As a concerned citizen on a fixed income, I encourage the School Board and the County to look for efficiencies that will reduce the overall budget and expenses of the school system. I applaud the School Board members for taking a closer look at the budget in line with your fiduciary responsibilities on behalf of the citizens of the County who are your neighbors, friends, congregation members, and taxpayers. I also thank the School Board for agreeing to submit a line-item budget this year and very much look forward to seeing those details published in January.

Each dollar that goes to the school comes out of a hardworking neighbors’ pocket. It takes a lot more money these days to put food on the table, gas in the car, and clothes on our backs. We need you to reduce the school budget, not just hold it steady. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months going through all the details of the budget, expense reports, and check registers approved at each School Board meeting. The School Board is not managing our money, you are just spending it, and lots of it.

As the recent community survey highlighted, the school must focus on education and providing teachers with the support they need to make educating students the priority. The school board and system say they are managing to community standards, however, I’m not sure those standards are from Northumberland County. The standards to which the school manages and funds prioritizes hiring a paraprofessional for inclusivity for special education rather than much-needed teachers. The existing community standards prioritize graduating students that are not proficient in English or math and are not prepared to join the workforce.

The community standards to which the Board manages prioritize contracts and partnerships with organizations outside the County and even outside the Commonwealth to teach diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic. Getting proficient in those basics will provide for equal opportunity, eliminating the need for costly social programs. The school budget is not robbing Peter to pay Paul with these contracts, it is robbing Peter to pay Judas as these outside organizations are not aligned with Northumberland County values and community standards and collect data and information on students without parental knowledge.

The school can still reward hard-working teachers (as identified at the last work session a 1.25% raise will cost under $200K, good news as this means the local match for the 2% raise will not require more taxes) by looking for efficiencies. Insurance costs are increasing for all of us yet the School Board members at their last meeting could not identify authoritatively what types of benefits were paid for staff and their families but set a priority to cover all costs.

This school board prioritizes spending $30,000 with Amazon, busting the budget for purchased services every year since 2018 (with the overspending in 2023 nearly equal the original budget from 2018) and failing to budget appropriately for retirement contributions. The year over year increase in school funding has not resulted in better student proficiency and can any of this Amazon money be brought back into the County?

The board recently did a line-item review of fiscal year 2023 expenditures. I encourage you to do the same for this current year, and to do it at every meeting. In the last meeting the Board said there was no “baseline from which to work” since there were questions on the 2023 budget that could not be answered. How is this possible when I have reconstructed budgets and expenditures since 2017 using data and information provided at each School Board meeting? The Board has prior year budgets to use as baselines and the failure to have answers for basic budgeting questions is very surprising especially when the people accountable for such spending are right here in front of us and can easily find the answers using technology.

This school board needs to get back to focusing on educating students and reducing costs. This County has many residents with the education (and past background checks) to help in the schools and offer support to teachers. Start a volunteer citizen corps to work with the new All-in Governor’s program, tutoring, and other duties so teachers and paraprofessionals can focus on education.

Let’s get back to basics, history, civics, reading, writing, and arithmetic, particularly good math with our tax dollars.

Karen A Pica, PhD
Heathsville, VA