Lynchburg City School Board members will gather community input for fiscal year 2027 budget priorities Tuesday, marking the public-facing start of a seven-month process to secure funds for next school year.
The public hearing will be conducted at the school board’s 5 p.m. meeting in the school administration building at 915 Court St. Residents who can’t attend in person can submit voicemail messages to the school board.
The school board will not present a budget proposal at the public hearing, said Tina Day, clerk of the board. Instead, board members will listen to residents’ open-ended ideas for funding priorities and use them to inform the budget drafting process.
Earlier this fall, principals and department heads developed budget requests, and school board members submitted ideas for what they’d like to see in the fiscal year 2027 budget, which funds the 2026-27 school year. After Tuesday, the goal is to weigh all “vision needs, external public, [and] internal public” concerns to draft a school budget that addresses the division’s needs as a whole, Superintendent Kristy Somerville-Midgette said at the school board’s Nov. 18 finance and facilities committee meeting.
Lynchburg City Schools receives money from city, state and federal funding pools. About 35% of the school’s current $119 million budget is funded by the city, according to the city’s adopted budget for fiscal year 2026. State funding is determined and adopted by the General Assembly.
At the Nov. 18 meeting, school board member Christian DePaul presented the “wish list” priorities submitted by fellow board members, which included a goal to increase the division’s starting hourly worker wage from $17 to $20.
The increase would apply to all staff members paid hourly, including bus drivers — one of the division’s most critical hiring needs, Tiffeney Brown, the division’s chief human resources officer, said in a November interview. Board member Nigel Alleyne said at the Nov. 18 meeting that a higher wage would help “to attract good drivers and try to retain them.”
Another goal is to increase starting teacher salaries from $50,000 to $53,000 and introduce a matched 6% raise for teachers already employed by LCS, DePaul said.
Chief Financial Officer Sonia Jammes said at the Nov. 18 meeting that when the $50,000 starting salary took effect July 1, it put LCS at “about the middle of the pack” compared to neighboring school divisions’ starting salaries. Statewide, the average starting teacher salary is $48,666, and the average hourly pay for staff is $16.58, according to 2025 data from the National Education Association.
Other proposed budget goals include funding programs to get parents more involved in their children’s education, expanding alternative education opportunities and increasing the maintenance budget to replace school fleet vehicles more frequently, DePaul said at the meeting.
Once the numbers are crunched for each of the goals, Somerville-Midgette will present a proposed budget to the school board on Jan. 20, according to a budget timeline adopted by school board members at their Nov. 11 meeting. Following school board approval, the budget will be submitted to City Manager Wynter Benda in February. The budget will be refined in March — as the city manager’s recommendations, anticipated city revenue and projected state funding are taken into account — and presented to the Lynchburg City Council in April or May.
The school board plans to have the process wrapped up on June 16, when the budget is set to be approved by the city council, according to the budget timeline.
After Tuesday’s input session, the next public hearing in the school’s budget process is scheduled for Feb. 3, when residents can weigh in on Somerville-Midgette’s proposed budget.
