At the height of the Monongalia County Board of Education meeting Tuesday night, Nancy Walker raised her hand for a question that reverberated from Morgantown to Charleston and back again.
“It’s not a third, right?” the BOE president asked.
“Because that’s the number that keeps getting bantered around.”
“No,” came the reply from Deputy Schools Superintendent Donna Talerico.
For the past several days, Gov. Jim Justice has been saying that one-third of the state’s public school students are failing core classes this term, while the coronavirus rages.
The reason, the governor says, is because they aren’t fully engaged by remote learning.
And remote learning has been school rule more often than not this term, as districts have been dealing with the unprecedented particulars.
One-third, Justice said last month, is why he’s 100% ready to put elementary students and middle-schoolers back in their classrooms — actually in front of their teachers — no matter the COVID infection rates in their respective counties.
Community spread of the virus, though, is why local board members and district officials wanted to keep Mon’s students on remote learning through Feb. 12.
Other districts across the state did the same, but were all shot down Wednesday when the state Board of Education collectively overruled the measure — citing those failure rates.
Not that they necessarily apply here, Mon’s deputy superintendent said.
Pandemic or no, Talerico said, Mon has academic advantages that most other counties don’t have, given its relative prosperity and housing of the state’s land-grant university within its confines.
While Mon students are struggling, the magnitude just isn’t to the numbers “portrayed statewide,” she said.
Grades are down generally for as many as 150 elementary students here, Talerico told board members Tuesday night.
As many as 200 to 300 high-schoolers could be doing better, also, she said, a number that’s comparable in middle schools across Mon.
Credit-recovery measures are already in place for failing high school students here, she said.
Even with the pandemic, Talerico said, the intervention among the younger grades has been more boots-on-the-ground, with specialists calling on families at home, even.
While, of course, it could be better, given the coronavirus, she said, it isn’t exactly academic quicksand, either.
“We’re not in a dire situation by any means,” she said.
