Table of Contents
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Hours before it is scheduled to adopt the fiscal 2027 budget Thursday night, the Alexandria City School Board did something it rarely does: All nine members signed a public explanation of how they got there.
The post, published on the ACPS website Wednesday evening, walks readers through Tuesday's add/delete work session, the three-hour meeting at which the board abandoned most of its proposals to restore employee pay after staff warned that doing so could violate the division's collective bargaining commitments. It was written by Kelly Carmichael Booz, Chair Michelle Rief and Alexander Scioscia and co-signed by the other six members.
The byline is itself telling. Booz sponsored most of the compensation proposals that died Tuesday, and Scioscia, reflecting on a year of cuts, had called it "frankly just not the budget I ever wanted to have to preside over." That the board's most vocal advocates for staff pay are the ones explaining why that pay will not be restored this cycle suggests an effort to get ahead of frustration from employees and their union before the vote.
"If you watched Tuesday night's add/delete work session ... and came away frustrated or confused, we understand. We were too," the post opens. It insists the withdrawn proposals "were not for show" and concedes the timing was not acceptable, framing the session not as dysfunction but as the unavoidable collision of a first-ever bargaining process with a long-fixed budget calendar.
On the facts, the board's account squares with what I reported from the meeting. The board withdrew its pay proposals after Chief Financial Officer Dominic Turner and Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt warned that, having adopted a collective bargaining resolution in 2024, the board had given up the power to set compensation on its own, in either direction. It approved a narrow set of offsetting changes: both Afghan family liaison positions at their actual cost of $150,600, an itinerant advanced academic services teacher at $147,200, $83,800 toward the Communities In Schools contract and an outside benchmarking study of central office staffing. The net change to the budget was zero, as a balanced-budget requirement demands.
Ryan Belmore
The post also resolves a detail that was muddled in the room. The board confirms it deleted a vacant technology services position worth about $104,000 to help fund those additions, a vote whose tally members and the chair restated several times Tuesday before settling it.
Where the published account is smoother than the meeting itself is in its central claim: that the board "chose the path that honors the bargaining relationship." In the room, that path was contested. Ashley Simpson Baird, who helped draft the collective bargaining resolution, and Ryan Reyna both challenged the legal interpretation, noting that no contract is yet in place for the reopener language to govern. Tim Beaty, a longtime contract negotiator, largely backed staff. The post acknowledges the interpretation "did not go unchallenged" but does not dwell on how live the disagreement was.
Read the full post from the school board here.
The board is scheduled to adopt the budget at 6 p.m. Thursday at 1340 Braddock Place. Still unresolved is the state budget, which could send anywhere from zero to $3.1 million more to ACPS once the General Assembly reconvenes later this month. The board has said that if the money arrives, compensation is first in line, at the bargaining table.
