County leaders have now joined School Board members in pushing for more early budget collaboration, to avoid repeating an impasse that soured relationships last spring.
At a Sept. 16 meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Budget Policy Committee, County Executive Bryan Hill said school leaders needed to develop a “budget of reality” for fiscal 2027.
Hill suggested that the School Board and superintendent should expect no more funding for fiscal 2027 than was received from the county government in fiscal 2026. Board Chair Jeff McKay said individual supervisors need to drive that theme home with their School Board counterparts.
McKay said he was not sure “that message is resonating as clearly as it needs to” with school leaders.
“We are going to need to have better and more complete conversations” with FCPS officials, the Board chair said. “It’s going to take a cooperative effort.”
In Virginia, school boards do not have independent taxing authority. The county government in fiscal 2026 is providing approximately 70% of the school system’s $3.9 billion budget.
In the fiscal 2026 county budget adopted in the spring, supervisors sided with Hill, appropriating $121 million less to schools than had been sought by Superintendent Michelle Reid and the School Board.
The result was a strained relationship between the two elected bodies, with the school system needing to reduce pay raises promised personnel and county officials saying the rates were excessive and shouldn’t have been prematurely dangled in front of employees.
On Sept. 16, Hill suggested a meeting between the chairs of the Board of Supervisors and School Board, plus Reid and himself, in coming months.
If it occurs, that would be well before the typical start of budget coordination, which usually begins with a joint work session between leaders in late November or (in 2025) early December.
The discussion at the supervisors’ committee meeting came a week after School Board members held their own work session on budget planning.
Closer collaboration in the next budget cycle might help improve things, Braddock District School Board member Rachna Sizemore Heizer said at the Sept. 9 forum.
“Individually, we can reach out to our [supervisor] counterparts … and just start having these conversations,” she said at that meeting.
Hunter Mill School Board member Melanie Meren echoed that sentiment. She suggested that too much authority had been delegated to Reid in negotiating with the county-government leadership.
For fiscal 2027, School Board members needed to take a more active role, Meren said.
