by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Stafford County Public Schools’ support staff—the bus drivers, cafeteria workers, maintenance workers, administrative assistants, bookkeepers, and other employees who aren’t teachers but who are essential to the day-to-day functioning of the school division—will receive long-awaited raises under the provisional budget adopted Tuesday by the School Board.
These employees, who have been begging the county to “support the support staff” at School Board and Board of Supervisors meetings since January, will see an average 8.7% raise for fiscal year 2025, which begins July 1.
“I am very proud to say that this budget includes the full implementation of Phase 1 of the non-licensed service scale [salary improvements],” superintendent Thomas Taylor told the School Board on Tuesday.
Other employee groups will also receive raises—an average of 5.2% for teachers and other licensed employees, and an average of 9% for instructional support staff, or paraeducators.
School Board members voted unanimously to approve the provisional budget recommended by staff on Tuesday.
It is provisional because the General Assembly has not finalized the statewide budget, meaning the exact amount of funding the division can expect from the state is still up in the air.
A provisional budget will “get us from point A to point B” and allow the division to issue contracts to teachers, Taylor said.
“Once the state does pass a budget and we have a firm number, whatever that number is, we’ll come back and make adjustments and bring that to the board for consideration,” he said.
The provisional budget anticipates receiving an additional $3 million in state funds, which Taylor said is a “conservative” estimate, as well as $13 million in new money from Stafford County.
“We owe a big ‘thank you’ to our Board of Supervisors and state legislators,” Taylor said. “The legislature did a great job for us—granted, that’s been tempered by the executive. And the supervisors came very close to the advertised tax rate and accounted for public education to the maximum amount of the advertised tax rate.”
The provisional budget does make some cuts, due to not receiving the full $15 million in new funding that the division requested from the county. Among those cuts, it delays implementing the full planned raise for licensed staff.
“We are walking that back 1% temporarily to balance the budget for today,” Taylor said. “It is our aim to add that back when we have additional revenue from the state.”
Taylor said the hope is that the General Assembly will finalize its budget in time for the School Board’s May regular meeting.
More information about the budget is at the school division’s website.
