Virginia lawmakers are advancing a plan for a new K-12 funding formula. What could that mean for schools?

Calls to update Virginia’s K-12 school funding formula have become more urgent in recent weeks since lawmakers approved a plan to evaluate and replace the formula, which could mean significant changes for how the state spends more than $10 billion a year. 

Superintendents in Southwest and Southside Virginia say they’re hopeful that a revamped formula could provide additional funding, particularly to small, rural school divisions and those that serve larger numbers of high-needs students. 

“Some school divisions are spending more than twice as much as other school divisions per pupil. … You’re never going to get that equal across the state. But there’s got to be some balance where you recognize that it’s not equitable under the current system,” said Keith Perrigan, superintendent of schools in Washington County and president of the Coalition of Small and Rural Schools of Virginia, who has long called for an overhaul to the state’s funding formula.

In October, the General Assembly’s Joint Subcommittee to Study Elementary and Secondary Education Funding approved hiring a consultant to help develop a new funding formula, the latest step in a yearslong effort amid mounting calls from school leaders, local officials and lawmakers to overhaul the 50-year-old model currently used to fund Virginia’s public schools. 

Since then, Gov. Abigail Spanberger has committed to “modernizing Virginia’s outdated K-12 funding formula” and working with the General Assembly to “increase state investment in public education,” spokesperson Jack Bledsoe said in a statement Thursday. State Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, the Democratic caucus chair, highlighted her party’s interest in the efforts during a news conference Tuesday.

Virginia is one of just a few states that fund public schools based on the number of positions the state determines a school should have; the majority of states use a “student-based” or “student-weighted” model that provides a base amount of money per student with additional funding for specific student needs. 

Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News and a member of the subcommittee, said during the group’s Oct. 26 meeting that the move was a long time coming.

“This is overdue,” she said. “Just to put on the record, our desire [is] for this to go aggressively, thoughtfully, quickly.”

How we got here

In 2023 the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission — the General Assembly’s watchdog agency — released a report confirming what some school leaders had already been arguing: The state’s current funding formula doesn’t adequately meet the needs of students.

In the current formula, the General Assembly and State Board of Education use Virginia’s Standards of Quality, which establish minimum staff-to-student ratios and quality standards for public schools, to determine baseline costs for salaries and benefits to meet those requirements. The state also uses a measure called the local composite index to determine the ability of each city, county or town to pay for public schools through locally collected taxes.

But the 2023 report found that Virginia school divisions receive 14% less funding from the state than the national average. 

The report also found that actual school division spending outpaces what the state’s formula calculates is needed. During the 2021 fiscal year, the state estimated that school divisions needed about $10.7 billion in state and local funding, but divisions actually spent $17.3 billion, with the vast majority of additional funding coming from local governments.

The formula also doesn’t account for the higher costs that divisions incur because of factors outside their control, including how many “higher needs students (at-risk due to poverty, special education or English learner) live in their division,” the report said.

This year, Virginia is set to spend about $10.8 billion, or about 29% of the state’s general funds, on K-12 education. 

Levi Goren, director of research and education policy at The Commonwealth Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit policy research organization based in Richmond, said this week that the report’s findings are clear.

“Virginia, as far as the state government, is falling far short of where it needs to be in the total level of investment in our schools,” Goren said by phone. “We need through this process to increase the overall adequacy as well as equity of our support for public schools, by our support I mean state support for public schools.”

Goren, who is serving on one of two advisory groups created to inform the subcommittee’s work in the coming months, believes the state could spend more on K-12 education to help take the burden off local taxpayers.


“Virginia is a relatively high-capacity state. We certainly face economic challenges, like everywhere else, but there are a lot of ways that the state could choose to raise additional resources to make that additional investment in our schools,” Goren said.

The 2023 report laid out 20 recommendations, including updating staffing ratios to reflect how schools are actually staffed, changing how the formula accounts for poverty and the additional costs associated with educating economically disadvantaged students and other subgroups of students, such as English learners and rural students. 

The commission also recommended creating an “economics-of-scale” adjustment to provide additional funding to small school divisions, which might receive less per-student funding than a larger division but encounter the same costs to operate a school building.

Student-based funding models

All Virginia school divisions receive a combination of local, state and federal funding. The share of each can vary based on how much revenue a community can collect locally from taxpayers, the number of students with disabilities or low-income students a school division serves and other factors. 

Every state determines how it allocates funding for public education differently.

Most states either use student-based formulas that assign a base cost to educating the average student and calculate funding for districts based on enrollment, or resource-based formulas that determine the cost of delivering education based on the cost of the resources needed, such as staff salaries, facilities and course materials, according to the Council of State Governments, a national nonprofit organization.

As of 2025, about 35 states and the District of Columbia use student-based funding models, according to the Education Commission of the States. About nine others use resource-based models, and half a dozen states use a hybrid of the two or a state-specific model. 

Of Virginia’s neighboring states, Kentucky and Tennessee use student-based models. West Virginia has a resource-based formula and North Carolina uses a hybrid model, but both states are currently studying the impact of moving toward student-weighted models. 

What a new funding formula could mean for schools

Roanoke City Public Schools Superintendent Verletta White says her school division would directly benefit from a funding formula that took student needs into greater consideration and hopes that “the diverse needs of students” is taken into consideration, she said during a recent interview with Cardinal News. 

About 59% of Roanoke’s 13,600 students are economically disadvantaged as of the 2025-26 school year, and nearly 20% are English learners. About 18% of students have a diagnosed disability.

“We’ve made a huge investment in making sure our English learners have the support and the resources they need, but one of the gaps that we have found, though, is that our students with significant cognitive disabilities need more support … so, that’s a double need,” said White, who serves as president-elect for the Virginia Association of School Superintendents. 

“When it comes to the SOQs [Standards of Quality] and when it comes to the student-weighted funding, it needs to make sure that we are accounting for the diverse and unique needs of our students for it to be fair and sustainable for us.”

The base amount of funding states gave school districts per pupil varied widely as of the 2023-24 school year, with Kentucky providing about $4,200 per student, Tennessee providing about $6,860 per student and the District of Columbia providing as much as $16,960 depending on the grade level, according to data from the Education Commission of the States.

But nearly every state that uses a student-based funding model provides additional funding, or “weights,” to students with disabilities, English learners and students from low-income households.

In Tennessee, for example, school districts receive an additional 25% of the base amount for economically disadvantaged students and anywhere from an additional 15% to 150% of the base amount for students with disabilities, depending on their needs.

If a similar model was adopted in Virginia, a school division like Roanoke could receive more funding since it has a large portion of economically disadvantaged students.

Perrigan, who is also serving on an advisory group, is particularly interested in the economies-of-scale adjustment. 

Small, rural school divisions can sometimes spend 15% to 30% per pupil more than their counterparts because of the costs associated with transporting kids greater distances and maintaining the same staffing ratios despite a small student population. 

He also echoed White and said he’d like to see the state look at funding “not just on an enrollment basis, but on a student-needs basis.”


“It’s very clear that it costs more to educate students in a high-poverty area than it does in an affluent area. It’s obvious that it takes more to educate a student who has special needs than it does for a student who’s gifted,” he said in a phone call. 

“It also takes more money to fund a student who lives in a remote area of the county than it does a student who lives within a half a mile of their school. So, taking those types of factors into consideration and not just looking at every student as an equal number, I think is important.”

What’s next

The Virginia Department of Education is finalizing a draft request for proposals for a consultant. 

The consultant will be expected to develop a data-driven tool that can evaluate and model alternative funding formulas to help officials understand their potential impacts, Holly Coy, chief of staff for the Education Department, said during a presentation at the Oct. 26 joint subcommittee meeting.

The agency plans to select a consultant and begin work during the upcoming legislative session, which starts in January.

Though the subcommittee approved two years for the work, Locke, the committee’s chair, noted that it would be “optimal” for it to be completed sooner.

“I don’t think it’s going to take us 24 months to get this work done, and that would be better and in the best interest of our school districts and our kids if we can move this as quickly as possible,” she said.

Jeremy Bennett, director of intergovernmental affairs for the Virginia Association of Counties, said he is looking forward to working with the new administration and the General Assembly. He is representing the organization on one of the two advisory groups convened to inform the joint subcommittee’s work. 

He said moving forward with the recommendations from the 2023 report is a priority of many of the association’s members.

“We continue to face significant fiscal pressures associated with rising instructional costs, increased student needs and aging school facilities. We strongly support continued investment in these standards of quality, including implementation of the recommendations from JLARC and the Joint Subcommittee on Elementary and Secondary Education Funding Committee to better align state funding with the actual costs of providing high-quality education,” Bennett said via phone.

Goren, of The Commonwealth Institute, is also encouraged by the efforts of the joint subcommittee and hopes the process will move as quickly as lawmakers are calling for it, too.

“I think that it’s really important that we move in this process in both a timely fashion because our students have been waiting too long, and also that we provide meaningful opportunities for folks in our communities to understand what’s under discussion and make their voices heard in terms of what priorities are for them,” Goren said. 

“Those two priorities, I think, in some ways, can feel like they’re in tension in terms of moving in a timely fashion and providing meaningful opportunities for input, but I think we can do both of them if we all work hard and move with intention.”