Virginia has big plans for economic growth especially in the technology sector with the expansion of Amazon in our Commonwealth. However, if we want our students to be ready for these high-tech jobs, we must fund our school infrastructure to support that goal. Investing in school modernization really is about economic development.
This is where I need to sound the alarm. School districts across the state are being hit with a triple whammy. Add together the need for safety upgrades + technology updates + maintaining outdated buildings and you’ve got a school funding disaster. That’s even without accounting for the urgent need for teacher raises.
I am a school board member in Newport News paying close attention and I have been horrified to find there is no grand vision to deal with this problem: Not at the Federal level, not at the State level and not in my city of Newport News. As a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in the 94th District, coming up with a plan for school infrastructure and safety will be a top priority when I get to Richmond.
This week, the Newport News School Board is having a messy budget debate with our City Council. This is the third year in a row we’ve had disagreements over funding for schools and, at local events and public meetings, the volume is rising on the issue. Our teachers’ union, the Virginia Education Association, is involved and flooding elected officials with comments and concerns over school spending. This isn’t surprising when considering increased teacher activism across the country with the Red4Ed movement.
One of the issues making our conflict worse in Newport News is the overwhelming need the schools face in the area of capital improvement. Not only do we have the traditional needs of maintaining outdated school buildings from the 1950s, but today we face two other challenges; modernizing school facilities for safety and for technology.
In recent years our school system has taken unspent revenue at the end of the year to complete small technology and building renovation projects. This is often between $4mn to $8mn out of a $300mn budget. We did one such project after the Sandy Hook school shooting. We renovated the front entrance hallway of an elementary school, taking down a wall and putting in a window so the secretary could see people coming through the front door of the school. The School Board was taking an incremental step toward better school safety. This year we included in our budget funding for security cameras with this end-of-year cash capitol. These incremental improvements are reasonable projects that our community supports. We haven’t always projected these expenses in the budget but this year we are doing so to honor the City’s request for more transparency.
Here is some background on our end of year funds. Since schools spend the majority of our budgets on personnel, we have a large slice of the spending pie that often shifts during the school year, depending on the decisions of the people we employ. We often end up with unspent revenue in the Spring because of the inability to perfectly project staff turnover and attrition. Sometimes, like during a recession, fewer people will retire than our budget predicts. Other years, when the economy is good, more people retire or make career changes. But as a school board we have a fiscal responsibility to fully staff our schools no matter what and this means we have to budget for the employees we have, not the staff we might end up with at the end of the year.
Employee costs dominate our school budget. Newport News Public Schools currently spends 86% of our budget on benefits and compensation and 14% for everything else to operate our schools. Our non-personnel budget has tightened over the years because we have moved revenue from operations into salaries and benefits. Ten years ago, NNPS spent 20% of our budget on non-compensation costs like fuel, utilities, and school supplies. We are now down to 14%, or $42mn, for operating our schools out of a $304mn budget. Additionally, in recent years, the City has not funded our technology and capital needs at an acceptable level. They propose that we defer these needs or put them in the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), however there is no guarantee we will ever see support for funding technology or security upgrades if we don’t pay for from our operating budget.
Funding these recurring security upgrades and technology updates with CIP money is also not a wise fiscal decision. You don’t want to borrow money with bonds for student computers or security cameras or fire and intrusion systems that may need updating in five years.
At the end of the day, I think the City does trust the NNPS School Board to manage our budget. Our budgets have won numerous awards from the Association of School Business Officials International and our budget book is an easy to read and transparent document that we are very proud of.
What we need now is a way out of this conflict, so we can all come together and show our support for schools. I suggest that moving forward, we look at a revenue sharing model similar to the one Norfolk adopted in 2018 so that when City revenue grows, the schools grow automatically. This stability has allowed Norfolk to build four new schools. A revenue sharing model like this in Newport News would ensure schools have the funds to get back on their feet and tackle our triple whammy of need head-on.