‘No loss is no help to Rappahannock’
How Virginia’s No Loss Funding formula impacts RCPS BY RACHEL NEEDHAM
There are only 22 school districts in Virginia that don’t qualify for No Loss Funding in any of the state’s budget options being considered by the General Assembly. Rappahannock County Public Schools is one of them.
Out of the 133 public school divisions in Virginia, 111 have seen significant declines in attendance over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Statewide, public school enrollment — measured in a unit school administrators call “average daily membership,” or ADM — has declined more than 3.5%, with some school districts losing as much as 10% of their student populations since March.
This is a big deal because the state government uses ADM to determine
much basic aid to send to each school district — the more students in a district, the more funding the district needs to educate them. Losing students means losing money from the state.
In September 2020, when school administrators across the commonwealth first started noticing that their enrollments were lower than they had anticipated, superintendents sounded the alarm, worried their districts could lose millions of dollars in state funding that they had been relying on to balance their budgets.
So in order to protect school divisions from unanticipated budget cuts in the midst of the pandemic due to enrollment decreases experts believed would be temporary, Governor Ralph Northam proposed a budget amendment in December with a provision to hold school districts harmless for enrollment losses. Simply put, under the “hold harmless” provision, school district budgets wouldn’t be financially penalized for enrollment losses during the pandemic. This became a line item in the state’s K-12 budget now known as “No Loss Funding.”
But the formula legislators are using to determine which divisions even qualify for No Loss Funding is at best confusing and at worst opaque — and what’s more, advocates for small and rural schools say it is inequitable.
According to RCPS Superintendent Shannon Grimsley, who spoke with a budget analyst at the Virginia Department of Education, legislators determine a school district’s eligibility for No Loss Funding by comparing a recent estimate of district’s state aid — based on ADM from September 2020 — to a budget devised during the January 2020 special session called Chapter 56. In other words, they weigh a pre-pandemic budget projection to a mid-pandemic budget estimate.
If that’s not confusing enough, there’s a catch: the items in Chapter 56 are considered government working papers and aren’t available to the public. (Portions of Chapter 56 have been included in the recent proposed budgets, but not all of it.)
A school district is only eligible for No Loss Funding if the amount of aid in the recent estimate is smaller than the amount that the legislature budgeted for in Chapter 56. If there is no difference, or if the estimated aid is greater than the amount in Chapter 56, then a school district doesn’t qualify.
Keith Perrigan, president of the Coalition for Small and Rural Schools, sent an op-ed to his fellow Virginia superintendents and to the Richmond Times-Dispatch excoriating the No Loss Funding calculation. “The very name of the No Loss funding stream sends a message of equity, but in practice it may be the most inequitable portion of the entire budget,” he wrote.
“If you assume that No Loss funding ensures that divisions don’t lose money due to lost enrollment associhow ated with the pandemic, you would be assuming incorrectly.
Perrigan continues: “To further exacerbate this issue of inequity, enrollment projections that are used for building the state education budget demonstrate signi cantly more error for high poverty and rural divisions than for other divisions. Enrollment projections for high poverty and rural divisions can be almost four times less accurate than projections for a uent and non-rural divisions.
“In 2018, rural enrollment projections were o by 4.4% while non-rural estimates were o by only 1.2%, and enrollment projections for divisions with the highest poverty were o by 6.6% while estimates for divisions with the least poverty were only o by 1.8%. These subtle inaccuracies contribute to signi cant inequities for calculating No Loss funding during a pandemic.”
Ostensibly, the state formula determined that the 22 ineligible school divisions simply didn’t lose enough enrollment to qualify for funding using budgets based on projections. Projections which showed that in fact, 21 of the 22 divisions actually gained enrollment over the course of the pandemic.
The one exception? Rappahannock County Public Schools.
RCPS is the only school division where the state acknowledges enrollment losses and yet has disquali ed Rappahannock schools from receiving No Loss Funding.
When asked about the anomaly, Delegate Luke Toria, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said that Rappahannock’s estimated state aid “did not decrease from the amount in the Special Session 2020 budget,” so there was no need for No Loss Funding.
“Most of the no-loss funding was driven by the actual September 30 enrollment counts coming in lower than projected,” Torian said. “In Rappahannock, the actual fall enrollment was 728, only 5 students lower than the 733 students that were projected, or only 0.62% lower than projected.”
Other experts have merely called Rappahannock an anomaly.
“No loss is no help for Rappahannock,” RCPS Superintendent Shannon Grimsley lamented to the Rappahannock News on Tuesday.