VCC Magazine Winter 2020

V irginia C apitol C onnections , W inter 2020 21 Fund Our Schools By Rachael Deane In December, a group of students, parents, educators, and public education supporters from across the Commonwealth gathered at Richmond’s Armstrong High School to kick off the Fund Our Schools coalition. Launched by the Legal Aid Justice Center, The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, NewVirginia Majority, and Virginia Educators United, the coalition envisions a Virginia where every student from every zip code has an opportunity to attain a high-quality public education. Strong, well-supported public schools are vital to ensuring that Virginia’s children can pursue their educational and career ambitions, to building a world-class workforce for the twenty-first century, and to endowing our future leaders with a strong sense of civic duty and community service. To build and maintain a thriving public education system is one of the highest callings of our state government.Virginia’s Bill of Rights lifts up the importance of public education, stating “that free government rests, as does all progress, upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge, and that the Commonwealth should avail itself of those talents which nature has sown so liberally among its people by assuring the opportunity for their fullest development by an effective system of education throughout the Commonwealth” (Article I, Section 15). Despite Virginia’s strong economy, our public schools continue to be underfunded, as our state Board of Education has pointed out in its 2019 Annual Report on the Conditions and Needs of Public Schools in Virginia . A 2019 JLARC report ranked our state 42nd in the nation for state per pupil funding and noted that state direct aid fell by eight percent per pupil in the last decade. The teacher shortage continues to grow, and statewide aggregate educational outcomes mask achievement gaps for our most academically vulnerable children. We simply do not invest enough in our public schools to fulfill the constitutional promise of a high-quality education for every child. The burden of declining state dollars falls on local governments, particularly in urban and rural areas with limited local tax bases. Across the Commonwealth, in communities that cannot afford to supplement state funding for education, academic outcomes suffer while students and educators languish in crumbling buildings with inadequate technology, textbooks, and other resources. Even in communities that can more easily afford to supplement the state’s investment, students who need extra support to succeed often lag far behind their peers. School funding is the rare policy issue that truly unites individuals across our Commonwealth, where the fates of our rural communities are bound together with those of our urban centers. The Fund Our Schools coalition has emerged to highlight the increasing needs of our schools statewide and the importance of investing in our children, our families, and our future economy. We seek a state budget that prioritizes equity in education, with dollars allocated based on student need; sufficient staffing—including removal of the pernicious support position cap—that meets the needs of all students; and just compensation and support for our educators, the dedicated public servants who mold our future civic leaders. The Virginia Board of Education, in prescribing our Standards of Quality this past fall, puts the price tag on this investment at about $1 billion per year. An investment now will pay dividends for decades—it’s time to fund our schools. Rachael Deane is the director of the JustChildren Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Richmond, where she leads statewide efforts to improve Virginia’s public education and juvenile justice systems. V