The Stafford School Board met this week in a special called meeting to reconcile its budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 — a task complicated by the fact that it is working with less funding than expected.
Board members settled on playing a “shell game,” as Chair Elizabeth Warner described it, with recurring and one-time funds in order to be able to support the hiring of four new high school counselors, which the board determined was a priority based on the mental health needs experienced by students this past academic year.
After the finalization of a state budget that provided an additional $8.8 million in recurring funding to the school division, the School Board voted June 30 to reduce the local funding request from the Board of Supervisors by $1.3 million, a decision meant to acknowledge the hard work of supervisors during a difficult budget season.
However, after initially voting last week to appropriate the school division’s budget per the School Board’s request, supervisors revisited that vote following a recess later in the meeting and decided to keep back a total of $2.4 million in unrestricted recurring state funding.
“It’s unfortunate that we are here tonight,” Warner said at Tuesday’s special called School Board meeting. “I want to thank our state delegates – they all worked very hard to get us this additional state funding. It’s unfortunate that this is the way it worked out… We made an offer to work with the Board of Supervisors with what we felt was a reasonable amount of money that was conservative and that would not put our budget in jeopardy. Now we are faced with cuts we have to make and utility bills going up 24%, and that is going to create a problem going forward.”
Stafford Superintendent Daniel Smith told the School Board at a work session before Tuesday’s special meeting that he had to make some “tough decisions” about what to prioritize with $1.1 million less in unrestricted funding and the estimated increase in utility costs.
To balance the budget, Smith recommended deferring the purchase of three new school buses and the hiring of 10 full-time paraprofessionals to support literacy and four full-time counselors to bring caseloads at the high schools closer to the School Board’s adopted staffing standard of 1:250.
He did not recommend deferring the hiring of eight full-time school security officers for the middle schools.
“In our initial budget, we prioritized our core mission around teaching students to read, but we also prioritized safety and security,” Smith said at Tuesday’s work session. “This was a tough decision, but where I landed is on making sure we prioritize safety. It hurts my heart to cut [positions dedicated to helping students succeed academically], but that’s where I landed.”
Smith said his recommendation to defer hiring the new counselors was the “most difficult” for him to make.
“We know the mental health and safety needs of our students continue to increase,” he said. “This past year, we had four students confirmed to have died by suicide. We had 2,956 crisis referrals for behavioral mental health support. We had 845 suicide risk screenings, resulting in over 300 full suicide risk assessments.”
However, Stafford also remains behind neighboring school divisions in middle school security officer staffing.
“Middle school administrators are currently absorbing security responsibilities that compete with instructional leadership and student support,” staff said, and hiring dedicated security officers “would mitigate the absence of support from [school resource officers] that are frequently pulled for other coverage and responsibilities at other schools.”
Smith said he felt he had to prioritize students’ physical safety in his budget reconciliation recommendation. He also said he felt he could not make any recommendations to use one-time funding for recurring staffing expenses.
But board members, especially Aquia representative Josh Regan, were motivated to look for some way to fund the high school counselors.
“I’m extremely disappointed that we don’t have the money to hire these counselors,” he said. “This is going to have a massive impact [on student mental health].”
Regan said that, according to data he obtained from one county high school, there were 5,689 student sign-ins to the guidance office — including 820 walk-ins — during the 2025-26 school year.
“We need as much support for these kids as we can get,” he said.
The School Board eventually settled on using $435,100 in recurring funds initially earmarked for textbook replacement to fund the counselors, and replenishing the recurring textbook money with one-time funds earmarked for additional buses and SAM [security asset manager] boxes.
In a statement sent yesterday about the budget reconciliation, Warner highlighted the board’s prioritization of student mental health, school safety and operational needs, while noting that “significant needs remain across our division.”
