MORGANTOWN — In many ways, the state Board of Education’s School Finance and Funding Committee, which was formed to help address education reform in West Virginia, is a tale the two senators who now hold seats on the body.
Craig Blair, the 15th District Republican and Senate Finance Chair from Martinsburg, says charter schools might not be bad for West Virginia — especially in the more impoverished parts of the Mountain State, where floundering schools in the consolidation bull’s eye mean everything to the little towns they serve.
Democrat Roman Prezioso, a Fairmont native who represents the 13th District, is the Senate minority leader who spent more than 40 years as a public school teacher and administrator.
Both turned out at Tuesday’s road-trip meeting of the BOE committee in Morgantown, which had gathered in advance of planned meeting next Monday of lawmakers in Charleston.
That meeting, though, has been apparently bumped up to June.
The session, when it does happen, will be in response to the contentious Senate Bill 451, which didn’t make it off the floor during the 2019 Legislative session.
With its call for charter schools and educational savings vouchers, SB 451 even sparked a brief statewide work stoppage among teachers — almost a year to the day of the 2018 walkout, in fact, which was heralded nationally as a victory in the labor movement.
As he talks to teachers across the state, Blair said he’s hearing the call for charter schools, even if it doesn’t always start out that way.
“It’s sort of odd,” he said. “They tell you, ‘We don’t want charter schools.’ Then they’ll describe what they do want, which sounds like a charter school.”
Prezioso countered by saying that teachers in such facilities don’t have the same protections as their counterparts in public districts.
He’d rather see money put into West Virginia’s 55 public districts, many of which are bringing home failing infrastructure grades.
The senator worked most of his career in Marion County, which has buildings that are generally 70 to 80 years old.
“Maintenance always suffers,” he said.
“ ‘We’re gonna Band-Aid this heating system, we’re not gonna replace it.’ ‘We’re gonna Band-Aid this roof, we’re not gonna replace it.’ There’s only so much you can do.”
JBissett@DominionPost.com
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