Some Fairfax County School Board members hope closer collaboration with their Board of Supervisors’ counterparts will make for smoother future budget processes than was experienced earlier this year.
Fairfax County Public Schools needs to convince local elected officials and the broader community that “we are being as strategic as possible with every dollar,” Mason District School Board member Ricardy Anderson said during a school board work session on Tuesday (Sept. 9) about budget planning and communications strategies.
With enough information, Anderson said, the community would recognize that FCPS is “squeezing the blood out of a turnip” to make each budget dollar count.
The fiscal year 2026 budget process that unfolded this spring ended with the school system receiving $121 million less from supervisors than Superintendent Michelle Reid had requested — and left hard feelings on both sides.
Closer collaboration in the next budget cycle might help improve things, Braddock District Representative Rachna Sizemore Heizer said at Tuesday’s forum.
“Individually, we can reach out to our counterparts [on the county board] … and just start having these conversations,” said Sizemore Heizer, who serves as the school board’s budget chair.
Hunter Mill Representative Melanie Meren, who chairs the school board’s governance committee, agreed that conversations with the supervisors need to be “starting now” and continue consistently throughout the next eight months until a fiscal year 2027 budget is adopted.
She intimated that a little humility from the school board might show supervisors “that we are trying every and each way to understand where they are coming from” on budget issues, suggesting that those interactions are best when taking place between elected officials, not staff.
“Although I greatly appreciate Reid’s outreach to other elected officials, that’s our job,” Meren said. “Those are our counterparts.”
For her part, Reid said one lesson learned from the most recent budget cycle was that town hall meetings with constituents came too late in the process to do much good.
“We need to do those earlier,” she said.
The fiscal year 2027 budget is just one big-ticket item school board members will tackle over the coming year. Boundary changes and facility upgrades will also be time-consuming and potentially controversial topics.
Meren said all of those issues should be considered as interconnected pieces of a bigger picture.
“The more we can weave in all those critical topics, it’s going to be better for us and better for the public,” she said.
The county government provides more than 70% of FCPS’ $3.7 billion annual budget.
In its draft package of priorities for the Virginia General Assembly’s 2027 legislative session, the school board continues its previous call for “fiscal autonomy.” While common in many states, taxing authority for school boards has not been used in Virginia for generations.
The board also plans to advocate for identifying a new, permanent source of education revenue to replace the funds lost when Virginia reduced its sales tax on groceries in 2023 and expanding the taxing authorities granted to counties to match those available to Virginia’s cities.
“The Fairfax County School Board (FCSB) supports a tax structure in the Commonwealth that provides localities with sufficient state revenue to better address the resource demands of mandated education programs,” the draft says. “Any revisions to the tax structure should result in long-term additional revenue capacity, not in revenue-diminishing or revenue-neutral changes among different taxing sources.”
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a 4% meals tax in May that will take effect at the start of 2026, but it opted to use the revenue to cut the real estate tax rate, drawing the ire of the local teachers’ union.
