As the Fairfax County Public School System reels from an absolutely devastating round of budget cuts, the administration has resorted to a bit of an unusual source for a solution – the community. Apparently taking a page from Kickstarter, a popular online funding website, the School Board is crowd sourcing solutions for two levels of the deficit, 50 million and 75 million, as the actual amount of the budget shortfall is contingent on several items that the administration will not determine until later in the process of determining the budget. Through a link available from the main Fairfax County Public Schools website (you’ll know it from desperately checking for snow days), you can create a budget proposal by selectively cutting various programs, at various different levels. For example, you can choose to raise class sizes by, on average, .25, .5, or 1 student per teacher. Additionally, you can choose to create your own program to be cut, entering a custom value for the amount of money to be saved. (This author solved the entire budget issue by cutting “School.”)

At its heart, the budget issue is mainly a simple problem that anyone can see. The costs of running the school district has ballooned rapidly, with ever increasing number of students (with slightly over a quarter receiving free lunches) and salaries. Adding on to that is the price of the new start times for school across the counties, and the subsequent need for more buses and equipment to handle that. However, the amount of funding from the school district hasn’t increased to reflect that. Even after the 3% increase in funding, the school district still faces an approximately 80 million dollar shortfall.

The Budget Proposal tool is available at https://budgettool.fcps.edu/