(The Center Square) — Back to school is always chock-full of firsts for students: a new grade, sometimes a new school, and often new classmates and teachers— although this school year also holds countless firsts for a select group of schools across Virginia.

Germanna Community College hosted the governor at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new lab school, the Future Educators Academy in Culpepper, this week.

Forty-four students attended orientation for Emory & Henry University’s Southwest Virginia Healthcare Excellence Academy last week. Next week, students will start taking classes at Explore@Roanoke, Roanoke College’s lab school. Several other lab schools are opening this fall, and VCU x CodeRVA, the state’s first lab school, is embarking on its second semester.

“I’m thrilled by the continued progress we’re seeing in lab school development across the Commonwealth,” said Gov. Glenn Youngkin at the Future Educators Academy opening. “Lab schools are a critical part of restoring excellence in the Commonwealth’s education system.”

Lab schools, or laboratory schools, are schools that often explore nontraditional K-12 modes of education. They offer a specialized education centered on a particular career field, a set of skills, or hands-on or project-based learning. In Virginia, they’re public, nonsectarian, nonreligious schools established by public or eligible private higher education institutions and don’t charge tuition.

Students can dual enroll at any schools mentioned above and earn college credits toward a particular degree or area of interest while continuing their high school classes.

The 17 high school juniors – all female, coincidentally – at the Future Educators Academy will earn their associate degree by the time they finish high school. The academy currently has transfer agreements with James Madison University and the University of Mary Washington, allowing its graduates to complete their education degrees and obtain their teacher’s licenses in just two years.

The Virginia Department of Education has approved 16 lab school applications from commonwealth colleges and universities, and more are in the pipeline. The goal for many of them is to not only fast-track students to their desired careers through innovative education but also to address some of the state’s workforce shortages. Virginia currently has a dearth of teachers and health care workers and, like the nation, is trying to respond to the STEM workforce shortage.

This school year is the first time Virginians have seen the lab school initiative – one that Youngkin has pushed for since taking office – start gaining real traction, partly because the department had to move quickly.

The first budget Youngkin signed included a $100 million fund for lab schools, but the Democrat-controlled General Assembly did not approve more lab school funds in the state budget that took effect July 1, so the department had to allocate existing funds by June 30. Democrats often protest, like the teachers union and the Virginia Education Association, that lab schools simply take away funding from existing public schools.

After the approval of CodeRVA in July 2023, the then-president of the VEA, James Fedderman, issued a statement decrying the decision.

“All students in Virginia deserve to be funded and supported like those at CodeRVA, but that is not the reality. While Governor Youngkin’s pet program lavishes more than $6 million in additional funding to an already well-funded school, nearby Overby-Sheppard Elementary school… receives a fraction of this student funding and has the 7th-highest poverty rate of all public schools in Virginia,” Fedderman said.

“Showering one school with huge amounts of state and local funding might look nice and distract some of the public, but parents of kids in other public schools want and deserve adequate funding for their students, too.”

The association has also warned, even before the most recent budget was passed, that colleges and universities starting lab schools take on a lot of financial risk in doing so.

“Higher education institutions will take a large risk establishing lab schools and should be prepared to shoulder the full cost of operating these schools into the future without any sustaining funding from the state or local level,” the association says on its website.