The Fairfax County Public School system currently faces a significant budget cut in the form of a greatly reduced transfer of state funds to the school system.
One cut that may significantly affect high school students is the requirement that students pay IB and AP exam fees.
“We’re an IB school, so students would have to pay the fees associated with those tests,” Principal Jay Pearson said. “For a full diploma candidate, it could be close to $800 of testing fees over a two year window.”
The exam fee cut is currently being proposed, but Fairfax County school board chairman Ilryong Moon said that if the school system is given any more money, the cut will not be implemented.
“We are certainly hoping we don’t have to charge students for AP and IB, but as of now, the proposal includes charging the students that fee,” Moon said.
The cut does not actually mean that FCPS will receive less money for 2014-2015 than they do during the current school year; rather, it means that the school system’s budget will increase to meet the growing student population by much less than in previous years.
“County executives are recommending that the [Board of Supervisors] give us 2% more than last year, though we are asking for 5.7%,” Moon said. “There is a 3.7% gap in the transfer request, which is about 63 million dollars.”
“80% of our budget goes into people, so the only way to achieve cuts is through reducing staff,” Pearson said.
Reduction of staff is set to follow an increase in class sizes by an average of one student.
“A 1.0 class size increase … would probably mean two to three fewer teachers,” Pearson said.
However, this larger average class size may be distributed unevenly depending on student registrations.
“I don’t like to have classes that are more than 30 … but we work real hard to not have that happen,” Pearson said. “Sometimes we’ll take a class of 34 and it’ll become two classes of 17. In the future we may not be able to do that.”
While the cuts may not seem like much, the extent of their effects for families can’t be known yet.
“I think part of the problem is that until there’s some real pain that’s felt by families, I’m not sure that the seriousness of the budget situation will really be appreciated,” Pearson said.