The Disconnect

The City Council, the School Board, and the city's FY2025 operating budget.

Caution:  This post contains operating budget details and traces of “back in the day” references.

The March 6 joint City Council and School Board operating budget work session revealed two groups of dedicated elected officials with largely aligned values wrestling with disagreements about how to implement those values in the city’s operating budget.  ACPS funding is a major part of the  city’s operating budget.

The essence of the discussion involved the School Board’s February 22 addition of $10.7 million to Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt’s proposed $384.39 million operating budget. The work session can be seen

The Board’s additional $10.7 million is mostly composed of $5.35 million for a 2% Market Rate Adjustment (formerly known as a COLA) for school employees, $4.2 million for a step increase—an increase from one pay rate to the next higher rate in the salary range for a position—for eligible staff who did not receive a step increase in FY 2021, and $987,000 to fund an additional 7.4 full time equivalent positions, including an athletic trainer, a counselor, and a psychologist at Alexandria City High School, a Dean of Students at each middle school, two elementary advanced academic services teachers, and a part-time family liaison.

Mayor Justin Wilson called the Board’s budget a “significant disconnect” between the Council and the Board and said that the additional $10.7 million would require a real estate tax increase. The operating budget problems are compounded because ACPS, like many school systems, is in a near system-wide hiring crisis. The often-impassioned work session discussion included statements on intra-government relations, tax policy, education and child welfare, teacher recruitment and retention, and electoral politics.

Some of Alexandria’s best minds regularly consider how the Council and the Board schedule and address their respective operating and capital budgets.  Each body has a knowledgeable budget advisory committee and each adopts a detailed budget resolution or similar process that defines how they examine their operating and capital budgets.  The following are modest suggestions that take no position about the merits of any budget line item.

The Market Rate Adjustment Request

A market rate adjustment, or cost of living allowance, is never guaranteed or predictable—it is subject to city revenues and general economic conditions.  Thus, an MRA is not appropriate for inclusion in the Superintendent’s proposed operating budget.  Treating the MRA as an additional funding request by the Board means that every year there will be a multimillion-dollar addition to the Superintendent’s proposed budget.

A better approach might be to return to the practice of making the MRA a separate and unquantified request in the Board’s budget in language stating that if city employees are granted an MRA, then ACPS employees should be treated similarly.  This “magic language” approach, as it was known, had the advantage of relieving the Board from guessing at the percentage amount of an MRA, a decision that ultimately rests with the Council.  Most rational people would admit that for MRA purposes there is no basis for treating city and school employees differently.

The Funding of a Missed Step Increase from Prior Fiscal Years 

ACPS employee compensation improves on a salary scale based on years of service. A missed step increase is a major irritant, thus the rhetoric about a “loyalty penalty” for long-term ACPS employees. There seems to be little comfort in the fact that neither dividends nor compensation increases are guaranteed in the private sector.  Even so, making up a missed step increase for ACPS employees in a prior fiscal is not an isolated action—city employees who may have missed a step increase in a prior fiscal year are justified in saying, “What about us?”

In the best of worlds, there would be a step increase and an MRA for all city and ACPS employees in every operating budget.  Unfortunately, there is nothing anyone can do to guarantee that will happen.  The essential question may be whether the cost of making up a step increase missed in a prior fiscal year yields significant employee retention value.

The Effect of Adding Personnel Positions to the Superintendent’s Proposed Budget 

Adding personnel positions to the ACPS operating budget is a sensitive topic. There are super-majority voting requirements that apply to motions by Board members to add positions.  The addition of positions in an operating budget that is largely composed of personnel expense can also send mixed messages. 

Each individual position may have merit, particularly in the minds of its sponsor and proponents.  However, the cumulative effect of additional positions can pass a tipping point and create inferences that the Board does not think the Superintendent knows how to staff the school system and/or that the Council has been chintzy with ACPS.  Neither assumption is correct. The debate often evolves to whether the Council will “fully fund” the schools, a concept with meaning that varies in the eye of the beholder.

Even so, the number (7.4) of additional positions proposed by the Board in an environment where the school system is struggling to fill vacancies might lead some observers to wonder why those positions were not included in the Superintendent’s proposed budget.

Whoever said that budgets reveal values was assuredly correct.  How budget decisions are made particularly matters when one elected body, the Council, controls the money and another, the School Board, decides how to spend most of it.