I believe in boldly advocating for public school funding. I worked collaboratively with our local, state and national leaders to ensure that they clearly understood the varied and changing needs of our students—consistently advocating for full funding of our school system’s budgets. In addition, I have served as the National School Board Association’s Legislative Liaison working with Virginia’s Congressional Delegation to bring to light the lack of funding for our Title 1 schools and the chronic underfunding of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA).

During my time as Chair of our Board, we brought to light how consistent underfunding of our school budget was negatively impacting our children. In addition, we were losing our teachers to surrounding jurisdictions. We commissioned a comprehensive salary survey and budget planning that allowed us to target our teacher group—with two recent strong budget cycles, and within a 3 year period, we were able raise our staff and teacher’s salaries. Our teachers salaries are now at 95-105% of surrounding school districts.

The success of FCPS is contingent upon funding the growing, unique and diverse needs of our student body. I will continue to fight to ensure that these needs are met.