If Dale Lee has anything to say about it, the map that grades the coronavirus in West Virginia’s 55 public school districts will have a day in court sometime soon.
Lee is president of the West Virginia Education Association, the teacher’s union that filed an injunction Monday morning in Kanawha County Circuit Court — which questions both the legality and relevance of the map.
The injunction is also asking the court to consider if the state’s Open Meeting laws are being skirted by the panel that convenes before said map is updated every Saturday at 5 p.m.
At issue is the recent reconfiguring of the map and its metric, which have allowed several school districts, including Monongalia County, to leapfrog into green on the map, after languishing in red or orange just days before.
“Our members have watched the constant manipulation of the map,” Lee said Monday.
“As each rendition failed to provide the desired results sought by our state leaders, additional changes were made,” the union president continued.
“The only way to restore confidence in the process and ensure safety in our public schools is to adopt a new system from independent experts recognized in the field of infectious diseases and public health, such as the original color-coded map from Harvard.”
He’s referring to the map from the Harvard Global Health Institute, which served as the template for the West Virginia model.
The institute tracks the pandemic worldwide, and its West Virginia map has a far different complexion than the one used for schools here.
North-central West Virginia is under a sea of orange in the current Harvard map, meaning remote learning and no in-person instruction or extracurricular activities, such as Friday night football.
Monongalia, Taylor, Harrison, Wetzel and Doddridge counties glow orange on that map, with Preston and Marion showing yellow.
Just three counties — Wirt, Braxton and Pendleton — are showing green on the Harvard map.
When the state map last updated over the weekend, it showed Monongalia, Preston, Marion and Wetzel in the green.
Harrison and Doddridge showed orange and gold, respectively, on the West Virginia version.
Monongalia County, which opened the Sept. 8 school year solidly in the red, quickly rebounded to green after the state changed the way COVID cases among WVU students are charted for the state rolls.
Rearranging WVU numbers in the metric, Lee said last month in Morgantown, doesn’t make the cases less significant in the county that’s home to the state’s flagship university.
University students work part-time jobs in Morgantown and Mon County, he said then.
University students lease apartments here, shop here, dine in restaurants here and drink in bars here, he added.
Lee said Gov. Jim Justice has also been infected — by politics.
“We have seen the manipulation of the map’s colors and metrics on numerous occasions as protests occurred and pressure was placed on the governor,” he said.
In the meantime, Clay-Battelle High School’s football team is under quarantine through Oct. 16, after it was announced Friday that a coach tested positive for the coronavirus.
