Isle of Wight County supervisors took a deeper dive into some of the big-ticket expenses driving the school system’s 2025-26 budget request at a March 27 joint meeting with the School Board.

The School Board adopted a $103 million budget for 2025-26 on March 18 that seeks a $6.6 million, or 20%, increase in local funding for annual operating costs, plus a $6.4 million capital improvements plan for one-time expenses.

The current $107 million county budget allotted $33.2 million, or 31%, to its school system at the July 1 start of the 2024-25 fiscal year, though the School Board had initially asked for $35 million during last year’s budget cycle. Superintendent Theo Cramer has urged upping the county’s share to 35% in light of Isle of Wight County Schools no longer receiving millions in federal COVID-19 relief dollars that expired last year. The county also allocated $14 million for one-time capital projects last year, $9.5 million of which were for the school system.

“Just like last year we’ve got a big ask and I know you guys have competing asks throughout the county,” School Board Chairman Jason Maresh told supervisors.

Supervisor Renee Rountree said the county has roughly $4 million left from the 2024-25 capital improvements budget. The savings include a bid to replace Carrollton Elementary’s heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system, originally budgeted last year at just over $7 million, coming in under budget in January at $5.7 million.

Rountree said the county can also expect $3.5 million in upfront payments from AES Clean Energy, the Arlington-based developer of the Sycamore Cross solar farm approved last year to span more than 2,000 acres across the Isle of Wight-Surry county line.

Surry County’s supervisors voted in February to reject their 125-acre share of the project, though a provision of the siting agreement AES and Isle of Wight signed stipulates Isle of Wight will receive its upfront payments prior to the start of the project’s commercial operation regardless of whether Surry’s share of the project moves forward.

“That’s kind of our top line of what we have to work with in capital. … We know we have $7.5 million,” Rountree said, noting the total available pertains to school-related and non-school one-time needs across the county.

According to Cramer, $3.1 million, or just under half of the requested local increase, is tied to mandatory expenses, including a state-required 3% pay raise for school employees and a $1.6 million increase in health care costs.

 

A new bus garage

The School Board ranked replacing its circa-1955 bus garage as its No. 1 priority out of seven one-time capital needs. The current facility isn’t designed to accommodate modern 77-passenger buses.

“It has been on the CIP (Capital Improvements Plan) several different years, but it was pushed down,” Deputy Superintendent Christopher Coleman said. “It was pushed down for very good reasons. Funds had to go elsewhere across the division. It has gotten to a point now that I believe that we really do need to take a look at it.”

Cramer’s February draft budget had called for a $7.5 million replacement, which the School Board had by March 18 reduced in scope to $4 million.

Two years ago, the School Board discussed multiple options for expanding or replacing the existing facility, the costliest of which was a $10 million proposal for a joint facility that would serve all vehicles owned and operated by Isle of Wight County and its school system.

“We kind of went away from that idea,” Coleman said.

The second-largest, $7.5 million option would have built a new garage with eight vehicle bays. The $4 million alternative would only include three bays but would be designed to be expanded each year.

Just over a quarter of that cost is tied to infrastructure such as paving and stormwater management. The stormwater pond alone, which the existing bus garage lacks, will cost $400,000, Coleman said.

Building only three heavy-duty work bays to start “would mean we would have to retain the old building until the rest of the building was finished,” said IWCS Transportation Coordinator Matthew Fike.

The average school bus will be in the shop for services 11 times per year, Fike said. IWCS performs over 680 inspections per year on its fleet of more than 60 buses, he said.

 

Smithfield High School band room

The second-costliest single project listed on the School Board’s capital improvements plan is a $1.4 million renovation of the Smithfield High School band room that parents have been requesting for years.

SHS, built in 1980, is the second-oldest school in the county after Westside Elementary, which was built in the 1960s. Its current band room is 1,997 square feet. While there are tentative plans to replace Westside within the next few years, SHS is here to stay.

“Smithfield High School will be there and we need to start ensuring that we’re moving forward with the renovation of those areas,” Coleman said.

Coleman said the plan is to repurpose the school’s boiler room, which measures 2,437 square feet, as the new band room. The boiler room is no longer needed since four years ago SHS transitioned to rooftop HVAC units, Coleman said.

Renovating the boiler room would be more cost effective than expanding the existing band room, Coleman said. It would also allow the existing band room to be repurposed as additional instructional space. 

It could have the ripple effect of freeing up space in Smithfield Middle School, which adjoins Smithfield High. Deputy Superintendent Susan Goetz said SHS, which has just over 1,300 students, is currently using 19 classrooms in SMS as overflow space. 

 

New employees

The School Board’s adopted budget seeks funding for 14 new full-time employees, 11 of which would be instructional positions.

These include two reading specialists, collectively budgeted at just under $220,000, whom Goetz says are already employed but are funded with federal Title I dollars. Title I is a component of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act that supplements state and local funding for schools with at least 40% of their student population from low-income households. IWCS has three Title I schools: Hardy Elementary, Windsor Elementary and Carrsville Elementary.

Cramer’s February budget draft had estimated IWCS would receive $782,734 in Title I funding for 2025-26, a 5% or $32,805 reduction from the Title I funding for the current year. The current $815,539 listed for 2024-25 is itself a 24% drop from the just over $1 million IWCS received in Title I funding during the 2023-24 school year.

According to Goetz, the Title I reductions are tied to the 2020 Census, which showed increases both in population and in median household income over the prior decade. Hardy is now “borderline” for Title I status, Goetz said, due to the School Board’s 2023 decision to move 75 students from Carrollton Elementary to Hardy to free up classroom space at Carrollton.

The two affected positions collectively work with 100 below-benchmark elementary students.

“These people already exist; they are working as reading interventionists, and what we would like to do is just move them to our operating budget,” Goetz said.

A math interventionist at Smithfield Middle, while technically a new position, would be funded entirely with a state grant, Goetz said.

The new positions also include an instructional assistant in welding at Smithfield High, three self-contained elementary special education teachers to accommodate an increase in special education preschoolers who move to kindergarten, two clinic assistants, one additional registered behavior technician and a director of career and technical education who would be involved in overseeing the division’s new Isle Marine Trades Academy lab school partnership with Paul D. Camp Community College, Old Dominion University and Newport News Shipbuilding as well as the division’s other career and technical education programs.

Non-instructional new employees would include two additional school security officers, or SSOs, to assist with the operation of new weapons detection systems installed in Smithfield High and Windsor High this school year, and a human resources coordinator.

When Supervisor Joel Acree asked whether the Isle of Wight County Sheriff’s Office deputies assigned as school resource officers were still in place, IWCS Human Resources Director Laura Sullivan said they were but as sworn law enforcement officers have a higher “probable cause” threshold to meet before they can search a student, which is why SSOs are needed to work the weapons scanners.

Isle of Wight County Administrator is scheduled to make public his proposed 2025-26 budget on April 3. The supervisors are set to hold a public hearing on the budget, which would include its annual and one-time contribution to the schools, on April 24 and tentatively are set to vote on that budget on May 15.