Governor Youngkin’s proposed budget released today includes changes to state support for public education, but once again fails to make the sustained, meaningful investments needed to meet the needs of Virginia’s students and educators. Despite strong revenue growth and hundreds of millions of dollars in available resources, the budget largely maintains the status quo for K-12 schools and makes no meaningful progress toward addressing long-standing underfunding.
While the administration highlights increases in education spending, most of the funding for K-12 schools reflects required technical updates such as rebenchmarking and data revisions, not new investments in staffing, student supports, or learning conditions. The budget makes no meaningful progress toward funding the unmet needs identified by the General Assembly’s nonpartisan research agency, JLARC, which has repeatedly found that Virginia underfunds its public schools by billions of dollars each year.
The budget also relies on short-term and one-time measures rather than long-term solutions. Educators and school staff are offered a temporary bonus in the current year and modest pay adjustments in future years that fail to keep pace with inflation or close the gap between Virginia and the national average in educator pay. These approaches do little to address persistent teacher shortages and growing staffing challenges in schools across the Commonwealth.
At the same time, the Governor’s budget includes significant reductions to K-12 funding in the current year driven by updated enrollment and lottery data. While these reductions are technical in nature, they nonetheless remove more than $200 million from school division budgets partway through the year, creating instability for schools already operating with limited resources.
Perhaps most concerning, the budget continues to prioritize tax cuts and corporate tax preferences over investment in public education. The Governor proposes hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax cuts, including roughly half a billion dollars in new corporate tax loopholes created by conforming Virginia’s tax code to Trump-era federal tax changes. These choices permanently reduce state revenue that could otherwise be used to strengthen public schools, raise educator pay, and provide targeted support to students who need it most.
The budget also fails to align accountability expectations with support. As hundreds of schools are newly identified as “Off Track” or “Needs Intensive Support” under Virginia’s new accountability system, the budget allows nearly $10 million in critical federal school improvement funding to expire without replacement. This comes despite JLARC’s warning that the state already lacks sufficient capacity to provide meaningful improvement support to high-need schools.
All students deserve access to a high-quality public education, regardless of where they live. That requires sustained, ongoing investment, not temporary fixes, technical adjustments, or policies that divert resources away from public schools. Fund Our Schools will continue working with lawmakers and partners in the coming months to advocate for a state budget that fully funds public education and meets the needs of every student in every zip code.