BOS upset with Richmond
The Board of Supervisors voted Monday to send a letter to representatives in Richmond, expressing the county’s disappointment in not receiving supplemental aid for the Rappahannock County Public Schools (RCPS).
Subcommittees in both the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates removed a $1.5 million supplemental aid subsidy to RCPS from their education appropriations packages. The additional funding had been included in Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed budget, leading school district officials to believe this bonus funding would be available for their 2024-25 budget.
“We've been reaching out to everybody we can, doing the Richmond visits, sending letters, face-to-face meetings, but the conferees are meeting behind closed doors this week,” RCPS Superintendent Shannon Grimlsey told the board. Members of the conference committee will attempt to thrash out the differences between the Senate and the House of Delegates on the budget. “Thursday they may present a new General Assembly budget to send off to the office.”
The Board of Supervisors will now be faced with a decision during their own annual budgeting of whether or not to appropriate more funding to RCPS.
At issue is the state’s “Local Composite Index” (LCI), a complex formula used to determine how much funding each county receives for public education. The formula’s ranking is determined by property values and the adjusted gross income of residents. As a result, Rappahannock County covers roughly 80% of the school district’s budget, comparable to the ranking of counties such as Fairfax and Arlington.
Wakefield Supervisor and Chair Debbie Donehey read aloud a letter at the Monday meeting she had written in response to the decision to remove the supplemental funding from the budget:
“This year, new additional mandates are being imposed across the board on Virginia schools. Again, Richmond is not differentiating between the needs of the vast majority of Virginia counties and those of our smaller, rural, relatively low enrollment schools in Rappahannock. By way of example, we have only one elementary school for K through seven and only one highschool, eight to 12, with a total of approximately 740 students. Yet the new mandates require us, among other things, to add counseling services as though we have multiple school houses and thousands of students.
What is clear to me based on the speeches given in Richmond is that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the school funding formula works for those of us in low density, rural counties. Lip service is given to the value of our agriculture and the system Governor Yonkin calls putting students first. Yet there's apparently no willingness to help individualize the new education mandates or to compensate for LCI caps that are not fair. One size does not fit every county.”
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to send the letter to the county’s state representatives.