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The Henrico School Board Thursday formally adopted its reduced Fiscal Year 2021 budget, a $642.3-million overall plan that includes a $509.9-million general fund budget.
The latter fund is $23.5 million less than what school officials thought they’d be receiving from the Board of Supervisors just two months ago, prior to the onset of the pandemic and the county’s associated tax revenue crash that necessitated Henrico’s overall budget be trimmed by $99 million.
The new general fund budget, which takes effect July 1, is $4.5 million less than the current year’s budget. (Henrico’s Board of Supervisors, which adopted its $1.3-billion overall Fiscal Year 2021 budget Tuesday, provides funding to the School Board, which then decides how to use it.)
Trimming the school system’s general fund meant eliminating virtually all new initiatives planned in the initial budget the School Board had approved earlier in the year – including the creation of 40 new positions for school counselors and 15 new positions for reading specialists, among others.
“The resources we thought we had available in February are no longer available, unfortunately,” HCPS Chief Financial Officer Chris Sorensen told the School Board Thursday.
The revised budget will cover a $3 million increase in the employer share of health insurance for school system employees and an identical cost increase in resulting from a Virginia Retirement System rate increase.
But otherwise, it will be a much leaner plan that anticipated. Other cuts include:
• a hiring freeze that will affect a number of vacant positions;
• the elimination of certain stipends for staff members who perform a variety of extra duties at their schools;
• reductions to, or elimination of, various training and travel plans for staff members;
• new textbook purchases;
• discretionary spending for departments and schools;
• some extracurricular activities.
Though the hiring freeze is in effect, Sorensen said that there would be exceptions. Classroom teacher and many other instructional positions will not be frozen, for example, and Central Office administrative positions that are open or become open will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, he said.
The cuts to extracurricular activities will not impact sports, music or club activities, Sorensen said. Rather, they relate to in-school activities that take place beyond the normal hours of staff members, he said. Officials will look to reassign some of those duties to other staff members within the framework of their existing contracts.
The school system is receiving about $9.3 million in federal CARES Act funding, but that money is not being included in the FY21 budget. Officials intend to use it as reimbursement for expenses they have already incurred during their COVID-19 response or for those they will incur in the coming months, Superintendent Amy Cashwell said.
Those may include some instructional needs, such as increased online learning options or summer programs, or even the provision of more meals for students “above and beyond in the manner we typically would do that during the school day,” she said.
County finance officials are planning monthly budget reviews, and the Board of Supervisors will allocate funding for the new budget on a quarterly basis instead of an annual basis, in order to make adjustments if the economy rebounds faster than anticipated.
Should additional funds become available during the new fiscal year, Sorensen said, officials would consider a number of programs for funding. Brookland District representative Kristi Kinsella told him that she hoped the new counselor and reading specialist positions would be first in line.
Sorensen agreed that counselors would be high on the list of considerations and said that some of the CARES Act money could be used to fund those positions.
Varina District representative Alicia Atkins suggested that some of the CARES Act funding be used to develop and implement training for teachers and other staff members about best practices for teaching remotely and working from home.
“In some cases, we have many teachers and staff working virtually and trying to provide instruction with their children in the home and other individuals in the home, so I’m hopeful we will really be proactive in providing appropriate training for that,” Atkins said.
