Franklin County officials don’t want to see schools shut their doors. But the board of supervisors acknowledged in a special meeting Thursday afternoon that closures may be inevitable due to an impending $3.7 million state funding decrease that follows years of declining enrollment.
Residents in the rural county south of Roanoke have been on edge since learning last month that as many as five schools in the county may close or be repurposed within the next few years. The county is also in the midst of a reassessment that has the potential to significantly raise property taxes for some.
In a 90-minute meeting Thursday, the board of supervisors didn’t take comments from the public. Instead, the supervisors discussed its options for supporting the school board as it examines cost-cutting options to make up for the $3.7 million it won’t get from the state for its upcoming budget.
“The school board’s working hard to come up with some solutions,” said Supervisor Tim Tatum of the Blue Ridge district that includes Henry Elementary School, one of two schools that could close as early as this summer. “Once they put in their due diligence and work to find these cuts they can make, if they still come up short … this board needs to reach into our reserves,” Tatum said.
School enrollment has been dropping in Franklin County for about 15 years. Enrollment was greater than 7,300 in 2007, board chair Ronnie Thompson said, compared with fewer than 5,800 this year.
That enrollment decline is one factor in the local composite index, or LCI, the state’s calculation of a locality’s ability to pay for its school division.
Along with enrollment, the LCI considers population, property values, incomes and taxable sales revenue. When a locality’s LCI goes up, the state gives its school division less money toward basic needs such as providing instruction, support services and transportation.
The majority of school funding for Virginia schools, including money for projects like renovations and new construction, comes from the local governments.
LCI data for the upcoming two fiscal years was released in late November. Franklin County’s LCI jumped up so much that the state is set to cut its funding by $3.7 million annually for the period covering fall 2024 through summer 2026.
In fall 2025, the LCI will be calculated again. And if enrollment keeps declining, as it’s expected to, the LCI will keep rising.
School administrators laid several options on the table at a late January school board budget workshop, including closing up to five schools over the next few years, consolidating bus routes, and even moving to a four-day school week.
Even if Henry Elementary and Burnt Chimney Elementary, the two schools at immediate risk of closure, shut down after this school year, the rising LCI is likely to force the division to implement other cost-saving measures related to transportation, scheduling and closures.
The county has asked the state for a “hold harmless” — essentially a one-year delay in the LCI increase — while the school board decides how it wants to cut costs. The prevailing mood on the board of supervisors seems to be that the body would be willing to provide one-time support to the school division to bridge any funding gap left over after cost cutting. But once county reserves are gone, it’s likely the school division will continue to come up short. So a long term bailout isn’t an option, Supervisor Lorie Smith warned.
The board of supervisors won’t formally review any requests for help from the school board until late March, after the school board has completed its own budget discussions.
That leaves families like Tiffany Herman’s in limbo.
Herman’s two daughters attend Henry Elementary in the southern edge of Franklin County. Her youngest was just a few weeks into pre-K when schools shut down at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and is now in third grade. Her older daughter is in fourth grade. “They’re just getting back to normal, to feeling comfortable with school,” she said.
Herman attended the supervisors’ afternoon meeting, but could only do so because her daughters had an after-school activity. She hoped the meeting would be informative and maybe even comforting. But she said Thursday night she left feeling more frustrated than before.
Henry had just 172 students across seven grade levels, pre-K through fifth grade, last year and is expected to keep shrinking.
Herman is frustrated that her local school could close with short notice, but knows the transition will be difficult regardless of how quickly it happens. And it’s not just about her own family’s comfort, though her drive for school pickups will double to nearly 30 minutes each way if the girls get transferred to Ferrum Elementary next year.
“We have so many students who are below the poverty line,” said Herman, who is secretary of the Henry Elementary PTO. “We have a lot of students with disabilities. We have students that are coming from non-traditional families.”
State education department data says 47.5% of students in Franklin County live in poverty.
Nearly 17% of students in Franklin County have an individualized education plan due to a disability, which is several points higher than the statewide rate.
The county also has a large, primarily rural service area, which adds to busing costs.
Transportation needs and student disability services require Franklin County to spend more per student than some other school divisions might need to. But those higher costs aren’t taken into consideration when LCI is calculated.
Demographic variations within the county also skew the LCI calculations, with wealthy retirees at Smith Mountain Lake concealing the economic reality of life for many others.
The median household income in the southwestern Blue Ridge district of the county, where Henry and Ferrum elementary schools are located, is just $45,000, according to the latest census data. That’s compared to about $66,000 for the county overall.
The northeastern side of the county, where Burnt Chimney Elementary School is located, has a median household income of nearly $93,000. There, in the Gills Creek district, nearly 4 in 10 people are aged 65 or older. In Blue Ridge, it’s just 2 in 10.
Those locations are important as the division considers where it might shuffle students to account for school closures. “Rezoning is more than just looking physically at the zone and drawing a line down the middle,” said Jason Guilliams, director of operations for the county schools, said at last month’s school board meeting. “You have to know where your students reside in order to get the numbers to go correctly.”
Consolidating bus routes could save the division more than $500,000 annually, but it has downsides for the student experience. Guilliams said some students are already riding the bus for nearly 90 minutes. Closing schools would only lengthen those rides.
There are similar tradeoffs to shifting to a four-day week. Or closing Snow Creek Elementary, Callaway Elementary or the Gereau Center technical school. Or cutting the $50,000 annually the division spends for wireless internet hotspots for 450 students to use at home.
“This board will support the school board,” once it decides on next steps, Smith said. “We have a wonderful working relationship … but this is just the beginning of the conversation. This deficit is going to be with us for a while.”
In the meantime, Herman said the Henry Elementary community feels left behind. “If you take into consideration the entire county there’s a lot of sentiment that we’re not in the right area to have the nice things.”
So she’s begun to prepare her daughters for the possibility their school will close at the end of May. “I didn’t want them to hear secondhand,” she said. “Because I knew word was going to travel fast.”