Virginia Education Association Responds to Governor Youngkin’s Introduced FY26-28 Budget
December 17, 2025
December 17, 2025
“Once again, this budget shows that the Governor is willing to celebrate record revenues while refusing to make the long-term investments Virginia’s students and educators need. One-time bonuses and technical fixes are not a substitute for fully funding our public schools. This budget reflects a broader failure to prioritize public education when it matters most.”
– Carol Bauer, President, Virginia Education Association
Governor Youngkin’s introduced budget for the current year through June 30, 2028, reflects a continuation of short-term thinking and misplaced priorities for Virginia’s public schools. Despite strong revenue growth, neutral forecasts, and billions of dollars in available resources, the budget fails to make the sustained, structural investments necessary to address chronic underfunding in K-12 education.
For state-supported school employees funded through the Standards of Quality, the budget proposes:
One-time bonuses do not compound, do not count toward retirement, and do not address Virginia’s ongoing competitiveness problem. Even with the proposed raises in the next two school years, educator and school staff pay in Virginia will lose ground to inflation and remain thousands of dollars below the national average. The responsibility now falls to the next administration and General Assembly to fix this budget, replace short-term fixes with real compensation, and ensure Virginia’s educators are finally paid at the national average.
The administration’s own budget documents show that Virginia enters the FY26-28 biennium in a strong fiscal position:
These figures show the central challenge in this budget is not economic uncertainty or lack of capacity, but a failure to prioritize long-term investment in public schools. If Virginia’s finances are as strong as the administration claims, there is no justification for a budget that continues to shortchange public education.
The largest K-12 funding item in the introduced budget is $543.8 million in General Fund spending for rebenchmarking and other formula-driven updates over the 2026-2028 biennium. These dollars are required to maintain existing commitments based on updated enrollment, compensation, and benefit costs – they do not represent program expansions or policy improvements.
In addition:
These choices stand in sharp contrast to the findings of the General Assembly’s 2023 JLARC study, which identified billions of dollars of annual unmet needs in Virginia’s K-12 funding system.
The FY26 caboose budget includes more than $200 million in reductions to K-12 funding, primarily driven by updated enrollment projections, lottery proceeds, and data revisions. These reductions are technical in nature and not the result of discretionary policy choices.
However, their impact is real. In a system already strained by staffing shortages and rising costs, technical downward adjustments translate into fewer resources available to school divisions. Even as a technical adjustment, this update effectively removes $200 million from school division budgets halfway through the school year, destabilizing divisions with no practical ability to adjust. These reductions further highlight the vulnerability of a funding system that lacks adequate baseline investment and ongoing capacity to absorb enrollment or data shifts without harming schools.
The introduced budget also removes nearly $10 million in federal funding that has been supporting school improvement capacity within the Virginia Department of Education, reflecting the Governor’s prior veto and the expiration of temporary federal funds. While framed as a technical adjustment within rebenchmarking, this change effectively reduces staffing and support in the Office of School Improvement at a critical moment for Virginia’s schools.
Under the Commonwealth’s new accountability system, hundreds of schools have been labeled “Off Track” or “Needs Intensive Support,” triggering more intensive state oversight and assistance. At the same time, the General Assembly’s own JLARC review that came out on December 16, 2025, warned that the redesigned improvement model is labor-intensive and that existing state staffing levels are already insufficient to meet current demands.
JLARC found that, under the new system, each Office of School Improvement staff member could be responsible for supporting roughly 30 schools, a significant increase over prior workloads, and cautioned that without additional staffing, it is unclear whether the state can deliver the depth of support high-need schools require. Reducing improvement capacity while expanding accountability expectations undermines the credibility of the system and leaves schools labeled as struggling without the state support they were promised.
Governor Youngkin’s budget also reflects a long-standing pattern of prioritizing corporate tax giveaways over public investment. The introduced budget includes $730 million in new tax cuts, on top of billions in prior tax reductions enacted during his administration.
A significant share of these cuts come from new corporate tax loopholes created by conforming Virginia’s tax code to Trump-era federal tax changes, which together will cost the Commonwealth roughly half a billion dollars over the FY26-28 period. These provisions largely benefit large corporations through expanded depreciation, expensing, and other business tax preferences, while permanently reducing state revenue that could otherwise be used to invest in public education.
Many of these tax cuts do little or nothing to benefit educators or school staff. Rather than conforming to the Trump-era changes, Virginia should be making independent decisions about how to raise and invest revenue based on what its residents need. Proposals such as eliminating taxes on tips and overtime provide no relief to most teachers and many education support professionals, whose compensation is not structured around tipped wages or overtime pay. In fact, school support staff in Virginia earn less annually than restaurant servers on average. These policies reduce revenue without addressing the real causes of educator shortages or improving pay competitiveness.
The introduced budget also includes an amendment to extend data center sales and use tax exemptions through 2050, locking in decades of forgone revenue. Data centers consume enormous public resources, including land, water, energy infrastructure, and local government services, yet this budget continues to shield the industry from paying its fair share. When data centers receive broad tax exemptions while dramatically increasing electricity demand, the result is a double hit for Virginians: higher power bills for consumers and fewer public dollars available for schools and other essential services. At a time when Virginia faces billions of dollars in unmet needs in public education, healthcare, and other core services, extending these tax breaks represents a clear policy choice to favor powerful corporate interests over students and communities.
The real takeaway from this budget is not a lack of resources, but a lack of political will. With revenues exceeding expectations, reserves at historic highs, corporate tax preferences preserved, and hundreds of millions of dollars directed toward new tax cuts, Virginia has the capacity to do better. What’s missing is a commitment to raise the revenue necessary to fully fund public education and meet the needs identified by lawmakers’ own studies.
With Democrats now in control of the General Assembly and a new administration preparing to take office, this budget must be fundamentally reshaped. Virginia needs sustained, ongoing investments in public education, not one-time bonuses and inflation-lagging compensation changes. A serious conversation about fair, reliable revenue options to ensure every student attends a fully staffed, well-resourced school will be absolutely critical for Virginia’s future.
Virginia’s students and educators deserve a budget that reflects the Commonwealth’s values and its capacity. This introduced budget falls short, and it is now the responsibility of the General Assembly and the next administration to fix it.
Virginia is a top 10 state in median household income, but ranks 36th in the US in state per pupil funding of K-12 education.
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