Lawmakers will return to Richmond tomorrow (September 6th) to pass amendments to the budget.
One of the key sticking points in the ongoing negotiations for budget amendments is a cap on spending for support staff at Virginia schools.
Laura Goren at the Commonwealth Institute says these employees play a critical role and the cap on spending is shortchanging students.
"These are folks who do things like clean and maintain the building and follow up with families when a student’s not showing up at school to figure out what's going on and get that student back in the classroom," Goren says. "So, this cap has been in place for over a decade now."
The cap on spending for support staff goes back to the Great Recession, a time when Kris Amundson represented Fairfax County in the House of Delegates. She says the cap was intended to protect teachers during a time of austerity.
"At a certain point, teachers say, ‘Yeah, but if I also have to be the social worker and I also have to run down and run the food closet and maybe supervise kids in the cafeteria at lunchtime, at a certain point, we need some extra bodies to do those jobs as well,'" says Amundson.
The budget compromise that lawmakers are considering lifts the cap for one year, then creates a work group to look at that and other issues raised in a recent watchdog report calling attention to Virginia’s chronically underfunded schools.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
