by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Spotsylvania County Public Schools is no longer the fiscal agent for the Commonwealth Governor’s School, a role it has performed since the program’s inception more than 25 years ago.
The CGS governing board, which is made up of one School Board representative from each of the participating school divisions—Spotsylvania, Stafford, Caroline, and King George—voted 3-to-1 last month to change fiscal agency of the program from Spotsylvania to Stafford.
Lorita Daniels, Spotsylvania’s representative to the CGS governing board, voted against the change.
Daniels told the Advance last week that she cast her vote in the interest of maintaining consistency, but that she understands and supports the change.
CGS is one of 19 academic-year Governor’s Schools in the state of Virginia. These programs provide an advanced, interdisciplinary curriculum opportunity to high-achieving high school students.
Students who are accepted to the program travel from their home schools to one of six CGS sites for half of each school day.
Currently, there are three CGS sites in Stafford County—at Colonial Forge, North Stafford, and Stafford high schools. There are two in Spotsylvania—at Riverbend and Spotsylvania high schools—and one at King George High School for King George and Caroline students.
The change in fiscal agents will not have a significant impact on the day-to-day operation of the program, according to a letter from Thomas Taylor, Stafford schools superintendent, who is serving this year as the CGS executive superintendent.
“Spotsylvania County Public Schools has been carrying the extra workload of supporting CGS since its inception and they should be commended for their dedicated service and support,” Taylor wrote. “It is the role of each member school division to step up and assume this responsibility when called upon and the great folks at Spotsylvania County Public Schools have certainly done their fair share. Thank you, Spotsy!”
The role of the fiscal agent is to act as CGS’s bank, accepting and paying out the funding that is provided to the program by the Virginia Department of Education.
State funding pays the salaries of the four regional CGS employees—the program’s director, an accounting manager, a network engineer, and a counselor—as well as for program supplies and field trips.
The four participating divisions pay for the teachers who work at each CGS site out of their own operating budgets.
According to its charter, the CGS governing board is supposed to vote on a fiscal agent each year, but this has not been done for several years, according to meeting minutes.
The board revived this practice in January of 2023, when it voted 3-to-1 to retain Spotsylvania as the fiscal agent, with Stafford representative Sarah Chase dissenting.
According to the minutes, Chase supported changing the fiscal agent to Stafford because it has the largest number of seats allotted to CGS—360, compared to Spotsylvania’s 240. King George and Caroline counties have 80 seats combined.
Chase also noted at the January 19, 2023, meeting that then-Spotsylvania schools superintendent Mark Taylor “did not yet” have experience working with regional academic programs and that April Gillespie, the Spotsylvania School Board’s primary representative to the CGS governing board, had not attended all meetings.
“It is concerning that the primary member of the Governing Board from Spotsylvania County has not attended all meetings, and attendance is a necessary part of showing that this program and board matter to your division,” Chase said.
According to the minutes, Gillespie only attended two of the five CGS Governing Board meetings in 2023. Daniels, the alternate Spotsylvania member, attended all but one of them.
Gillespie only attended one of the four meetings in 2022. Daniels was present for all of them.
Chase last week also thanked Spotsylvania for “carrying the water” for CGS for the past 26 years.
“It’s time for Stafford to step up,” she said. “We just want to make sure that everything fits seamlessly, and we are meeting all the needs of the diverse student population we have in this region.”
