Sussex County may be closer to implementing voluntary school assessments to help fund school districts’ capital projects.
Developers would be responsible for VSAs or impact fees when building housing. Those funds would then go to school districts to keep up with the county’s growth.
Three of the Council’s five members – Matt Lloyd, Jane Gruenebaum and Steve McCarron – are newly elected and have voiced some interest in VSAs.
McCarron said implementing VSAs is a matter of fairness.
“If people are impacting a district's capacity, is it fair to spread that amongst everybody, or should the people moving here pay a proportional share and help out with the building of the new schools?” McCarron asked.
McCarron, Gruenebaum and Lloyd look at VSAs more favorably than their predecessors, who didn’t see the practice as viable for Sussex County even though it has been legal to charge developers since September 2023.
McCarron said he has a lot of empathy for districts because of his time as a Woodbridge School Board member and president.
Sussex County’s ability to use VSAs is modeled after New Castle County’s practices.
Milford School District’s chief operating officer Sara Hale said having developers help foot the bill is better than charging the whole community for growth it didn’t cause.
Hale added that her school district covers part of Kent County as well, so they already receive some funding from impact fees paid by developers there.
“They were very instrumental in helping us make sure that we could fund our new facility and the renovation of our middle school without an additional tax increase on our community members,” Hale said.
Any VSAs would have to be approved by the state’s Department of Education to make sure the schools are approaching capacity and have a need for more funds.
Matt Lloyd, another councilmember, informally proposed a building moratorium in the county that received largely negative public comments. McCaron said the Council should focus on land use issues using other tactics for now.
