Making sure the state pays its fair share of public education costs

Responding to JLARC's study on school funding

Great public schools are the foundation of great communities. And with adequate education funding, every public school can provide a high-quality education that gives students the tools they need to succeed regardless of their background or their zip code. Even a 10% increase in public education funding can lead to increased income earnings and a decreased risk of poverty for students later in life.

Virginia’s nonpartisan research agency (JLARC) released a major report in 2023 that has provided a blueprint for how policymakers can improve the school funding formula to make sure the state pays its fair share and every student gets the support they need to reach their full potential and thrive. Through the hard work of students, teachers, parents, legislative champions, and other advocates for the last two years, Virginia’s legislature has made some of the improvements recommended by JLARC.

These include:

  • Lift the Support Cap, a Great Recession-era policy that arbitrarily limited the state funding for school support staff (part of Recommendation 4)
  • Improving funding to remove barriers for students in low-income communities through improving the “at-risk add-on,” including boosting the funding amount and modernizing the data source (Recommendations 9 and 10)
  • Creating a per-pupil add-on for students with disabilities and boosting funding for English language learners (modified implementation of Policy Option 5)

Those are important improvements, but they’re only a part of JLARC’s recommended roadmap for making sure the state pays its fair share to provide educational opportunity for every student. Over the coming year, we can build on our progress through continuing to implement JLARC’s recommendations while community members and legislators also consider the more sweeping policy options for our public schools. (You can learn more about the Joint Subcommittee studying the JLARC recommendations and policy options and how you can engage here.)

Here’s what’s left to do on the major funding recommendations:

Recommendation 1 (near-term): Make technical improvements to the Standards of Quality (SOQ) formula and compensation supplement calculations to stop leaving out division central office positions, facility and transportation staff, and certain other costs from various calculations.

Recommendation 3 (long-term): Establish SOQ staffing ratios that accurately reflect how divisions are staffed. These should be developed by the VDOE in consultation with school divisions and the Board of Education.  

Recommendation 4 (remaining sections; near-term): Remove the hidden cuts to school funding that were built into the SOQs during the Great recession, including…(ii) reinstating the non-personal cost categories removed in FY09 FY10, and (iii) reinstating the federal fund deduction methodology used prior to FY09. (Additionally, although we won on part i (fully lifting the support cap) during the 2025 legislative session, we will need to monitor to make sure that Virginia keeps up with the prevailing ratio of support staff to students.)

Recommendation 5 (long-term): Direct VDOE to update the cost assumptions for school division employee salaries when doing the biennial SOQ rebenchmarking process to better reflect current salaries paid by school divisions

Recommendation 6 (near-term): More fairly calculate salary and other costs using division averages, rather than the “linear weighted average” that undercounts Virginia’s largest school divisions and results in prevailing cost assumptions that are well below actual costs for the majority of local school divisions.

Recommendation 7 (near-term): Limit sudden swings in the Local Composite Index by using three-year averages, rather than a single year, when updating calculations every other year.

Recommendation 8 (near-term): Move supplemental funding for students living in lower-income communities into the state’s main school funding formula (SOQs) to ensure students receive this critical funding, rather than keeping it as an optional “add-on.”

Recommendation 12 (long-term): Replace the current cost of competing adjustment with a more accurate adjustment based on a Virginia cost of labor index that better accounts for differing labor costs across school divisions.

Recommendation 13 (long-term): Include an economies of scale adjustment to provide additional funding to school divisions with fewer than 2,000 students.

Here’s JLARC’s “policy options” for further consideration:

Option 1: Develop and implement a funding plan to increase compensation to achieve the statutory goal of Virginia teacher salaries being at or above the national average. 

Option 2: Direct that a locality’s student enrollment and general population be equally weighted in the calculation of the local composite index for Standards of Quality funding, rather than weighting student enrollment two-thirds and the general population one-third. This would better recognize that local governments have significant costs beyond K-12 education. 

Option 3: Replace the local composite index with a revenue capacity index, which would more accurately measure local ability to pay by better measuring local tax capacity. 

Option 4: Replace the entire staffing-based SOQ formula with a new student-based formula that is based on actual average school division expenditures. 

Option 5 [partially implemented]: Simplifying and boosting funding for students with disabilities and English language learners by replacing the current SOQ formula calculations for special education and English as a Second Language with student-based funding calculations that are based on actual average school division expenditures. Legislators boosted funding for students with disabilities and English language learners during the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions, including providing a flexible add-on for students with disabilities. However, Virginia’s funding for students facing higher barriers remains far short of the level needed to make sure every student has the opportunity to fully learn and thrive.