The Alexandria City School Board approved the FY 2018 Final Combined Funds Budget for Alexandria City Public Schools at a total expenditure of $284 million on Thursday night.
The budget focuses on maintaining resources for our classrooms, while also keeping ACPS competitive across the Northern Virginia region, despite the tough economic climate.
“We would like to thank City Council for their support of a tax increase and although this additional funding is not directly allocated to the schools for this upcoming budget year, we appreciate their statements of support for future increases in funding for schools. This has been a difficult budget year for ACPS. The School Board has done its best to ensure that the classrooms have the resources they need, while focusing on continuing to retain and attract exemplary staff, who we know are an essential part of any high-performing school division. Balancing these two components of the ACPS 2020 Strategic Plan is essential to continue the work over the next year,” said School Board Chair Ramee Gentry.
ACPS Staff will get a full step increase from July 1, which averages out at a 2.25 percent increase. These increases will be offset by mandatory staff increases in health benefit costs and any corresponding increases in Virginia Retirement System contributions as a result of this 2.25 percent increase. To accommodate the step increase, the adoption of new textbooks for language arts grades K-2 and Spanish and French world language textbooks at the middle and high school level will be postponed. There were also adjustments to staffing and reductions in the technology budget that will impact mobile hotspot availability for students.
The School Board was unable to fund both the full step increase and the new textbooks as the City appropriation was $2.1 million short of the amount requested by the School Board to fund the Operating Budget for the schools next year. Central Office departments already made $1.6 million in reductions to their budgets prior to the budget being proposed to City Council.
The required increases over last year’s Final Budget of $277.6 million are due to growing enrollment in ACPS. The budget provides for 23 new positions to keep pace with growing student numbers. However, this number will be reduced by three positions after July as some teachers at the high school will be required to teach more instructional periods.
“We continue to face the impact of growing enrollment on the services we can provide. This budget is as pared back as it possibly can be without impacting the ACPS 2020 Strategic Plan, our roadmap for the future. Achieving high-performance requires supporting all areas of the Strategic Plan,” said Superintendent Alvin L. Crawley.
Last year marked the first year that the ACPS student population exceeded the seats available according to the specifications for optimal learning environments outlined in the joint City and Schools Long Range Educational Facilities Plan. This school year, ACPS had 15,056 students enrolled as of October 2016 and has continued to grow since. This is approximately 1,000 students more than the number of seats available. This seating deficit is projected to increase further in the 2017-18 school year. Enrollment is projected to increase by 2.8 percent in FY 2017-18, taking ACPS to a total of 15,473 students. By FY 2027, ACPS is projected to have just fewer than 17,800 students.
The Final Budget includes pushing back the modernization program by at least one year. The Final Budget assumes that the Lee Center will be made available to use as swing space from FY 2019 for the entire modernization program. The modernization will begin with Douglas MacArthur Elementary School in FY 2020.
The modernization of George Mason Elementary School will be pushed back one year to FY 2022 and the modernization of Cora Kelly School for Math, Science and Technology will be pushed back by two years to FY 2024. The second Pre-K center would open in FY 2026.
The construction of a new elementary school, whose location is still to be determined, and the modernization of Matthew Maury Elementary School are both pushed out of the ten-year CIP. Only the designs funds are included in FY 2017.
Plans for a new middle school would be scaled down from a building for 1,200 students to one for 600. Planning for this would take place in FY 2022, with construction beginning in FY 2023.
T.C. Williams King Street campus will get six relocatable classrooms this fall, with the construction of a new building, potentially at the Minnie Howard campus, beginning in FY 2021. This timeline is the same as the timeline originally adopted by the School Board in December 2016.
ACPS has put in a request for $10.8 million in FY 2018 of the City Council approved three cent real estate tax increase. The City Council has decided that they wanted to leave the money in contingency. The schools do not automatically get any of the funds from this three percent tax increase. The new Ad Hoc Joint City Schools Facilities Investment Task Force will make recommendations regarding how the contingency funding is allocated and also the overall Capital Improvement Program planning for both the City and ACPS. Funds will be made available for City Council allocation in January 2018.
Review the budget documents online: