The Virginia Joint Legislative Audit Commission (JLARC), of which I am a Commission member, released a report last week completed by its professional, nonpartisan staff after nearly two years of study. Its findings were not entirely unknown except the discrepancies between policies and actual funding were much greater than anyone had ever documented. (https://jlarc.virginia.gov/landing-2023-virginias-k-12-funding-formula.asp) The difference between state promised funding and actual dollars per year is in the neighborhood of four billion dollars!
For decades local school board members and those knowledgeable of how the complex school funding formula is supposed to work have decried how state funding has left local governments holding the bag on meeting the cost of K-12 education at a time when there is increased insistence on improving school quality and outcomes. During that same period state legislators manipulated State Standards of Quality to create an illusion that the state was funding its share of education costs. For decades I made the same speech, updated with new numbers, that the state was not living up to its end of the bargain in funding schools regardless of how much there was an effort to mask what was really going on.
Without the involvement of any elected officials, the professional staff of JLARC found that Virginia school divisions receive less K-12 funding per student than the 50-state average. School divisions in other states receive 14 percent more per student than school divisions in Virginia. That equates to about $1,900 more per student than in Virginia. Virginia funding is even less on average than states in the South.
Part of the discrepancy in state funding for schools comes about because the state has never since the inception of State Standards of Quality (SOQ) in the mid-1970s been willing to acknowledge the true costs of education. The SOQ formula calculated that school divisions needed a total of $10.7 billion dollars in FY21, but school divisions actually spent $17.3 billion. Local governments with their sources of revenue limited principally to the real estate tax have had to make up the difference. That explains why real estate taxes have had to increase regularly over the years.
During the Great Recession state government reduced its budget because of the decline in revenue by reducing the Standards of Quality for public schools. Staffing requirements for schools were reduced as a way to balance the budget. Now, more than a decade later those reductions in Standards that were already below actual need have not been restored.
Education is a politically hot topic and will be debated heavily in the upcoming fall election campaigns. There is likely to be a lot of chest beating about the Standards of Learning and whether our children are performing up to standards. The JLARC study results can interject some truth into the discussion.
Before we start berating teachers and local school administrators about student performance we need to seriously evaluate how the General Assembly and the Governor are doing in providing the necessary support to those who work with the children daily. The facts tell me that we have been short-changing our schools, and it is way past time to correct that situation.