This post reflects my views and does not represent the entire school board.
At our most recent school board meeting, our board was presented with research during public comment regarding K–12 staffing trends, school spending, and enrollment data, including figures specific to Madison County. I want to first acknowledge and thank that individual for their civic engagement. Public participation in our school board process is not just welcome, it is essential to a healthy community. That said, I also have a responsibility to this community to respond honestly and thoroughly when data is presented that may create an incomplete or misleading picture of our school division. Since that meeting, I have reviewed the materials presented and conducted my own research.
The materials shared during public comment drew from several sources, including the Brookings Institution, the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University (the paper given to us was cited from the Edunomics Lab at George Mason University, I believe in error), and the Epoch Times. While Brookings and Edunomics Lab are legitimate research organizations, both carry institutional perspectives and funding priorities that shape how they frame data. The Epoch Times is widely regarded by media researchers as a politically motivated outlet with a documented history of publishing misinformation, and is not appropriate for serious education policy analysis. This illustrates an important truth. It is easy to build a believable narrative by selecting only the sources, think tanks, and data points that support the conclusion you already want to reach. I could do the same thing in the opposite direction. Anyone can. That is not research. That is just finding sources that agree with you.
The presentation framed rising staffing levels alongside falling enrollment as evidence of waste or mismanagement. On the surface, that may appear bad, but that framing deliberately ignores the context that explains nearly all of it. The most significant omission in the data presented is the role of ESSER, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Congress authorized approximately $190 billion in ESSER funding across three rounds in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These were temporary, time-limited federal dollars specifically designated to help schools respond to the crisis. Schools across Virginia and the nation used ESSER funds to hire additional staff, such as counselors, interventionists, learning recovery specialists, tutors, and student support personnel, to address the academic and mental health impacts of the pandemic on children. These were not permanent budget expansions. They were emergency responses to an emergency. ESSER III funds carried a deadline, and schools are now winding down those positions as federal dollars expire. The Edunomics Lab data cited in the presentation capture the peak of that emergency staffing, but they do not provide that context. Presenting those numbers without explaining ESSER is not analysis. It is selective storytelling. The national figures cited that staffing increased by more than 700,000 positions while enrollment fell, reflecting this ESSER surge almost entirely. Presenting those numbers as evidence of overstaffing, without noting that the majority of those positions were federally funded, temporary, and pandemic-driven, is just not accurate and isn’t the whole story.
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the data presented is any acknowledgment of special education. The absence of this context alone makes the whole staffing argument fall apart. Special education is not optional. It is federal law. Schools do not get to choose whether to provide these services based on budget convenience. Special education requires dedicated teachers, paraprofessionals, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, behavioral intervention specialists, case managers, and more. The staffing ratios in special education bear no resemblance to a general education classroom, and they shouldn’t. These children have legally mandated individual education plans, and those plans must be staffed and funded. No two individualized education plans (IEPs) are exactly alike, which means the range of students that a division serves is drastic. Based on what I have read, the percentage of students identified for special education services has grown steadily over the past decade, driven by improved identification of needs. This is not a flaw in our system. It is our system working as it should, identifying and serving children who need support. It means you cannot look at a staffing to enrollment ratio and draw meaningful conclusions without accounting for special education caseloads. The data presented did not do this. Not once. In Madison County specifically, any honest analysis of our staffing levels must account for the makeup of our student population and the services we are legally required to provide. A think tank and a research lab in Washington, D.C. have no insight into that. They are working with aggregate numbers from a spreadsheet.
I want to be clear about something. Outside think tanks do not know what our classrooms look like. They do not know our kids. They have never sat in a Madison County classroom, walked our hallways, or spoken with our teachers about what a typical day actually requires. Organizations like the Edunomics Lab produce research that is useful for broad national trends. Applying those findings to Madison County, a rural Virginia school division with a specific student population and limited resources, and specific legal obligations, without ever setting foot here, is not expertise. It is guesswork. If you want to understand what our schools need, the path is clear. Ask to speak with a building principal. Ask a teacher how a typical day looks. Ask a special education coordinator about their caseload. Watch what a school counselor navigates in a single morning. No think tank report replaces that. The complexity of what happens inside a school building every single day cannot be reduced to a staffing to enrollment ratio on a line graph. I would personally invite any community member who has concerns about staffing or spending to arrange a meeting with a building principal. I am confident that what you will find is dedicated professionals doing extraordinary work, often with fewer resources than they need, not the picture of bloated bureaucracy that selective data points might suggest.
I want to be transparent about this. I am no expert on this matter, and I have reviewed the sources presented to us at the meeting to the best of my ability. I will acknowledge that enrollment in Madison County has declined from 1,829 students in 2015–2016 to 1,572 in 2025–2026. That is a real trend, and our board monitors it and takes it seriously in our planning, but declining enrollment does not automatically mean we should reduce staff. We have been cutting budget dollars using staff attrition for several years. This goes back before the pandemic. This means we should ask the right questions about our student population, our legal obligations, which positions are federally funded and temporary, and what our teachers and students actually need to succeed. Those are the questions I am committed to asking, with complete data and in full context. What I will not do is allow a one-sided presentation of cherry-picked statistics, sourced in part from an unreliable outlet and filtered through think tanks with their own agendas to drive decisions about the children and educators of this community. Our students deserve better than that. Our teachers deserve better than that, and this community deserves a school board that will tell them the truth even when the truth is more complicated than a line graph.