NORFOLK, Va. — Data collected by The Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP) dissects just how much money Virginia’s school districts are investing into each student.
Combining numbers from fiscal year 2023 spending reports from each locality and enrollment figures from the Virginia Department of Education, the report ranks each district based on how much it spent on teaching per student.
Of the 116 districts charted — Arlington tops the list with $19,495 in instructional spending on each of the district’s more than 27,500 students.
Surry County also ranks high, investing $18,406 in instruction per student – though the smaller district only had 685 students at the time, according to VPAP.
Chesapeake is the biggest spender among the seven cities in Hampton Roads, spending just over $13,000 on teaching each student.
Newport News follows with $11,767 in instructional spending per student, just beating Virginia Beach's $11,634 spent per pupil.
Norfolk ranks 80th overall after allocating $10,816 for each student.
Suffolk charts the lowest of the Hampton Roads districts, with $9,931 devoted to teaching each of its nearly 14,500 students.
Radford spent the least on teaching out of all of the Virginia districts ranked, with $8,647 spent on each young scholar.
For context, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that national average public school spending per student rose almost 9% to $15,633 in fiscal year 2022.
Spending data was not available for 15 localities. The full report shows those districts omitted, and more information on each city's spending.