FCPS Budget recommendations come to Board of Education

The recommendations from the FCPS Budget Solutions Work Group will be presented to the Board of Education in tonight’s regular Board meeting. The Work Group was created early this summer to come up with solutions for how the District can address the projected $16 million deficit in the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget.

In July, the Work Group created ten recommendations that they ranked in order of preference. The Group’s top two recommendations both involve using the District’s Contingency Fund to fill the $16 million deficit.

However, the Lexington-Herald Leader reported last week that the District’s FY26 Contingency Fund may not have enough money to actually fill the deficit.

The FY26 District Budget, adopted by the School Board in May, anticipated a $42 million Contingency Fund; Superintendent Demetrus Liggins told the Herald-Leader that the Contingency Fund is now on track to be somewhere between $15 and $22 million.

• FCPS’s Contingency Fund is not a separate account that grows over time. Instead, it resets each Fiscal Year as the District budgets 6% of the Fiscal Year’s General Fund revenue for Contingency.
• Superintendent Liggins told the Herald-Leader that the District may only allocate 2% of the General Fund toward Contingency — the minimum allocation allowable by state law.

Liggins also announced other steps that he hopes will cut costs for the District, including:

• Pausing on filling any District office vacancies.
• Pausing all maintenance projects that do not immediately impact health or safety.
• Only hiring retirees as substitute teachers.
• Launching an internal review of the District’s financial decisions, similar to an internal audit.

Some of these steps overlap with recommendations from the Work Group - specifically freezing all District office hires and cutting back maintenance costs. Other recommendations include freezing all spending that is not contractually obligated and seeking private sponsors to support specific school facilities and programs.

These recommendations are not binding; the Board can implement one, several, or none of the recommendations from the Work Group. But with the announcements from Liggins concerning the low Contingency Fund and the implementation of several cost-cutting steps, it is unclear how the recommendations will fit into the Board and the District’s ongoing conversation around the District’s financial stability.