Potential employee raises aren’t the only thing being considered by the Warren County School Board as it continues developing the 2024-2025 budget for Warren County Public Schools (WCPS), which has several areas of both immediate and future needs.
From left to right: School Board members Andrea Lo, Antoinette Funk, Kristen Pence, and Melanie Salins during their Wednesday, May 15 meeting and work session.
During the work session portion of its four-hour May 15 meeting, School Board Chair Kristen Pence, Vice Chair Antoinette Funk, and members Andrea Lo and Melanie Salins heard from WCPS staff about exactly what is needed for the next school year and beyond to help successfully educate the school division’s roughly 5,000 students. Board member Tom McFadden, Jr., was absent.
WCPS Superintendent Christopher Ballenger pointed out to the School Board that everything from the teacher salaries to the health insurance, janitorial services, technology increases, math screener, substitutes, playground mulch, additional staffing, and buses, are currently driving the 2024-2025 budget.
Some highlights of specific needs for WCPS during the upcoming school year and included in its 2021-2026 comprehensive plan are:
Teachers
In addition to discussing the additional costs associated with raising the salaries for teachers, instructional assistants, and other employees, WCPS staff talked about adding more teachers and/or extending contracts.
For example, WCPS Personnel Director Jody Lee (pictured above) said the agriculture teaching position should be increased from a 10-month to 11-month contract. Agriculture classes are growing in size, he said, as are ag teachers’ responsibilities, which pretty much have extended over 12 months, despite them having 10-month contracts. WCPS also could benefit from adding another ag teacher position, according to staff.
“Most of your ag teachers are going to be 11- or 12-month employees because they do stuff over the summer time, and so this would not take away from needing [an]other position,” said Lee. “This is just something that needs to happen because they’re working over the summer and with their stipend that they receive that should only cover the extra hours during the school year not just for the summer as well.”
Ballenger agreed, adding that if the school division gets a Land Lab — which in Virginia provides agriculture students with hands-on opportunities to gain on-farm experience — it will have animals that need to be taken care of on a daily basis, all year long.
“So as the [ag] program grows, you’re going to see that we need to compensate for ag teachers’ time,” he said. “And it’s just what needs to be done.”
In other teacher-related areas, School Board members also again discussed a proposed 3 percent salary increase plus a step for teachers and instructional assistants, as well as a proposed 3 percent increase inclusive with a step for all other roles.
The Warren County Board of Supervisors, which funds a big chunk of the WCPS budget, has publicly said it supports such raises.
Substitute teachers
The current debate is whether to outsource the process for hiring subs or to bring the system in-house. At its meeting on Wednesday, the School Board did not decide which route to take but weighed recommendations from WCPS staff.
Currently, Educational Solution Services (ESS) is contracted by the division to hire substitutes but there have been complaints from teachers, substitutes, and even board members about the company.
Lee said he and Kendall Poe, deputy director of human resources and finance for WCPS, formed a committee to analyze the situation and make a recommendation to the School Board.
For outsourcing, they put together a request for proposal and received information from six companies. After narrowing the list down to three companies (EduStaff, Kelly Education, and ESS), Lee said the committee decided that WCPS should continue using ESS.
Among the reasons why, Lee said, are the comfort level of working with ESS, a long-time contracted company; ESS will provide a new absence management system and an on-site representative; ESS also offers nurse subs, an area of need for WCPS; and the costs were, while higher than the current budget, roughly about the same markup for all three companies.
“Kendall and I would also like a fair opportunity to make the corrections that we know we could have done a better job on our part and ESS is owned up to and is willing to do their part to make the partnership work,” said Lee, referring to complaints levied against ESS.
“I think there’s things on our end that we need to do better and I would like the opportunity to do that,” he said. “We know what we need to do now. We know how we can manage this better and give our principals direct contact with a representative that’s going to be in our building every single day and can help fill those short notice call-ins or whatever the case may be.”
“I’m disappointed that this committee was apparently tone deaf to the fact that ESS has really just dropped the ball repeatedly,” said Salins, who supports bringing the sub hiring system in-house.
Technology
WCPS Interim Technology Director Doug Stefnoski, who also coordinates instructional technology, explained why his department is requesting a $600,000 increase in the budget.
“I just wanted to point out that even though the narrative that we’ve been talking about is to use this cash to buy PCs because of the security upgrade that we discussed previously, that this is not really about just a one-time expense,” Stefnoski said. “I wanted to talk about the reasons why I’m asking this to be a permanent increase to our budget.”
Stefnoski (pictured above) said that the division’s current technology needs have already exceeded what’s been allocated, while unfunded needs from the previous school year were pushed onto this year’s budget.
“Long story short,” he said, “these expenses got us in the red already.”
And while WCPS does get funding from the federal E-Rate program — which is a discount program, not a grant that allows it to make technology-related purchases — the school division is required to have a 30 percent match.
“This is something that we rely on for purchasing a lot of our internet equipment, also for paying our internet bills,” Stefnoski explained to board members. “So, in my opinion, to not be able to have the funds to match this is basically throwing money away.”
And when he said that WCPS needs PCs, Stefnoski explained that “it’s really a function of we don’t have enough funds in this particular cost center to be able to develop an appropriate refresh schedule so that we can plan out our expenses over a longer period of time.”
Right now, he added, WCPS is “functioning in the emergency mode trying to get the $600,000 to cover the PC needs we have now, but that would only take care of our current need for that. We still have other needs.”
For example, WCPS must consider having a regular Chromebooks turnover schedule, as well as battery backups, wireless access points, and switches. And while some of this can be funded through the E-Rate program, the division still needs to have the funds in there to be able to develop a plan for that, he said.
“And in some cases, some of these things are not a guarantee that we would get the funding,” said Stefnoski, adding that rising costs are another consideration.
“So, if we’re just level funded in this cost center, then next year we’re already gonna be further in the hole because we don’t have enough to cover just the inflated costs for some of these programs that we use,” he said. “I want to say we don’t have enough to cover what we’re already trying to meet for the school needs. So we do need a larger budget for technology.”
“You’re just catching up and putting band-aids on things you’re working on?” asked Pence.
“Yes,” said Stefnoski. “I mean, these guys here, the techs, they’re the MacGyvers, the magicians, the mavericks. They’re holding stuff together with bubble gum and duct tape to make things work. But at some point, we need to be able to get the equipment that we need for our teachers and our students to do their jobs.”
Other expenses related to the proposed technology department budget increase include laptop upgrades, hardware purchases, and increased security (i.e. cybersecurity, data security, and physical security, such as cameras and speakers).
“I really can’t underestimate how bad that can be for a school system if you don’t have appropriate security in place,” Stefnoski said. “We do have a great team working towards making sure we have a secure system, but anything we can do for that would help.”
Future needs
As part of its 2021-2026 comprehensive plan, WCPS staff also spotlighted some future needs for consideration, including a higher starting pay rate for incoming custodians to stop the high turnover rates; school bus replacements, expanded bus routes, and higher fuel costs; rising preventative facilities maintenance costs; and recruiting, employing, and retaining highly qualified staff, among other areas.
Work continues
Nothing in the 2024-2025 budget is a done deal yet, according to WCPS Finance Director Robert Ballentine, who said the Virginia General Assembly recently approved the state’s budget and WCPS will wait, along with the Warren County supervisors, to see how that plays out locally.
“I’m anxious to see exactly what that means,” said Ballentine (pictured above). “I don’t know if there’s going to be more money or less money or maybe it’ll be exactly the same as we’ve built into what we’ve done up to this point. But that could affect things either in a positive or negative way.”
And the County also hasn’t yet voted on its budget, which includes funding for WCPS.
“We don’t have a final budget,” Pence said, “so I think it’s appropriate for us to talk about the things that we can do and what we can do with some of the extra asks and needs that we’ve had. I mean, ultimately we still need to put forth the budget that we need. Everybody seems to agree on the teacher increases. Everybody agrees on the teacher additions, that we need a reading specialist, and the ag teacher.”
“I’d like to make sure we keep the four reading specialists because I think that’s just a non-negotiable,” added Funk.
Video by Mark Williams, Royal Examiner.