WJCC Schools contract will be signed Friday

School system has been operating without an agreement more than two years

The impasse over the 55-year-old joint Williamsburg-James City County school system appears over. A new contract to operate the system is on the agenda to be signed Friday, when the school board meets with the two localities’ elected officials.

James City County just published an agenda for the joint meeting that has as its action items “approval of the Contract for the Joint Operation of the Williamsburg-James City County Public School System.”

County spokespeople declined to provide any further details on the specifics of the contract.

Each locality and the school board must vote to approve it when they meet Friday morning at 8:30 at the James City County Recreation Center on Longhill Road.

The standoff began in June 2023, when Williamsburg City Council voted to study running its own school system. County supervisors, who said they were taken by surprise, retaliated a month later by unanimously voting to terminate the schools’ joint operations contract at the end of this school year.

The city said it had a larger share of minority and poor students who were seeing worse results in schools than county residents.

But after both sides learned how much more it would cost them to operate separately, including the cost of new schools for the county, they soon returned to the bargaining table.

During the impasse the two sides made their own independent decisions on how they would fund the school system budget for the current fiscal year that began July 1. The majority of the system’s more than 11,000 students come from James City County, which pays 90% of the local funding.

County officials maintain the city, which seeks better outcomes for its students, is underpaying its share of school costs relative to its ability to pay.

County Administrator Scott Stevens told Williamsburg Watch that James City County is paying 85% more than what state formulas say it owes based on its ability to pay, while the city is only paying 25% more.