We’ve passed a new budget (FY26)!

On Tuesday June 3, the Richmond School Board passed the budget for the next fiscal year, FY 26, which begins this July 1, 2025. You can find the details and documents online here.

Some highlights of our new budget: 

• Fully funding all of our collective bargaining commitments with an additional investment of $16.5 million, including a 3% raise for all teachers

• increases investment in our district wide literacy and graduation goals, with a special emphasis on the unique needs of our multilingual learners

• Investments to hire 55 new multilingual teachers! The Richmond Public School (RPS) Talent Office has already hired 33 of the 55 teachers. It is likely that all the positions will be filled by the start of the school year.

There are roughly $14 million in reductions – including the elimination of over 30 vacancies. After completing the staff allocation process this year, we have 24 vacant teacher positions and three vacant instructional assistant positions in excess of the requirements articulated in our business rules. The proposed reduction of vacancies does not impact high-vacancy schools because, before identifying these proposed vacancies, all schools were allocated their appropriate number of positions as defined by the staffing business rules.

The teacher positions were vacant for an average of 17 months. In a typical budget year, we would assign those vacancies to schools to provide additional support. However, given our current fiscal situation, we are eliminating those vacancies, which saved RPS approximately $2.4 million. You can find a detailed breakdown of the positions that were eliminated on pages 16 and 17 of the budget presentation uploaded to board docs at the link earlier in this post.