Ten Years and over $105,000,000 Million Northumberland taxpayer dollars later, we once again find ourselves staring at a School Board budget that asks for an ADDITIONAL $1,747,496 million dollars from the County. If this trend continues, within the next five years, Northumberland taxpayers will be shouldering more than $19,000,000 dollars of the School Board budget.

That’s bad news for the entire county. Necessary expenditures on infrastructure, public safety and health take a second seat to funding an ever growing School Board budget. In fact School Board expenditures last year consumed more than every other County department and agency combined.

According to a report “Competitive Teacher Pay”, generated by the Virginia Department of Education and presented to the Virginia General Assembly in January of this year, the problem isn’t money – it’s where the money is being spent. According to the report, big bucks counties’ test scores are sometimes eclipsed by counties with lower costs per student, money should be shunted from administrative and other costs to student education, and teacher retention isn’t all about pay.

The original General Assembly report: https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/2024/RD72/PDF

Our presentation here highlights where Northumberland County stands after ten years of uncontrolled spending and tells the story in easy to understand graphs which include student test scores.

The bottom line is that our student’s test scores don’t reflect that the $100 Million dollar county investment has changed much of anything.

Except of course, your real estate tax rates. (Which have gone up by 45% since 2014.)