K-12 Funding Trends At-a-Glance: Data for Statewide and All 132 School Divisions (2021-2022)

State funding for K-12 education is still down when compared to pre-Great Recession levels, despite a decade of economic growth prior to the pandemic. Statewide, students will see less funding from the state than they did in 2008-2009, adjusting for inflation. Schools are increasingly reliant on local governments for funding with localities spending $4.4 billion more than the state required to meet the state’s staffing standards.  New analysis shows that, if the revised Standards of Quality put forward by the Virginia Board of Education were fully funded for the budget year that begins July 1, 2021, divisions in Virginia would receive an additional $631 per student, on average, with some higher poverty divisions receiving around double that amount.

Those are just a few of the key findings summarized by The Commonwealth Institute’s latest analysis of K-12 data that is available going into the 2021-2022 school year. Check out our statewide and rural schools summaries below, as well as all individual school divisions.

*Note: For Fiscal years 2021 and 2022, direct aid calculations were made with pre-pandemic student projections and 2020 regular session conference report funding levels to give a comparison of underlying trends. Enrollment has been unstable during the pandemic. 

Corrections. Due to inadvertent data coding errors, the following issues have been corrected since the original publish date:
– School divisions were incorrectly labeled as having more or fewer staff per student relative to the 2008-2009 school year. This was corrected on 8/5/2021.
– The statewide PDF included student demographic information in the incorrect rows. This was corrected 3/23/2022.
We apologize for the errors.