The Staunton School Board has presented a bare-bones budget for FY2023 and Staunton City Council is not planning to support this budget as requested. This means our schools are in crisis. 

Here's how it works: The Staunton School Board creates a budget with an ask for funding from City Council each year. Then City Council can decide to support or not support the District's budget by allocating the correct amount of funding. City Council is currently planning to short the District's budget by over half a million dollars. This will impact every SCS student in our community. 

Underfunding the schools, unfortunately, appears to be a trend: At the start of 2020, the City of Staunton thought tax revenue would be down due to the pandemic so they cut the school funding by 2 million dollars. However, Staunton tax revenue was actually up that year and each year since, exceeding expectations. Unfortunately, Staunton City Council did not return the money they had cut from the District.

Since the pandemic, Staunton City Schools has had to dip into emergency funds just to meet basic operating costs. This isn’t sustainable and if the District's budget is not supported by City Council, funding will likely be cut from the arts, sports and extracurricular activities simply to meet minimum operating expenses. 

The District has 27 open positions yet the current draft budget from City Council will only cover 7 of those positions. This means Staunton City Schools will have to cram more kids into each classroom but it also means funding will be cut from other areas.

THIS IS NOT RIGHT.

Staunton City Schools has already fallen behind its neighbors. For example, Waynesboro School District and Augusta County Schools haven’t cut their schools’ budgets since 2013. Staunton, meanwhile, cut the District’s budget during the Great Recession and again in FY2021. Staunton cut local funding to schools by 13% in FY2021! Augusta County responded to the pandemic by increasing funding for its schools from FY2020 to FY2021.

We ask Staunton City Council to value the students, teachers and staff of our community by fully funding Staunton City School's  FY2023 budget. There is no greater investment in our community's future. There is no greater time to act than now.