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Chesterfield County looking to fill $200M school budget shortfall

A bald man in a gray suit and brown shoes is on the right, speaking in a school auditorium. A few meeting attendees are scattered around various seats to the left.
Billy Shields
/
VPM News
Chesterfield County Public Schools Superintendent John Murray, right, discusses the school system's fiscal year 2026 budget plans on Tuesday, January 28, 2025, at Midlothian High School in Midlothian, Virginia.

Superintendent says expected $26M increase not enough to meet goals.

Chesterfield County Public School officials are hosting a series of town hall meetings to make the case to community members that the system needs more money in its budget next school year.

According to Superintendent John Murray, the school system can realistically expect an increase of about $26 million in the budget for fiscal year 2026 (which would run from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026). But he said that increase is not enough for CCPS to meet its objectives — especially ones related to employee pay.

“We have a lot more need than [we have money], we have to support a growing demand,” Murray said. “So when we think about things like state-mandated raises of 3%, that costs us a little more than $20 million. It doesn’t leave a lot of meat on the bone.”

Murray said the system hopes to achieve an across-the-board starting teacher salary of $60,000 and a $16 per hour base wage for hourly employees. (The current figures are around $52,000 and $14 per hour, respectively.)

But meeting those benchmarks, he told attendees at Midlothian High School Tuesday night, “would cost us $65 million.” He cited a study by JLARC, the General Assembly’s research arm, that found many of the state’s public school systems — including Chesterfield — underfunded.

The county has estimated that CCPS — which has an annual budget of about $1 billion, about half of which comes from the state — is underfunded by more than $200 million.

Samantha McMillian teaches reading at Falling Creek Elementary School, which is a Title I school — a federal program that provides extra funding for schools with larger proportions of lower-income students. She said the current funding formula is not doing enough to attract highly qualified teachers to schools that serve the students with the most need.

“I would love to see a change in process so that in our Title I schools, we are expecting highly qualified teachers and that we’re offering some kind of incentives,” she said. “We’ve been doing the same thing year after year and getting the same results.”

Billy Shields is the Chesterfield County reporter for VPM News.