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Suffolk City Council agreed to provide the Suffolk School Board the total amount of $81.1 million they requested for their 2025-2026 fiscal year budget during a City Council and School Board joint meeting on Wednesday, April 9. 

Suffolk Public Schools’ original request from the city of $82.3 million decreased by $1.2 million because the city will absorb the cost of any preexisting and new school resource officers. Until now, SPS had to reimburse the city for SROs, at approximately $78,000 per SRO. The SRO funding will now come out of the police operating budget.   

A new Elephant’s Fork Elementary School location was also discussed, as was updating the current joint use of recreational facilities agreement between SPS and the city. An update on new residential developments across the city was also presented. 

Mayor Michael Duman pointed out the Board’s budget has increased from $175 million to $204 million over the last two years, which he said is a “pretty substantial” increase.

“I know we got inflation and keeping up with salaries, but for our public to know, our citizens know also that the effort’s being made to fund the request of the school system to do what we need to do,” he said. 

One of the Board’s biggest budget requests from the city was for 11 new elementary SROs. All the middle and high schools have dedicated SROs, but the elementary schools don’t. Instead, sheriff deputies are placed in the elementary schools when they can work around the court dockets. 

It was decided the city will initially provide four SROs next year, four more during the 2026-2027 fiscal year, and then provide the final three during the 2027-2028 fiscal year. 

“The bottom line is we have limited resources within the police department,” Duman said. “We have to keep officers on the street, we have to keep our citizens safe. And I’m not saying we don’t need to keep our students safe also, but we’re down to the elementary level. So the reality of it is it would be impossible not so much to fund 11 SROs, it would be difficult to find 11 bodies.” 

City Manager Al Moor talked about the possibility of having idle officers sit at a school property instead of at a shopping center. 

“We also have areas in our traffic zones or our zones that we patrol, that if we have, you know, a lot of times our officers may be doing paperwork, they may be sitting idle and not moving, and if they’re going to be sitting idle, our thought was, in lieu of sitting in a shopping center, let’s sit in a school property so we have a presence there when they’re down,” he explained.  

In the city’s budget, $13.1 million of capital funding will go toward the Northern Shores Elementary School addition and the school administration office. The city is also allotting $11.5  million for debt services left over from previous capital projects, as well as nearly $762,000 for school administration and operations building leases on Bright Lane.  

The City Council will host a public hearing about its proposed budget on April 16, with the goal of adopting it on May 7. There will also be another public hearing on May 7 regarding property reassessments increasing more than 1%.

Director of Finance Charles Meek said the city has an unassigned fund balance of over $100 million in case of emergencies such as a “catastrophic” weather event or an “economic downturn.” Their financial policy requires them to keep 20% of the budgeted governmental funds in the unassigned fund balance, which is needed for the city to keep its AAA bond rating.

School Board Chair Heather Howell said it was “startling” to hear about the city’s $100 million unassigned funds while the Board has about $7 million worth of unfunded needs that would “enhance the lives of our students and our families that are part of this community.”

Regarding a new Elephant’s Fork Elementary location, Moor said they are looking at the general area of Pitchkettle Road to Route 460. Details were not provided as Moor deemed them inappropriate at this time.

The new site will be within the current Elephant’s Fork school zone. 

“My message here is that we are working together,” Moor said. “We have heard [the Board] from last meeting. We have some thoughts. We hope this will work out in the next couple months that we will be speaking to you in more detail.”

Gordon said this is a priority for the Board as the school is over capacity by 130 students. 

In a presentation by Director of Parks and Recreation Mark Furlo, the city requested to amend the current recreational facilities joint usage agreement with SPS. 

Parks and Rec staff has determined the city has a shortage of five diamond fields and three rectangular fields.

Furlo recommends the joint use agreement be amended to include fields at Southwestern, Florence Bowser, Creekside, Nansemond Parkway, and Kings Fork middle schools.

The city and SPS’s current joint use agreement was first signed in 2008 and later amended in 2010. The agreement governs the shared use of gyms at Mack Benn, Northern Shores, Oakland, and Booker T. Washington elementary schools, as well as Creekside and Kings Fork middle schools. It also governs the shared use of fields at JFK and John Yeates middle schools.

This agreement allows nonprofit youth athletic associations to use those facilities.

Gordon said field availability first needs to be addressed at those schools because so many organizations already use school fields. 

“All the schools that we have listed up here, not all of those schools have field availability,” Gordon said. “I think we’re all in agreement that there needs to be something that has to be done, but we have to be able to show everyone the total amount of use that we’re getting.”

Howell brought up concerns about the request to use middle school fields because those sports programs are growing. She also wanted to make sure liabilities for injuries will be covered in the agreement, as well as where the funding will come from to fix fields that currently can’t be used.