WESTOVER — Westwood Middle School’s VEX Robotics team will receive a donation from the City of Westover for the team’s upcoming trip to the VEX World Championship.
VEX Robotics is an educational competition to bring STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics ) to schools and encourage students to pursue these fields as careers, according to the website.
At this week’s Westover city council meeting, Mayor David Johnson said he thought the team’s accomplishment was amazing, and the city should support the school and its students.
The Westwood Classical Mechanics team won the West Virginia state competition and will be competing April 25-28 at the World Championship in Louisville, according to the school.
According to a flyer distributed by the school, the trip will cost nearly $12,000 and will help cover robots, registration and students with financial constraints.
“This is something we should be proud of,” he said. “This is our school. These guys have done a great job. … I really think we need to do this.”
City council members voted unanimously to amend the agenda to allow voting for the donation amount Monday night. Council then voted unanimously to approve the donation.
In other efforts to support Westwood Middle School, Chief Richard Panico said he received a lot of positive feedback from recent efforts to send a police officer to patrol the school grounds during the day.
“Before last week, we really never had a cruiser up at the school,” he said. “The SRO (school resource officer) would go up there in his own [vehicle] and he would park and go in. We’ve let him take a vehicle up there in the daytime for the past several days, and we’ve got a lot of calls from the school, even the school board, that recognizes that that’s a heavy deterrent if someone is going to go up to that school, and they see a marked police vehicle up there.”
Panico said the vehicle was parked in front of the school and easy to spot.
“You actually create a level there that someone is going to look at and say, ‘Ok, I know there is police protection in here,’” he said. “So, I’m not going to dedicate a vehicle to that, but I have the schedule set up where I can have [the officer] at the school. … So, I will let that sit up there during the days, and that would be his vehicle during the days, and when he is done with shift, he can bring it back down on patrol.”
Panico said if the force purchased a new vehicle, the Chevy currently used for patrol would go to the school because it is not a fully loaded police vehicle.
“We got more calls in the last seven days since school started with that car being up there saying, ‘Hey, we didn’t realize that you guys had more officers up there. What’s the story? Why is there a police car up here? So we are getting a lot of positive feedback having a police car up there.”
Several councilmembers, including Leonard Smith, Edie Viola, Al Yocum and Ralph Mullins and Mayor Dave Johnson expressed concern over the the veteran monuments removed from the Monongalia County Courthouse Square.
They were removed when renovations to the square began and have not been replaced. Westover wants council to know where they are being stored.
Johnson said the city of Westover had offered to place the monuments at the VFW.
Councilmembers also want to know where the plaque is that was to be placed on the fountain donated to the county. Johnson said he would investigate.
