Increasing revenue to support our students
Every child deserves to learn in classrooms with up-to-date curriculum and fairly paid teachers and in a building that inspires learning, not asthma attacks.
Virginia has never provided that to all of our students. Instead, we’re earning Ds and Cs in our school funding adequacy, fairness, and effort. Our public school funding levels are consistently below the national average.
At the same time, the federal government is pushing down more of the costs for food assistance onto states and threatening parents’ access to health care. Children can’t learn if they’re worried about their next meal or whether their mother can afford her next month’s insulin supply. Education, health care, and housing affordability shouldn’t be pitted against each other in a no-win battle. To improve public school funding while also addressing other issues that impact students’ ability to learn, we need new, sustainable revenues to pay for what our classrooms and students need.
Together, parents, teachers, and other advocates have begun making progress toward improving Virginia’s public school funding system. Catching up from harmful choices of the past doesn’t happen overnight, but over time, our progress will make a difference in helping more children learn and thrive.
However, we know much more needs to be done. The state’s research agency, JLARC, laid out a pathway in 2023 for making progress, including how the state could pay more of its fair share. Our local governments shouldn’t – and in some cases can’t – be expected to do it alone. At last count, local governments were already paying 45% more on average than the state funding formulas required, even after counting the voluntary incentive programs. In places that can afford to do so, that number is even higher – as much as 169% in Loudoun County. But many of Virginia’s poorest cities and rural counties struggle to even pay the minimum, leaving their students with few resources.
The state must step up and pay its fair share to help every student learn and thrive. That requires real money, which requires additional revenue.
What can we do?
Making sure the rich and powerful corporations pay their fair share can help our students and make our tax code fairer. Right now, the top 1% pay less as a share of their income than the rest of us. A new, fairer tax on income that exceeds a million dollars a year and fixing corporate tax loopholes will raise over $1 billion a year to help our students get the support they need to thrive without pitting the needs of our communities against each other.
We can also increase flexibility for local communities to decide how they’re going to pay their share of school costs, which aren’t going to go away even with increased state funding. Right now, the state only allows nine localities to enact a local sales tax for school construction if voters approve.
And when popular bipartisan legislation was previously passed to change that, Governor Youngkin vetoed it. Additionally, the state bans all local governments from enacting an income tax. Making the state tax code fairer and more adequate is important, and so is letting Virginia’s cities and counties use democratic processes to build a local tax system that meets the needs of their unique communities.
As we fix our schools and deliver more resources, policymakers should also make sure that the dollars we currently have are used to improve our public schools, not get diverted to unaccountable private schools for the few. Private school vouchers take money from our public schools, which are open to all and serve the vast majority of our students, and give it to private schools that pick and choose who they want to teach and whether or not they want to provide extra help for students with disabilities.
Ultimately, we are advocating for a set of common-sense measures that will raise the revenue needed to support our children without causing an undue burden on working-class Virginians.
Updated December 2025