by the state.
Thompson is also hopeful that schools will not be impacted by the state’s miscalculation. He said, “The House and Senate versions of the FY24 budget came out over the weekend and thankfully, early indications look promising for this error to be corrected through the General Assembly budget process. There is still more work to be done in Richmond before a final budget for FY24 is adopted, but we are glad to see early positive signs.”
