It was a real-life word problem gone awry.
The tool has been up since June 2022, allowing districts to build their budgets around the estimations. But last week, someone — the state would not say who — realized that the numbers were wrong. The miscalculation occurred after the state failed to account for funding changes connected to the elimination of the state’s tax on groceries, which took effect Jan. 1.
A notice went out to school districts Friday. The error was first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“We certainly understand that this has caused some consternation,” said Charles B. Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. “We’re very sorry that this happened in the first place and that it wasn’t caught earlier.”
The error surfaces as state lawmakers prepare to debate the state’s two-year budget plan. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has proposed more than $1 billion in tax cuts. And though he has also proposed boosting teacher pay and investing in school reading and math specialists to address learning loss during the pandemic, Democrats say more investment is needed.
The school funding error will deal the biggest blow to districts that rely the most on state aid, such as those in poor, rural communities that cannot depend on a wealthy property tax base to fund their schools. For some of those districts, state aid makes up 80 percent of the funding used to provide basic educational services.
“There’s a little bit of a panic right now,” Keith Perrigan, the superintendent of Bristol Public Schools and head of the Coalition of Small and Rural Schools of Virginia, told the Times-Dispatch.
Districts in Northern Virginia, where property values are generally high, get a much smaller proportion of their budget from the state. Fairfax County Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, will get $13 million less for the coming fiscal year, a small portion of the budget for a division that spends well over $3 billion annually.
The flawed tool overestimated Prince William County’s state aid by about $11 million for the coming fiscal year, when the district estimates it will spend about $1.6 billion.
“Unfortunately, this error by [the state education department] may inhibit our ability to make critical FY 24 investments, such as teacher staffing, special education teaching assistants, and crucial safety improvements,” Diana C. Gulotta, spokeswoman for Prince William County Public Schools, said in an email to The Washington Post.
Del. Barry D. Knight (R-Virginia Beach), who oversees the state budget for the House as chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, said he wishes he would have been informed about the error sooner.
“If I had known about it earlier we may could have thought about … a fix sooner,” Knight said. The House will unveil its proposed modifications to the state budget on Sunday afternoon, “and it’s a little bit too late to even change anything around at this late point.”
Instead, House and Senate negotiators will have to hammer out a solution to the problem later in the legislative session when they reconcile differences between budget amendments proposed by the two chambers.
Del. Schuyler T. VanValkenburg (D-Henrico) expressed frustration over the error, criticizing the Youngkin administration for expending so much energy on what he characterized as distractions, including a tip line for parents to report teachers they don’t like, a policy sharply restricting the rights of transgender students and an error-plagued rollout of history teaching standards, he said.
“At a certain point, your manpower is being so driven by these ideological crusades that you’re not minding the store,” said VanValkenburg, a high school civics teacher.
Macaulay Porter, spokeswoman for the governor, declined to address that criticism. In a statement, she said: “The Administration is continuing to work with all stakeholders, including our school systems and the legislature, to address the VDOE estimation tool error. The Governor is confident that we will address localities’ concerns.”