James City County is exploring adding two more representatives to the school board it shares with Williamsburg.
James City County Board of Supervisors Member Tracy Wainwright said that even though the county has the majority of seats on the board — five of the seven — the representation hasn't kept up with the pace of the county's growth or its share of the student body.
About 9 out of every 10 students in the district come from James City County; student population is used to determine the localities’ school funding split.
“Since we do the bulk of the financing, it’s good for us to have the bulk of the decision-making,” Wainwright said. “How that influence goes will depend on who ends up in those positions.”
If approved, it would be the first change to Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools’ board in three decades. The last change to the WJCC board was in 1995, when county residents voted to directly elect their school representatives.
But in 2025, Williamsburg, James City County and the school board signed an agreement after two years of questioning whether to break up the 70-year-old joint school division. The agreement gives the county the power to add two more members.
Wainwright asked administrators in late June to look into the process of getting the new members on the ballot in 2027. The 2025 agreement requires the county to give Williamsburg and WJCC 12 months' notice. She wants an update this month.
Wainwright believes the city’s influence on the board is overweighted compared to its population and student enrollment. The county’s population growth has outpaced Williamsburg’s, growing from about 43,000 people to nearly 84,000 since 1995; the city’s has increased from nearly 12,000 to about 16,000 in the same span. Meanwhile, representation on the school board hasn’t changed.
Jim Icenhour from the board of supervisors doesn’t see the urgency or the benefit to either locality. He said he can’t think of a situation where the city’s “disproportionate representation was exercised to the disadvantage of the people in the county.” But Icenhour said a compelling case could change his mind.
Icenhour told WHRO in October, when he was chair of the board of supervisors, that he didn’t expect the request to expand would happen so soon. Williamsburg Mayor Doug Pons, though, wasn’t surprised.
“I suspected that it would come sooner rather than later,” Pons said this week. “If the county feels that it’s something they need to do because it’s important to them, and certainly it’s part of the contract, then we would support that.”
County staff said in an email to WHRO on July 2 that research is ongoing. Wainwright envisions adding two at-large members rather than redistricting the county’s district lines.
A mix of district and at-large representation would be new to James City County. The five school board seats are divided into districts that align with the board of supervisors’ districts. Icenhour hopes the county can take its time and research examples from other localities before making a decision.
“Let’s go take a look at anybody else who has done something like this in the Commonwealth and see how they did it and what the results were,” he said. “There are pros and cons to both sides of how you could do it.”
