School Board member urges County supervisors to allot remaining funds to school division

Warren County Public Schools Superintendent Christopher Ballenger addresses the Warren County Board of Supervisors/Warren County School Board Joint Budget Committee during its Monday meeting.

The Warren County School Board would like to get the $1.2 million chunk of the school division’s fiscal year 2023 budget appropriated by the Warren County Board of Supervisors (BOS) as soon as possible.

“While it’s been said 150 thousand times, I hope we can get to looking at that $1.2 million sooner rather than later,” said School Board member Antoinette Funk, referring to the amount of money the BOS has approved for the school division but still hasn’t appropriated.

Funk chairs the Warren County Board of Supervisors / Warren County School Board Joint Budget Committee, which met on Monday, September 12.

The joint committee was formed earlier this year for members of both boards to tackle the County’s education budget and related spending.

Those present for the Monday meeting were School Board members Funk and Andrea Lo, Warren County Public Schools (WCPS) Superintendent Christopher Ballenger and WCPS Finance Director Robert Ballentine, BOS members Delores Oates and Vicky Cook, Warren County Administrator Edwin Daley, and County Finance Director Matt Robertson.

The request from Funk (above, during a previous School Board meeting) came during the last roughly five minutes of the almost hour-long joint committee meeting. She was referring to the $1.2 million the BOS is still considering appropriating to schools.

The division was funded at 75 percent to start the school year, or about $6.9 million. The BOS recently approved $5.7 million, which leaves $1.2 million outstanding.

There were identified needs that the school division had in the budget, but they were placed on hold due to the funds not being appropriated to the operational budget for the time being. These included additional teaching positions, supplements, and other costs.

Part of the reason for the BOS holding the funds was to ensure there was enough funding for the capital projects from the county. The Warren County BOS provides the school division with 40 percent of its annual funding.

During the joint committee meeting, Oates, who is vice chair of the BOS, said one of the concerns for the BOS is planned renovations at Leslie Fox Keyser Elementary School “and what will actually be the reality of that versus the speculation,” she said. “There are uncertainties there. I know we also have E. Wilson Morrison [Elementary School]; if there’s any way that we can make that a priority at some point for those kids, that’s another consideration.”

Funk said that while she understands the BOS’s concerns, “from our perspective, it just feels like you’re holding part of the operations budget for capital instead of for operations, for which it was originally appropriated for… Because we originally approved it for operations, and some of it is being withheld for capital… and it really puts us in a predicament, obviously. We may have to talk to our staff about not getting the supplement yet,” she said, adding that the School Board has been telling WCPS staff that the board continues to work on obtaining the funds. “And we don’t want to be in the same predicament come next September,” she said.

One of the BOS’s concerns in the future, Oates continued, is the sustainability of some of the budget decisions that were made during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “What’s going to happen with future funding, the biennial budget? There are so many things,” said Oates. “The $1.2 million may not be used for capital; it may be used for future operations. But it’s yours. We’ve appropriated it to schools.”

“But we don’t have it yet for operations,” Funk said.

Cook pointed out that one of the purposes of reevaluating the school division’s budget every quarter is to look at its performance, “and if there’s something there… then that’s when we’ll open it up for discussion,” she said.

“Well, again, I just want to reiterate I hope that come next September [for the 2024 budget] we’re not sitting here still trying to get a finalized budget that should have been done back in March,” said Funk. “And I think you guys [the BOS] want that too.”

“Absolutely,” said Oates.

“We don’t want it to go from March to September, but that’s the realization of where we’re at,” Funk said.

Another issue, Oates pointed out, was that the Virginia General Assembly [GA] didn’t approve a budget until the end of July. “A lot of it had nothing to do with the supervisors,” she said. “It had to do with the GA.”

Funk acknowledged that that was “a huge factor,” as well.

Oates also said that local governments in the state are basically learning on the fly about navigating the budget cycle, which from 2020 until now has been impacted by the pandemic, as well as new state legislators. “This is new territory,” she said. “We’re all trying to learn.”

The BOS wants to plan for the school division’s future needs “and not get caught in a situation where we can’t fund something,” Oates said.

Superintendent Ballenger said: “And that’s what we’re doing — planning on where we need to go.”

Regarding renovation funding for Leslie Fox Keyser Elementary School, Ballenger updated the joint committee, saying that about $245,800 would be available from cafeteria funds, with another $217,700 coming from value engineering savings identified by the general contractor. Additional savings are also forthcoming from other contractors, he told the committee members, which could help reduce renovation costs at the school from roughly $15.5 million to the school division’s available revenue for the project of $14.8 million.

“We’re still waiting on four or five contractors to get back on some other things,” he said, “and we estimate that to be about $128,000. But of course, we don’t know until they give us their numbers. So, value engineering right now totals about $463,500,” without the estimated items still to come in. The renovation project is slated to start on January 1, 2023.

The joint budget committee also set its next meeting for Monday, October 24 at 4 p.m. The meeting will be held at the Warren County Government Center, 220 N. Commerce Ave., Front Royal, Va.

Watch the joint budget committee meeting in its entirety on this exclusive Royal Examiner video.