Roanoke City Public Schools officials are warning the division could see a $6 million shortfall in state funding this year due to lower-than-expected student enrollment.
The warning comes after a tense budget cycle this spring that saw more than $14 million in cuts following a change in how the Roanoke City Council funds its schools.
While school officials are still trying to understand the “whys” behind the enrollment drop, Chief Financial Officer Kathleen Jackson cautioned that the school board might need to make mid-year changes to its budget — which isn’t uncommon for school divisions.
“Our expenditures have been tracking better than budget this year and we do have contingency in our budget for this type of uncertainty. We will certainly be continuing to keep a close eye on this,” Jackson said. “Mid-year budgetary adjustments aren’t off the table.”
“A statewide issue”
The state funds public school divisions based on “average daily membership,” or the average amount of time students are enrolled in a school district. Both the state and school divisions use that measure as of March to plan for the upcoming school year’s budget.
This year, Roanoke City schools officials planned for about 12,700 students based on last year’s count of 12,661, but as of Sept. 30, only about 12,217 students are enrolled.
That’s about 500 fewer students than the school division expected this school year, school officials told the Roanoke City School Board at a work session Tuesday night.
The information was part of a regular budget update from Jackson.
Jackson said since the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment has been “up and down.”
“Still, up until (the 2025-26 school year), a trend in the right direction but a pretty significant decline last year,” Jackson said.
Enrollment in public K-12 schools across the country has been declining in recent years due in part to declining birth rates and parents opting out of public schools. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia predicted that K-12 enrollment across the state will drop by about 3% by 2030.
Student counts
The Virginia Department of Education collects average daily membership counts as of Sept. 30 from every school division each fall. Those numbers reflect how many K-12 students the state provides funding for. This fall’s data has not been made publicly available as of Oct. 28, but when it is, it can be found here.
As a result, school divisions, including in Southwest and Southside Virginia, have been forced to close schools, cut programming and, in some cases, even lay off staff.
Roanoke City’s student enrollment in grades pre-K through 12 has dropped about 1.6% since the 2020-21 school year, according to data from the Virginia Department of Education.
Even though there are fewer students, the cost to educate them has also been rising, just like people’s own household bills. In that same time period, the division’s budget has increased about 21% — with state funding increasing about 48% — according to division documents.
Superintendent Verletta White said school chiefs from across the state learned at a recent Virginia Association of School Superintendents conference that this issue isn’t limited to Roanoke City.
“This is a statewide issue. … there is declining student counts throughout the state and it’s projected through 2028,” White said during Tuesday’s school board meeting. “That’s going to have a significant impact, I believe, on state funding.”
How schools are funded
Roanoke City Public Schools’ budget for the 2026-27 school year is about $308 million, which includes a $270 million operating budget. The remaining $28 million includes specific costs associated with food services, capital funding and grant funds.
Of that $270 million, about $163 million comes from the state — based on average daily membership calculated in the spring. Last year, the division also saw about $207,800 less in state funding than was anticipated — contributing to its budget shortfall.
How the state funds local school divisions is based in part on the number of students a division serves.
The General Assembly and State Board of Education use Virginia’s “Standards of Quality,” or SOQs, to determine minimum staff-to-student ratios and baseline costs for salaries and benefits for those staff members. The state also uses a measure called the local composite index to determine each city, county or town’s ability to pay for public schools through locally collected taxes.
But the funding model hasn’t been updated in half a century, and many school leaders and local officials argue it doesn’t provide adequate funding, leaving the burden on local taxpayers.
Just this week, a joint legislative committee launched an official process to study and replace the funding model, but the model will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
For now, Jackson said Roanoke City schools can reasonably predict receiving state funding for less than the 12,700 students it originally budgeted for — or about $6 million in state funding — but also said expenditures have been coming in under budget so far this fiscal year.
The number of students attending Roanoke City schools can also change by March, when the state conducts its second count for funding purposes.
“That is obviously a very significant number and a serious issue that we’re going to have to work with,” Jackson said Tuesday.
Board member Derek Kaknes was clearer, though.
“It should be called out that given that structural deficit, we are going to have to hew very tightly to the standards of quality, and that is going to have a significant impact on current staffing levels if nothing changes between now and March,” he said during Tuesday’s meeting.
Where are students going?
Parents aren’t required to give a school division a reason for removing their child, but school officials have collected some information around the decline in enrollment, said Chris Perkins, chief of staff and operations for the school division.
Roanoke City Public Schools works with Future Think, a firm that specializes in enrollment projections and demographic studies for facility planning, and has identified a few trends: some students who were kindergarteners last school year didn’t return for first grade, and ninth-grade enrollment is also down.
“It’s very concerning. The first and ninth grade drop is not what we expected,” Perkins told school board members Tuesday. “Our trend has been a decline in sixth grade, and then they come back in ninth grade, and we didn’t see that this year.”
According to preliminary data from Future Think, the number of kindergarten students who returned for first grade and those who returned for ninth grade dropped about 5% this year, Perkins said.
The majority of students who left, or 300 of 527 who were no longer enrolled as of Sept. 30, went to Roanoke County Public Schools, and about 90 students moved to Salem City Schools. Another approximately 90 students are now being homeschooled, and about 30 went to private schools, but Perkins cautioned the board that those numbers are preliminary and are estimates.
Perkins also noted that school officials know that neighboring divisions have also seen drops in enrollment, but the Virginia Department of Education hasn’t yet publicly provided its annual fall enrollment report.
White and Perkins both said they don’t have clear reasons for the drop, but Perkins plans to work with Future Think to provide more information to the school board as it is available.
“We’re working with them to determine if there’s something else. Right now, without exit surveys from parents — and even then exit surveys are not reliable — we would have a hard time determining why this has occurred,” Perkins said.
