Arlington School Board members for six months have promised a new approach to tackling the school system’s budget-development process.
Those assurances are about to be put to the test.
The release of a draft Fiscal Year 2026 Arlington Public Schools budget is still a month away, and its final adoption is nearly three months down the road. But things are moving at a fast pace, with multiple challenges:
- There is fiscal uncertainty at all three levels of government that fund county schools: local, state and federal.
- Trying to make sense of all the moving parts will be a relatively inexperienced School Board. Two members are new for 2025, none of the other three has spent more than three years on the body.
- The current chair, Mary Kadera, has already announced she won’t be seeking re-election in November. She becomes the third Board member in a row set to leave after just a single four-year term.
- School leaders will have to fund any promises made to newly empowered unions through collective bargaining.
Kadera and the other four Board members — Bethany Zecher Sutton, Miranda Turner, Kathleen Clark and Zuraya Tapia-Hadley — have quite the test ahead.
A New Way of Budgeting?
In detailing the FY 2026 budget-process timeline during a January School Board meeting, Superintendent Francisco Durán said budget planning had been ongoing since last July.
New for FY 2026, he and the Board will present a unified budget to the community, slated for publication on March 13.
This compares to the previous procedure, where “I did one in February [each year], followed by the School Board,” said Durán, who was hired away from a staff position in Fairfax County in 2020, before any of the current Board members were in office.
The reason for the change from what had been decades-long standard practice?
“We want our best recommendations to come forward through that collaboration,” Durán said.
At the Jan. 16 meeting, the Board’s chair, Kadera, said efforts were being made to make the budget process more transparent as well as more thorough.
“This year, we’re sort of going a step further,” she said. “Those who are so motivated … can dig a bit deeper.”
She noted that “transparency is really important in any year,” particularly given budget challenges that lie in wait.
“We’re going to have some budget tradeoffs,” Kadera predicted. “It’s important for our community and our staff to really understand, soup to nuts, the process that we go through.”
Arlington Leads Pack in Per-Student Spending
There is no way to with 100% accuracy compare spending by local school districts. But the Washington Area Boards of Education, or WABE, tries.
WABE is a consortion of local suburban school districts. Its annual report, issued near the end of each calendar year, provides a trove of information from the currently underway fiscal year — in this case, FY 2025.
The data, compiled and reported by staff from Fairfax County Public Schools, attempt to come as close as possible to an apples-to-apples comparisons of Northern Virginia school spending.
Arlington Public Schools again leads this list. Its expected fiscal 2025 per-student cost is $25,175, up 2.2% from FY 2024.
Among other major school districts in the region, with spending and year-over-year trajectory:
- Falls Church: Per-student spending of $23,711 is down 0.1%
- Loudoun County: Per-student spending of $21,915 is up 10.1%
- Alexandria: Per-student spending of $21,769 is up 1.9%
- Fairfax County: Per-student spending of $20,940 is up 5.7%
- Prince William County: Per-student spending of $18,069 is up 10.9%
The school districts of Manassas and Manassas Park also are analyzed in the study, with per-student costs roughly in line with those in Prince William County.
Trying to Find Efficiencies
In late January, Arlington school leaders received a draft 121-page report from the consulting firm Baker Tilly, looking at both enrollment and budget data — along with comparable information from other local school districts.
The report noted that, from fiscal 2018 to 2024, the school system’s operating fund rose 32.2% to $656.1 million, while the overall school budget was up 22.9% to $810.1 million.
(In the current fiscal 2025, the overall adopted budget is $826 million.)
The report found that spending growth during that six-year period has been uneven, especially when it is compared to the overall student population:
“It is interesting to note the minimal increases in spending at the school division from FY2018 through FY2020. The growth in per-pupil expenditures is a relatively new trend, starting in FY2021 and continuing to grow through FY2023.”
The majority of school-system costs relate to personnel, and the report found that the school system added 139 full-time-equivalent positions from FY 2023 to FY 2025.
The average salary cost position rose from $73,935 to $86,430 during the same period, according to data in the report.
What Is Proposed for Cuts?
The public won’t get an inkling of what the superintendent and School Board might propose for cuts until the budget plan is released in March.
But the Baker Tilly report came up with an estimated $32.1 million in potential savings for the coming fiscal year, about a third of it by reducing “nice to have” but not essential staffing levels.
Proposals to save money also include consolidation of elementary school classrooms that have small student counts; eliminating secondary-school courses with minimal enrollment; and being more strict in approving overtime requests from staff.
The report also suggests more attention and oversight be paid to the hiring of additional staff with contingency funds:
“Currently, requests for additional staff seem to be received/approved by a variety of upper-level staff. A more standardized approach will allow for a more measured approach in granting extra staff, better monitoring of which schools are receiving what, and, ultimately, more equity in allocation of staff across the division.”
The proposals also seek consideration of eliminating the school system’s exemplary-project programming for the coming school year. That would save $3.6 million.
“While pushback may occur from schools and the broader community, APS will need to articulate the higher priority needs for teachers and related to accomplish strategic goals,” the report says. “Teachers in the exemplary program should be given preference in filling needs for APS that may have been created through attrition and other staff movement.”
For additional savings, the report suggests eliminating health-care insurance for retirees once they reach the age of 65 and are eligible for Medicare. That would save an estimated $5.6 million.
Too Much Top-Level Bureaucracy?
Those contending that Arlington’s school system is top-heavy might have gained some ammunition via the Baker Tilly report.
Analysts compared the number of top administrators at local school districts, finding that Arlington has a “considerably higher proportion of administrators compared to the larger districts.”
“Loudoun and Prince William have approximately three times as many students, but with approximately the same number of upper-level administrators,” the report noted.
The total figures, however, are relatively small — 34 staff members fall into that category in Arlington out of a total budgeted FTE count of about 5,260.
The figure is 37 in Loudoun and 33 in Prince William. Fairfax County, with 6.5 times the number of students as Arlington, makes do with fewer than twice as many (67) top-tier staff as Arlington.
Put another way in the report, Arlington has one top-tier administrator for every 823 students. Loudoun has one for every 2,205, Prince William one for every 2,746 and Fairfax one for every 2,675.
When compared to smaller school districts, however, the situation is reversed.
Alexandria (with 16,600 students) has one upper-level administrator for every 692 students, while Falls Church (with 2,700 students) has one for every 141.
What’s Next in the Budget Process?
Unlike numerous states, Virginia school boards do not have independent taxing authority. About 80% of the school system’s budget is via a pass-through from the county government.
The Arlington government and school system have a revenue-sharing agreement in place, but the total amount of government funding for schools won’t be known for sure until County Board members adopt a budget and set tax rates in the spring.
Also still up in the air is total funding from the state government, which awaits the General Assembly and governor resolving budget disputes.
Then there is the federal government, where the Trump administration seems hostile to disseminating pass-through funding to states and localities, even if Congress has approved it.
Key dates as the school system’s fiscal 2026 budget process rolls on:
- Thursday, Feb. 13: There will be a presentation on the fiscal 2025 mid-year budget situation
- Wednesday, March 12: A School Board/County Board budget work session
- Thursday, March 13: The formal budget presentation
- March 25 to April 3: A series of School Board work sessions
- Thursday, April 3: More work sessions and a School Board budget public hearing
- Mid-April: County Board members adopt the county budget, set tax rates and determine the transfer amount to schools
- Thursday, May 1: School Board members adopt the budget
- Tuesday, July 1: The county government’s 2026 fiscal year begins
