Great public schools are the foundation of great communities. But to be great, our public schools need sufficient funding to provide a high-quality education that gives students the tools they need to succeed regardless of their background or their zip code. 

Unfortunately, the state isn’t paying its fair share of school costs. In many places in Virginia, local governments can’t afford to make up the difference. Students, parents, and teachers in communities across Virginia are working hard, yet too often they do so without access to sufficient resources and support. This is significant because money matters to student outcomes.

Virginia’s nonpartisan research agency (JLARC) released a major report in 2023 that has provided a blueprint for how policymakers can improve the formula that calculates state funding for public schools to make sure the state pays its fair share to support our students, our schools, and our communities. 

Through the hard work of students, teachers, parents, legislative champions, and other advocates for the last two years, Virginia’s legislature has already made some of the improvements recommended by JLARC. These include:

• Lifting the Support Cap, a Great Recession-era policy that arbitrarily limited the state funding for school support staff (part of Recommendation 4)
• Improving funding to remove barriers for students in low-income communities through improving the “at-risk add-on,” including boosting the funding amount and modernizing the data source (Recommendations 9 and 10)
• Creating a per-pupil add-on for students with disabilities and boosting funding for English language learners (modified implementation of Policy Option 5)

While these are important improvements, they’re only a part of JLARC’s recommended roadmap for making sure the state pays its fair share to provide educational opportunity for every student. 

In 2026, policymakers should continue to improve the adequacy and equity of state funding for our students while also making real progress toward a rigorous, inclusive rewrite of Virginia’s currently overcomplicated K-12 funding formula.

This session, legislators can build on their recent progress for our students by:

• Protecting recent victories for our students by codifying the at-risk add-on in the main Standards of Quality formula (JLARC Recommendation 8), codifying the new per pupil add-on for students with disabilities, creating a new per pupil add-on for English language learners, and boosting the adequacy of all three add-ons (see Improving Support for Students Facing the Highest Barriers for more information)
• Engaging in a rigorous, inclusive process to determine whether and how to overhaul the funding formula. This should include providing funding for the work of the Joint Subcommittee that is tasked with leading this work, which would allow them to engage in robust public engagement and commission an adequacy study to help policymakers know how much money is needed to provide a high-quality education for children in communities across the commonwealth. (You can learn more about the Joint Subcommittee studying the JLARC recommendations and policy options here.)

Virginia is a top-12 state in terms of median household income, so we have the capacity to create great public schools in every community. But we only ranked 33rd in the country in state per-student funding during the 2022-2023 school year. By continuing to make progress on JLARC’s funding adequacy and equity recommendations and building a rigorous, inclusive process to determine whether and how Virginia will rewrite its school funding formula, we can make real progress towards becoming a place where every neighborhood has great public schools for our children.