Va. Board of Education approves 15th lab school, uses remaining state funding (2024)

The Virginia Board of Education approved the state’s 15th lab school on Friday and allocated the rest of the state’s $75 million lab school fund. State leaders accelerated the approvals of lab school applications, as the fund can only be used until June 30, the last day of this fiscal year — a deadline imposed by the new two-year state budget that legislators finalized last month.

Lab schools, which are K-12 schools that partner with higher education institutions, are Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s signature school choice initiative. The schools are free and open to the public, set their own curricula and budgets, and are associated with their corresponding institution of higher education.

State leaders expect all 15 lab schools to be up and running by the 2025-26 school year. The lab school initiative is a historic expansion of nontraditional options for public school students in Virginia, which has only seven public charter schools. Neighboring states like North Carolina and Maryland each have more than 100 charter schools.

The approved lab schools will teach curriculums that cover an array of specialties from space to maritime to welding and hands-on apprenticeships, to addressing such issues as health care needs and helping prepare skilled workers for high-demand fields in their local areas.

The board, up against a tight deadline, approved 11 lab schools in the past three months while facing several hurdles.

Five Virginia colleges that had already been awarded millions in state funding for lab schools scrambled to find new partners and resubmit their lab school applications before Friday’s meeting because budget language finalized last month emphasized that state code does not allow lab school funding to go to private or two-year colleges. Old Dominion University stepped in to partner with those five schools and act as the eligible higher education institution.

“These challenges that we’ve had politically, I think people take an eye off the ball of what this is all about. I think it’s been very unfortunate because there has been so much good going on,” said board member Bill Hansen, who also sits on the board’s lab school committee.

“This is actually going to be an amazing mosaic of projects that are going to really, I think, help build up the commonwealth, and it’s going to be done community by community, region by region, and literally student by student.”

The budget compromise that General Assembly budget leaders and Youngkin reached in May allowed Youngkin to keep most of the funding the assembly had appropriated in the current budget for his lab school initiative. Any lab school funding not used before June 30 would revert to the state’s general fund. The finalized budget did not include the additional $60 million that Youngkin had sought in the budget he proposed in December.

To help meet the June 30 deadline, the board’s lab school committee decided in a split vote in April to alter the lab school application process by eliminating the standard second review of applications and instead recommending the approval of lab schools upon first review. The committee chair and vice chair raised serious objections to forgoing the standard process that applies to all state Board of Education standing committees.

The board on Friday approved the Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore, which is a lab school partnership among Old Dominion, Eastern Shore Community College, Accomack County Public Schools and Northampton County Public Schools.

“Together, we are expanding innovative educational opportunities for students and parents, empowering them to reach for the stars,” Youngkin said in a statement Friday after the board’s approval of the lab school. “The Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore not only provides an innovative learning environment for Virginia’s Eastern Shore students, but also addresses a crucial economic need of the Commonwealth by creating an educated and trained workforce that meets the demands of the future.”

Youngkin campaigned on advancing school choice in Virginia, but the only significant school choice initiative to take off since his inauguration in January 2022 is his signature lab school program.

Youngkin won a partial victory for his lab school proposal in 2022, when Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears broke a tie vote in the Senate to rescue his amendment to triple the number of higher education institutions that can partner with local school divisions. The Senate then voted to block his proposal to use state per-pupil funds to pay for them.

While the state’s lab school fund will be emptied by the end of the month, the channel for lab school applications remains open. Any higher education institutions that want to start a lab school can still apply, but they would have to secure another funding source.

Virginia Department of Education spokesman Todd Reid said the board looks forward to considering applications of school divisions and higher education partners that may come forward in the coming months with interest in starting new lab schools.

Anna Bryson (804) 649-6922