While the General Assembly has been passed a stopgap’skinny’ budget, lawmakers have agreed to appropriate millions to Virginia’s public schools to address a $201 million error–the spending plan includes $132.7 million for the current school year and $125.8 million for the next year.
Schools across the state that used the Department of Education’s basic aid calculation tool to derive budgets, find themselves in the red due to an error in the tool; it did not account for a provision to hold localities harmless from Virginia’s elimination of the state portion of the grocery tax.
As a result, there is a statewide shortfall of about $201 million.
The Northampton schools budget for the fiscal year 2024 will have a funding shortfall of nearly $1.2 million.
The proposed budget includes 7% teacher raises: a 5.75% raise plus a step raise of 1.25% to 1.5%. The funding is based on a projected average daily roll of 1,300 students.
The adjusted budget request will be presented to the Board of Supervisors on April 11.
Virginia expects an estimated $3.6 billion in excess revenue during the fiscal year.
Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, told Virginia Mercury, “I wish the Department of Ed had gotten this right,” Simon said, referring to the accidental funding shortfall. “I wish we could’ve kept working towards the priorities that we have, and I trust … that we still will keep working on getting through the impasse because there’s a lot of money that’s at stake here: money for our education, money for teacher pay raises, money for public employee raises, huge amounts of money for mental health that we all support and we can’t abandon that.”
People naturally assume that the public school system is trying to do what’s best of the children. The fact of the matter is that these institutions have nothing to do with education. They are set up by people who, like all other people, have their own personal agendas. The public school’s true purpose is to put certain messages into the children’s heads so they’ll be more obedient of the government when they get older.
Consider the ‘grade’ system. You start off in first grade, where you’re placed not by academic ability, nor by willingness to learn, but by age. The reason for this is very simple. Most children already think of adults as if they’re their superiors, and now they’ll associate their position in the grade system with superiority. Obviously, that’s nonsense. A kid in the 5th grade may very well have less overall academic ability then a kid in the 2nd grade. Moreover, education isn’t something that can be ranked. The kind of education that tends to be more valuable later on in life is your specialization, not the sheer quantity of raw general knowledge.
Next, consider the way a classroom is structured. The teacher is in charge. The students are to listen to the teacher. This is most peculiar as well. After all, the teacher is a hired employee, who is in fact working for the students. If anything, the teacher should be listening to the concerns of the students, not the other way around. The reason the classroom setting is set up in this way is clear. The students learn at an early age to respect authority figures, so later on, they obey the government.