The Chesterfield County Public Schools Board voted 4-0 last week to approve its Fiscal Year 2020 budget.
Midlothian District board member Javaid Siddiqi was absent for the Feb. 26 meeting.
Superintendent Merv Daugherty had proposed the $672.2 million budget, which is $17.5 million more than the FY2019 budget.
“I think overall we’ve done a great job as a board trying to figure out what our needs are … in regard to sending over a balanced budget,” Bermuda District board member Carrie Coyner said. “We probably should do some long hard looking at how we run our school division,” she said, adding that she was “disappointed in where we ended up” in regard to the unfunded needs list.
Chesterfield Schools chief financial officer Christine Berta listed 12 unfunded items in a chart, including $57.3 million in maintenance identified in a Facility Condition Assessment; cameras, door security and an intrusion detection system, estimated $25 million; 54 additional mental health counselors at a cost of $89,000 each, or $4.8 million; 15 additional nurses at a cost of $1.2 million; seven School Resource Officers at $60,000 each plus equipment, or $630,000; and adding $1 to each school bus driver’s hourly wage at a cost of $841,000.
The budget requests an additional $7.7 million from the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors, which also must consider the General Assembly’s recently-approved biennial budget and any changes that would be recommended by Gov. Ralph Northam.
The School Board also voted to approve its five-year capital improvement plan by a vote of 3-1 with Coyner dissenting.
Noting that she wants to see improvements made at Thomas Dale High School’s West Campus and at Carver Academy, Coyner said she was pleased with the CIP for FY2020 but not in the following four years. Those two Chester school buildings are “constantly having things failing,” she said.
Although he voted to approve the CIP, Matoaca District board member Rob Thompson said he was disappointed that construction of a new elementary school at Magnolia Green in the western part of his district has been delayed. The Board of Supervisors delayed the school last July and now disagrees with the projected student growth numbers that they presented, Thompson said. “We need to solve this data problem,” he said.
During public comment, Midlothian resident Ron Hayes complained about private cleaning services used at several schools in the Midlothian and Clover Hill. In response, Coyner said she believes that those issues can be handled in the service provider’s contract. “I don’t think we need to address it in the budget,” she said. Coyner added that when she came on the board seven years ago, some schools were happy with their cleaning service and some weren’t, and the same holds true today.
