By a 4-1 vote last week, the Mathews County School Board adopted the division’s revised 2025 budget that gives teachers and other school employees a 5 percent pay increase, plus a step on the salary scale (roughly equivalent to another percent).

The action came after supervisors, at a June 6 special meeting, approved amendments to the county’s overall FY2025 budget providing about $300,000 in additional funding to schools above what had initially been part of the draft budget that was presented to supervisors for adoption in May.

During the school board’s Tuesday, June 18 meeting (which was held in the Thomas Hunter Middle School cafetorium since the school’s Brooks Auditorium was being used as a polling place for the primary election), Superintendent of Schools Dr. David S. Daniel spoke on some of the challenges the division has faced over the past year in terms of state funding and declining enrollments.

Due to enrollment declines, including a mid-year adjustment in March t...