It is that time of year again: Fairfax County Budget approval, and like clockwork complaints are raised about how much our county is spending; however, few of those complaints rely on the facts or look at the actual county or Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) budgets. FCPS proposed budget is funded from several sources: Fairfax County, Virginia State funds, sales tax, and Federal funds and other smaller scale inputs.
Fairfax County $2,673M 70.1%
Virginia State $723 M 19.0%
Sales tax $254M 6.7%
Federal Funds $51M 1.3%
For this report, 4 Public Education will focus on the contribution from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (BOS) to FCPS, since it is, by far, the largest source of funds.
In 2004, Fairfax contributed $1,238 million, about 53% of the total Fairfax County budget to our K-12 public schools. At that time, the number of students was 166,746, and the county population was 979,749.
In 2024, 20 years later, Fairfax sent $2,435 million to the public schools, just about double the 2004 contributions. While this sounds great, adjusting for price changes using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to measure price changes over that period, the FCPS budget has barely risen faster than the CPI. The 2024 allocation to FCPS is over CPI change by only 1 percentage point, over a 20-year period!
Nevertheless, the number of students, facilities, roles, and functions of FCPS has grown substantially, while the funding is flat considering inflation. In 2024, there are 182,000 students and the county population is 1,150,309.
The FCPS budget highlights show that 2020-2025, several important, challenging and expensive parts of our diverse student population have grown in just the last 5 years:
The number of students receiving Special Education services has increased by 7.5%.
The number of ESOL students has grown by 5.1%.
Students eligible for free or reduced lunch has grown by 15.7%.
Obviously, these three examples of our most critical and expensive education services have grown significantly since 2004, if they have grown this much in five year. However, if total funding has been basically fixed relative to price changes over the last 20 years, how have resources been diverted to these groups? What has been sacrificed?
While FCPS resources have been allocated to these and other areas, the “opportunity cost” of these factors has come in terms of lower wages and salaries for our teachers and staff. As you all know, we are not keeping up with salaries offered by our immediate neighbors (and competitors!) for teachers and other staff. Also, our class sizes are larger than our immediate neighbors. These lower salaries and higher class sizes may be why it is hard to retain teachers in FCPS.
It is actually surprising that the quality of FCPS education has kept up at all, in the face of flat funding, enrollment growth, growing demands for more services and an increasingly challenging student population.
That FCPS students are getting a very good education is a testament to great teachers, staff and management. But, at some point, the quality will diminish without a greater financial commitment. Maybe we should look at per student dollars per SAT point for some correlation. Maybe that would point to how much money we need to stay at the top using that metric.
The 2025 FCPS budget request to Fairfax is $2,637 million, while Fairfax BOS is planning for a smaller offering of $2,600 million. This is a 6.8% increase over 2024 funding. The CPI has risen 3.2% over the year according to the March CPI report. So, in this sense, Fairfax is doubling inflation -- which is great!
However, the percentage of the total budget being given to FCPS has dropped to 51.4% from 53% twenty years ago, and this is the second straight year of lower than usual proportion. Maintaining, or surpassing, the historical proportion is key to assuring Fairfax is not falling behind in providing a quality educational system.
Bottom line: It is appropriate for the Fairfax Board of Supervisors to consider adding more funds to FCPS to match the School Board’s request, to further invest in our kids.
To support Fairfax County Public Schools Budget Request contact your supervisor here.