Table of Contents
I've spent more hours than I can count this year watching Alexandria build a school budget — from the board's first adoption back in February, through a city budget season that stretched into spring, to the final votes this week.
Work sessions that ran past dark. An add/delete meeting where the rules changed on the day of, and the board had to figure out what they were even allowed to do. Roll calls. Public comment, some of it angry. A blog post from the board, signed by all nine, trying to explain themselves before a vote. A 10-year capital plan. A $13 million gap. Fifty-six positions cut.
Here's what I didn't see.
I didn't see anyone throw up their hands. I didn't see anyone take the easy route. I didn't see a single person decide it was good enough and go home.
What I saw was people questioning. Pushing. Asking staff one more time whether a number was really the number. Arguing over a legal interpretation in real time because getting it right mattered more than getting it done. Looking for every dollar, in every line, to save a position or a program or a contract that serves a kid in this city.
And it wasn't just the nine people on the dais. It was the staff who built the thing — the finance team that rebuilt the numbers after every change, the superintendent steering her last budget through, the administrators who had to find cuts in their own departments and then explain them out loud. It was residents, too: parents who came to public comment, students who showed up to defend a program, neighbors who read the documents and asked hard questions and pledged to keep at it after the meeting ended. Some of them were furious. They came anyway. That's not noise. That's a community doing its job.
Nobody's ever happy with a budget. That's the nature of the thing — when there isn't enough, someone goes without, and the people making the call know it. You could watch it on their faces.
And it isn't only the school board. The City Council has its own version of this, with a harder math problem: it has to weigh schools against everything else a city owes its residents — public safety, housing, streets, the people who can least afford to be forgotten. I watched the council make its own painful calls this year, approving a police wage package one night while turning around to look for cuts to pay for it. There is no version where everyone wins. There is only the work of trying to be fair with what there is.
I should be honest about where I sit. I don't have children, and I didn't go to ACPS. I came to all this as something of an outsider — no kid whose class size I was tracking, no personal stake in any one school. Maybe that's a limitation. But it also means what I'm about to say isn't coming from a parent defending a program or a graduate defending a legacy. It's coming from someone who simply watched, closely, for a long time.
I came away from all those hours believing something simple, and I think it's worth saying out loud in a year when it's easy to assume the worst about anyone in public life: the people doing this — the board that voted, the staff who carried it, the residents who showed up — are trying to do right by the children of Alexandria, and by the residents who pay for it all. You can disagree with where they landed. I'd defend your right to. But disagreement and contempt aren't the same thing, and we lose something important when we forget it.
So once in a while, before you fire off the comment or assume the worst, stop. Take a breath. Ask yourself what you'd do if it were your call, with that gap and that math and that room full of people watching. Give someone the benefit of the doubt. I sat through enough of this to come away convinced of something I'd ask you to consider too: no one in this is out to get you, or to do more harm than good. They're just people, doing a hard job, in public, where every mistake is visible and every choice leaves someone unhappy.
And here's the thing I'd say to anyone who, like me, doesn't have a kid in these schools and might wonder why this is their fight.
It is. A school system isn't only for the families inside it. It's the single biggest thing this city does together, the largest line in the budget your taxes already fund. It shapes property values and who can afford to live here. It decides whether Alexandria grows the workforce, the neighbors, the volunteers and the leaders it's going to need in twenty years. The kid who gets an Afghan family liaison this year, or doesn't, becomes part of this community either way. We all have a stake in how that goes, whether or not we ever set foot in a classroom.
So if you've been treating school news as someone else's concern, I'd gently push back. It's yours. It's mine. It's every resident's.
This is where you come in.
The budget you just watched get adopted isn't the end of anything. The state hasn't passed its own budget yet, which means there's money still in question. There's a new superintendent coming. There's a new high school principal starting July 1. There are work sessions on the calendar right now that almost no one will attend.
Go to one. Email a board member. Read the documents — they're public, and they're more readable than you'd think. Show up to public comment, even when you're frustrated, especially when you're frustrated. The process only works when the people it's for are in the room.
I'll keep showing up. I hope you will too.
— Ryan
