Public Education Underfunded in Fairfax County, VA

Public Education Underfunded in Fairfax County, VA

Fairfax County Public Schools have joined an ever-growing list of school districts from around the nation of school districts coming up short on funding for children’s education. This lax funding is affecting public education at every level, from kindergarten through grade twelve, and is indicative of a much broader issue. All across the Commonwealth of Virginia, public education funding is being cut – with potentially devastating consequences lurking just down the road for our future workforce and economy.

Bad Formulas Cost Virginia Schools $800M Per Year

During the recent economic recession, Virginia’s cash-strapped government altered the formulas that it uses to determine how much money needs to be spent on each school district. The result of this alteration was that the government reduced by more than half a billion dollars annually the funding that formerly went to Virginia’s public schools. With the state economy on the rebound, however, most of these formulas have not been restored to their previous levels. Researchers at the Richmond-based Commonwealth Institute have gone on record as suggesting that the current formulas applied to calculate the needs of individual school districts ignore the actual cost involved in providing an education to a student.

The implication being made is that these changes in public schools’ funding allocations were designed, not to provide a temporary economic boost during lean times, but to provide long-term annual investment reductions under the guise of an austerity measure. As the Commonwealth of Virginia’s largest jurisdiction, Fairfax County has been hit the hardest: viewed objectively, a reduction in the proportion of state funding spent on public education leaves more students behind in Fairfax than anywhere else in Virginia by way of a sheer count of heads.

Supporters of a recent proposal by Governor Terry McAuliffe, that more funds be allocated to support the hiring of additional teachers, argue that Virginia’s funding changes suggest a lack of understanding as to how education works – an inability to grasp the fact that certain resources are necessary to ensure a well-rounded education, and that small changes can have a ripple effect over time as the absence of key personnel and once-funded programs are applied to successive generations of students.

Local Issues in Fairfax County

Current legislative concerns regarding the allocation of funds to the Fairfax County educational system can be viewed here.

Many concerned individuals view these proceedings with a healthy degree of skepticism. They point to the overwhelming abundance of language suggesting that current cuts in funding – which are demonstrably the result of changes initially made for purely financial reasons – are due to a variety of other reasons in the present day.

The Republican-led Virginia state legislature strongly opposes any additional funding for public education. They say that current funding is adequate, that any issues are due to mismanagement, and that cuts in spending are the result of assessments as to how a given school district is performing.

To many, this sounds a bit too evasive; it is a given that the formulas for assessing public education spending incorporate the performance of school districts into their consideration. Revisiting the point doesn’t explain why, post-recession, said formulas have not been restored to their previous state.

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