Proposed WCPS budget funds pay raises, new buses, more instructors

Pay raises, additional instructors and specialists, as well as five new school buses, are part of the proposed fiscal year (FY) 2020-21 operating budget for Warren County Public Schools (WCPS).

The Warren County School Board this week presented the proposed budget to the Warren County Board of Supervisors (BOS) during a joint February 18 meeting and reviewed it again during a School Board work session on February 19 following its regular meeting.

WCPS Interim Superintendent Melody Sheppard told the supervisors on Tuesday evening she projected additional funds available from the State of Virginia and staff turnover total more than $2.95 million.3

“Our goal this year is to focus on the areas which will have a positive impact on our students,” WCPS Interim Superintendent Melody Sheppard told the supervisors on Tuesday evening. “So, anything you see that we are recommending for our budget next year will have a direct impact on students.”

Goals for the school year 2020-21 are to use roughly $2.85 million of those funds to fully implement salary scales for teachers, instructional assistants (IAs) and nurses, as well as a 1 percent cost-of-living adjustment and step for all WCPS employees.

WCPS also would use $120,000 of the more than $2.95 million to buy five new school buses through a lease-to-own agreement and would allocate $150,000 to a fund for new textbooks, which would be purchased in a deal providing both online and hard-copy editions.

Another goal, Sheppard added, is for all Warren County schools to be accredited.

Toward that goal, WCPS wants to add 4.5 teaching positions — to include one half-time Patient Care Tech teacher for its Career and Technical Education (CTE) program, two English language teachers, and two special education instructional coaches — and would hire two instructional resource team specialists, one social worker, and four IAs, according to the proposed budget summary Sheppard provided to the supervisors.

The cost to cover the additional teachers and specialists would total almost $3.83 million, with $231,833 targeted to the social worker and IAs, who would work in a to-be-created Behavior
Support Program for the school district, said Sheppard, adding that $4,760 would be used to increase the CTE budget for the EMT and Trades Academy, which has seen increased enrollment.

The nearly $3.83 million proposed for the additional instructors and specialists exceeds the roughly $2.95 million in projected additional funds by $868,858, according to the proposed WCPS FY 2020-21 operating budget that Sheppard handed out during the School Board’s work session on Wednesday.

Overall, WCPS expects approximately $61.59 million in total projected revenue for the upcoming fiscal year based on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s proposed budget. The total required expenditures for the current WCPS budget are just more than $58.63 million.

During the joint School Board and BOS meeting on Tuesday evening, Warren County Administrator Doug Stanley shared a variety of data, including WCPS budget increases during the last decade (see graph below), and how much funding WCPS has been allocated as part of Warren County’s total budget over the years.

Source: Doug Stanley, Warren County Administrator.

For example, in the school year 2003-04, the local school appropriation from Warren County totaled just more than 25 percent of the County’s total budget. Comparatively, it was approximately 32 percent of the County’s total budget for the current school year, according to Stanley’s data.

Much of the increase, he said, has been to cover capital needs, such as construction and/or renovations to schools such as E. Wilson Morrison Elementary School, A.S. Rhodes Elementary School, and Warren County High School.

“We’ve made significant progress in the last 15 plus years on meeting capital needs,” Stanley told the supervisors, “and now we agree that the focus should shift to addressing the school system’s operational needs over the next five years until the need for the next elementary school arises.”

During the Warren County School Board’s February 19 work session, Sheppard gave members some good news and announced that health insurance rates came back a few days ago and they’ve been decreased by 5.9 percent.

“So, we have an excellent rate decrease,” she said. “If you remember two years ago, we had an increase of almost 20 percent and last year we had a decrease of around 3 percent.”

Sheppard said with the savings from the insurance rate decrease, WCPS, in turn, would like to decrease the employees’ portion of their health insurance. “When we know more information, we’ll be able to make some recommendations” about what to do with the savings, Sheppard told School Board members.

She also set an additional work session for March 4 that will follow the School Board’s regular meeting and a special meeting on March 11 to approve the WCPS final budget.

“The reason to do that,” said Sheppard, “is because we expect to get some additional information from the state about how much money we’re going to get from them.”

 “The devil is in the details and we haven’t got the details yet,” Robert Ballentine, WCPS Director of Finance said that the State Department of Education has about 10 days until it releases related budget information to school districts.

Robert Ballentine, WCPS Director of Finance, said there are three state competing budgets currently under consideration by legislators in Richmond.

The Virginia General Assembly is slated to adjourn on March 7, according to Ballentine, putting WCPS in “good shape” to know what to expect in its forthcoming budget so that the district can move forward.

“We’re almost in a state of hold right now,” Ballentine said. “We’ve talked about the [budget] priorities we’d like to do… but until we get a little better picture of our revenue from the state, it’s difficult for us to do anything more.”

Sheppard said Stanley agreed to accept the final WCPS FY 2020-21 budget on March 12. He said on Tuesday that he expects the supervisors to approve the final WCPS budget at their April 21 meeting.

The School Board members present on February 19 were James Wells, Ralph Rinaldi, Catherine Bower, and Kristen Pence. School Board Chairman Arnold Williams, Jr. was absent for the regular meeting and work session, but he did attend the joint meeting on Tuesday with the BOS.