As if there are not enough hands reaching into taxpayers’ wallets, the Fairfax County School Board may want to add itself to the list.
In what effectively already is a dead duck for the 2024 session, Fairfax School Board members in their lengthy list of General Assembly priorities are calling for “fiscal autonomy” for elected School Boards across the commonwealth.
“Fiscal autonomy”? That kinda, sorta smells like shorthand for “taxing authority.”
Currently, Virginia school systems like Fairfax’s get the bulk of their operating cash from the local governing body (in Fairfax’s case, the Board of Supervisors), with lesser amounts coming from the state and federal governments. Most of the local funding comes from property taxes, a hefty chunk of which is cleaved off from the county government and sent to the school system.
Depending on the year and the locality, the give-and-take on how much the school system should get ranges from sociable to venomous.
Chances that the General Assembly would move to provide local School Boards with independent taxing authority – as frequently can be found nationwide – are as close to zero as mathematically possible, even with Democrats holding the majority in both houses for 2024. Even if a bill did pass, it likely would be dead on arrival at the governor’s desk.
Do those on local elected School Boards across Virginia really want taxing authority? Why, the cynics might ask, would they give up sitting in the catbird seat – being able to loudly demand more money from state and local leaders while not having to face the consequences of being the ones taking it out of taxpayers’ wallets?
In the now three decades since Virginia permitted localities to have elected, rather than appointed, School Boards, and most have opted to go that route. But not all.
Voters in Hanover County – located in the Richmond suburbs – on Nov. 7 rejected a proposal to switch from appointed to elected, although the result seemed to have more to do with intra-county political infighting and less with the merits of each option.
The history books say that Virginia was the last state in the nation to authorize elected school boards, following General Assembly action in 1992. But history books sometimes get it wrong.
In 1949, the legislature – which later came to regret its decision – permitted Arlington voters to elect their School Board members. But during the more than decade it was in operation, those board members couldn’t seem to decide which side of the segregation/integration divide to land on, and by the early 1960s the largely segregationist General Assembly had had enough and forced Arlington back to an appointed board. So it stayed until the early 1990s.
