Following the 2023 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) study on how to improve the Standards of Quality (SOQ) in the Commonwealth and the 2024 recommendations of the Joint Subcommittee on Elementary and Secondary Education, several legislators have introduced legislation and budget amendments meant to help localities with K-12 funding. VACo supports the JLARC and the Joint Subcommittee recommendations and the subsequent legislation as VACo’s 2025 top Funding Priority and has publicly testified in favor of the following bills. The support position cap has been essentially removed in the House and Senate proposed budgets.
HB 1831 (Simonds) and SB 1236 (Aird) effectively end the support cap and require the Department of Education, (i) 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, and (ii) 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, including costs related to retirement, health care, life insurance, and payout of earned but unused leave. The bills also require 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, except for certain support services positions enumerated in the bills.
HB 1954 (Rasoul) and SB 977 (Hashmi) also effectively end the support cap and codify additional recommendations related to the cost of K-12 salaries, additional funding for special education, at-risk students, and English learners, among other provisions.
KEY POINTS
- For far too long localities have been trying to emphasize how out-of-date and inadequate the current SOQs are.
- Per code, the State should be funding 55% of the costs of education and localities should be funding 45% of the costs of education. However, over time localities have been forced to pay far more than the allotted 45%.
- These recommendations change the standards for the better and finally provide the changes localities desperately need to help support our schools.
- Local governments solely fund over 57,000 K-12 staff positions.
- The state funding formula recognizes only 8% of actual instructional aides employed.
- In FY 2021, local governments invested $6.6 billion more than the state funding formula indicated was needed.
HB 1831 was incorporated into HB 1954, which passed the House of Delegates on a vote of 61-34 and has been referred to the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee. Both SB 1236 and SB 977 were left in the same committee and did not advance past crossover.
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 more adequately reflect the actual salaries 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.
As previously reported, legislation and budget language such as HB 1831 is critical to moving forward with much needed funding reforms to the way in which the Commonwealth funds public schools.
VACo Contact: Jeremy R. Bennett