Jennifer Brody endured a couple of scary days last week.
When President Trump issued an executive order freezing all federal assistance, the Fredericksburg City Schools chief financial officer’s thoughts quickly turned to the various programs and initiatives that could be affected.
“We were looking at all of our title grants, our IDEA 611, 619, our Head Start, our nutrition funds, the money for our next round of electric buses,” Brody recounted Monday, during a school board work session on the proposed 2025-26 budget. “It was a hard day.”
While the initial order has since been rescinded, the specter of shifting federal policy loomed over Monday’s discussion, as FCPS Superintendent Marci Catlett and staff presented a budget totaling $65.5 million, an increase of 10.7% from the adopted FY2025 budget.
The budget includes a current gap of approximately $5.87 million, which would require some combination of additional state or city funding. Based on an Average Daily Membership (ADM) of 3,500, FCPS could see $1.6 million in state revenue compared to last year’s budget, Brody said.
Catlett identified two budget priorities: an exemplary staff and instructional excellence, and educational equity as driving the division’s funding needs.
Specifically, the proposed budget includes a 5% increase for all staff, a pay bump that Brody said will make FCPS competitive with its neighbors in Stafford and Spotsylvania counties. Factoring in that increase, which entails a fiscal impact of $2.1 million, the starting salary for a teacher would be $52,437.
The budget also calls for four to five additional teachers in kindergarten through second grade, at a cost of $400,000 to $500,000. Those hires are intended to reduce class sizes in those grades to a division-wide average of 20 students in the face of (slowly) increasing enrollment.
Other staffing requests include two new kindergarten instructional assistants at each of the city’s three elementary schools (an estimated $360,000 fiscal impact) and one “behavior support classroom” to be shared among the three schools ($220,000). Students needing behavioral interventions would spend two to four weeks in the classroom before transitioning back to their assigned school, Brody said.
Beyond staffing, the biggest impact on the proposed 2025-26 budget comes from the operating budget of Gladys West Elementary School, which has an estimated fiscal impact of $2.46 million.
Next, the school board will schedule a special meeting to finalize decisions for the superintendent’s proposed budget before holding a joint work session with city council during which the two bodies will attempt to bridge the funding gap.
While the division is accustomed to factoring in changing needs and fluctuations in state funding when crafting a budget, uncertainty at the federal level adds another variable to this year’s discussions. School board chair Matt Rowe (Ward 1) proposed that the board leave open additional dates in the event “something critical does happen and we need to make a budget pivot.”
School board member Molly McFadden (At-large) asked Brody if there would be a way to see which programs could be in jeopardy, as well as models or projections of their overall impact on the budget.
“Do we have any worst-case scenarios?” McFadden asked.
Brody replied that the worst-case scenario is “significant,” with Title I ($1.4 million), nutrition ($3 million), and IDEA ($750,000) representing core programs that could be affected.
“These are all very material numbers to us,” she said.
