Isle of Wight County Schools is seeking a $6.8 million, or 20%, increase in local funding for the 2025-26 school year.

Superintendent Dr. Theo Cramer presented a $103 million budget to the School Board on Feb. 25 that would amount to a 5.9% increase over the $97.5 million budget the School Board adopted for the current year.

In 2024, Isle of Wight’s Board of Supervisors voted to “lump sum” fund IWCS $33.2 million, which the School Board was tasked with allocating as needed. Cramer’s budget for the coming school year requests $40 million from the county.

“About half of our requests are required just to maintain our school division, more specifically the raises and health care expenses are consuming a majority of our requests,” Cramer said.

Roughly $3.4 million of the requested increase is tied to mandatory spending, including $781,000 to provide the 3% raises for school employees required by the state’s 2024-26 biennial budget, an expected $1.6 million increase in health care costs and a $309,798 required local match for the division’s textbook fund.

Cramer said last year’s county contribution amounted to a 30.8% share of the supervisors’ $107 million 2024-25 general fund budget. By comparison, the $27.4 million school system contribution listed in the county’s 2019-20 budget amounted to a roughly 35% share of that year’s county budget. The percentage of the school system’s budget coming from local funds decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic due to IWCS receiving millions in additional federal relief dollars, known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. The deadline to use ESSER funds elapsed last year.

“Without the additional COVID or ESSER dollars and with the state admittedly underfunding our school divisions in the state, it is critically important and urgent that we receive the percent of the county’s operating budget that we received prior to the pandemic,” Cramer said. “I implore both our School Board members and our Board of Supervisors to please take these data points into consideration.”

Cramer cited a 2023 report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, or JLARC, to the General Assembly that concluded Virginia school divisions received less funding than the national and mid-Atlantic regional averages in the 2019-20 school year. According to a bar chart included in Cramer’s budget proposal, IWCS currently has the second-lowest per-pupil cost in Hampton Roads at $13,859 per student.

“If these bars represented our academic scores, we would be up in arms, people would have an issue and they should. … We have gotten used to getting along with less,” Cramer said.

School Board Vice Chairman Mark Wooster, however, raised concerns at a Feb. 27 budget work session over the tax implications. IWCS Finance Director Liesl DeVary said just over $670,000 equates to an additional penny on the county’s current real estate tax rate of 73 cents per $100 in assessed value.

“Obviously, more and more funding that we receive that the county provides, they’re getting it from where? Taxpayers,” Wooster said.

According to the proposed budget, IWCS expects $37.5 million in state funding for 2025-26 and an additional $8.1 million as its share of state sales tax revenue. Last year, the division budgeted just under $38.5 million in state funding plus $8.6 million from sales taxes, for a net year-over-year reduction of just over $500,000.

The budget further calls for 15 new positions including two reading interventionists, a math interventionist, an instructional assistant in welding, three special education self-contained elementary teachers, a career and technical education director, three library assistants, an attendance clerk, two additional school security officers and a human resources coordinator, which are collectively budgeted at $1.1 million. There’s also $934,667 in changes to the division’s local pay scale impacting 95 employees, mostly instructional assistants.

“Staff members too often take a pay cut to come work in Isle of Wight County; we can absolutely not depend on that in future years,” Cramer said. “Yes, we have a very desirable community to live in and a very good school division to work in, but the cost of living continues to go up and we owe our employees a fair and comparable compensation package.”

A separate 2025-26 capital improvements plan for one-time expenses calls for $7.5 million to replace the division’s circa-1955 bus garage, which Cramer said isn’t designed to accommodate modern buses, a $1.4 million renovation of the Smithfield High School band room that parents have been requesting for years, and $915,000 to purchase six new buses.

“Approximately one in three of our buses have exceeded their expected lifespan of 15 years or over 300,000 miles,” Cramer said. “Although we were funded five buses last year, we know that we still need additional buses for the next several buses for the next several years to get us up to par with our bus acquisition rotation.”

“I think we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that last year we got $9.5 million from the county in local funds for capital improvement and that’s huge, it’s huge, and again we’re asking for more stuff that didn’t get picked up last year. While I think this is important it’s also worth pointing that out,” School Board Chairman Jason Maresh said.

There’s also $180,000 earmarked for weapon detection devices for the county’s two middle schools. The rapid screening devices were budgeted for the two high schools this year.

Maresh, at the Feb. 27 work session, suggested prioritizing the one-time capital improvements over restoring the annual 35% county contribution.

The School Board is scheduled to hold its required public hearing on the budget on March 6 and vote on its adoption March 18. Once it’s adopted, the request for local funding will head to the supervisors, who typically begin discussing the county budget in late March or early April and vote on the county budget in May.