Henrico School Board advances budget proposal, plans new laptop, wireless network contracts

The Henrico School Board advanced its $665.2-million budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2021-22 to the Henrico Board of Supervisors Thursday, voting unanimously during a work session to endorse it. A public hearing scheduled Thursday to permit public input about the plan attracted no speakers.

The budget does not reflect the funding announced earlier this month by Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas that will cover significant pay raises for all eligible county employees – including a minimum of 6.8% for teachers. That funding will be included when supervisors adopt a final budget later this spring.

The school system’s budget proposal represents a 3.6% increase from the current fiscal year budget of $642.3 million.

Also during Thursday’s meeting, the school board received an update about plan for a new long-term contract for its middle school wireless network and a new four-year contract its high school laptop program, both of which it’s expected to authorize within the next month or so.

The middle school network contract essentially will double the number of WiFi access points in each of the county’s 12 middle schools, while also providing service at 14 other program and administrative sites, such as the James River Juvenile Detention Facility, Henrico Schools Technology Director Brian Maddox told the board.

The existing six-year contract provides access points in every other classroom in each middle school but doesn’t include any in schools’ gymnasiums or cafeterias. The new contract will provide them in every classroom and in gyms and cafeterias, he said, to meet increased demand. The current contract is $852,000 per year, and while Maddox said he couldn’t divulge specific bid amounts publicly because officials are still reviewing the proposals they received from potential vendors, he did say that the costs are relatively low.

Concurrently, Maddox and his team are evaluating bids for a new four-year contract for the provision of laptops for high school students and faculty members. The existing $4.3-million annual contract with Dell for more than 18,000 laptops ends in June.

Henrico made national headlines in the spring of 2001, when it became the first school system in the nation to provide a laptop to all of its high school students through a contract with Apple. Four years later, it switched to Dell and has remained with the company since.

Maddox told the board that his team is basing its recommendations for vendors for both the laptops and middle school wireless network not solely on price alone but rather on a weighted series of factors that includes price.

Board members also received an update from HCPS Chief of Staff Beth Teigen, who indicated that nearly 7,000 school system employees had received the first doses of COVID-19 vaccine and more than 460 had received their second doses. Another 50 new hires or other employees who hadn’t yet received their first doses were scheduled to do so Friday, she said.

HCPS Chief of Communications and Community Engagement Andy Jenks told the board that with students now beginning to come back to school in person, the school system will post weekly COVID-19 case updates on its online dashboard. The new data will continue to show cases reported by school but also will indicate how many close contacts are determined to be related to each and will list the number of in school outbreaks (transmission from at least one student to one employee, or vice versa).