On January 16, the Senate Education and Health Committee recommended to report and refer SB 977 (Hashmi) on a vote of 11-3 to Senate Finance and Appropriations. The bill, which is a recommendation of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) 2023 report on Virginia’s K-12 Funding Formula as well as a recommendation of the Joint Subcommittee on Elementary and Secondary Education Funding, would effectively eliminate the cap on K-12 support positions. VACo provided public testimony in favor of the legislation along with numerous members of the local government and K-12 education communities.
As previously reported, VACo’s 2025 top funding priority is to support legislative action to implement the recommendations of JLARC’s landmark 2023 report on Virginia’s K-12 Funding Formula where they coincide with local prevailing practices. In the near term, VACo encourages prioritization of efforts to restore pre-recession era K-12 funding, especially eliminating the cap on support positions; provide full state support for the actual number of K-12 staff positions employed; and revise the methodology for calculating teacher salaries to reflect the actual salaries more adequately being paid by school divisions. Though progress has been made in recent years by the state in restoring support position funding, fully eliminating the support cap would provide more than $200 million to local governments across the Commonwealth for K-12 education costs being solely funded by localities.
In further detail, SB 977 would require the Department of Education (the Department)…
- in calculating nonpersonal costs in the Standards of Quality funding formula, to include the costs associated with work-related employee travel and leased facilities;
- in calculating the deduction of federal funds in the Standards of Quality funding formula, to examine actual school division spending on support costs as a percentage of actual school division spending on all public education costs, with certain exceptions such as food service;
- in calculating the costs in the Standards of Quality funding formula beginning with fiscal year 2029, to include all employee benefit costs incurred by a majority of school divisions;
- in calculating the cost of salaries under the Standards of Quality funding formula, to include facilities staff and transportation staff salaries in the calculation of any cost of competing adjustment to salaries for instructional and support positions; and
- in estimating the cost of any compensation supplement for instruction and support positions under the Standards of Quality funding formula, to include an estimate the cost of such a compensation supplement for facilities staff. The bill also prohibits the Department from applying any cap on inflation rate adjustments to non-personal cost categories during the biennial process of re-benchmarking the aid to the public education budget. The bill (a) requires a per-pupil Standards of Quality funding add-on to be provided for each special education student; (b) requires support services positions to be funded based on a calculation of prevailing costs and prohibits such positions from being subject to any method of funding calculation that caps the number of funded support services positions based on a ratio of such positions to students enrolled in the school division, with the exception of certain support services positions enumerated in the bill; and (c) establishes the At-Risk Program for the purpose of supporting programs and services for students who are educationally at-risk, including programs and services of prevention, intervention, or remediation.
This bill will likely be joined by additional legislation and budget amendments that will be reported on and supported by VACo. As previously reported, legislation such as SB 977 is critical to moving forward with much needed funding reforms.
VACo Contact: Jeremy R. Bennett