Call Wednesday just another day at the office — in the unprecedented life of the West Virginia Academy.
Classrooms have been renovated, furnishings are being delivered and work is being completed on the playground, in preparation of the first day of school next month.
What makes it all unprecedented, is that the academy, which is located in a building on Chestnut Ridge Road that WVU once used for research, is Monongalia County’s first-ever charter school.
It’s one of four frontier schools, in fact, that will open their doors — either literally or digitally — for classes this fall for an inaugural first day.
Along with the West Virginia Academy, another brick-and-mortar school in Martinsburg will usher in students in late August when morning bell rings for a new term.
Two others will exist solely online in the new landscape of alternative education in the Mountain State — and in many ways, it’s the school State Aid Formula, and not academics, which is writing the book report.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey didn’t mention charter schools specifically the day before, but he did talk a lot about opportunities and choices.
That narrative threaded through the motion he filed with state Intermediate Court of Appeals concerning the Hope scholarship program.
The Hope scholarship, by law, would have approved families for an outlay of $4,300, which is the amount of that aid formula for public schooling here.
Families could have used that offering to pay for private school tuition, homeschooling and other expenses outside of the public school district in the counties where they live.
More than 3,000 students across the state had already been approved for monies from the measure, which passed the GOP majority state Legislature and signed by Gov. Jim Justice, also a Republican.
Argumentative essays
On July 6 in Kanawha County, however, Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit struck it down, saying the law violated the state’s Constitutional mandate to provide “a thorough and efficient system of free schools” for all.
Free schools, though, that are supplemented both by that formula and education levies, if those tax measures pass at the ballot.
Students who leave the county school district for alternative academics take that state aid money with them.
Two weeks ago in Mon County, that meter was running at nearly $2 million, in a district that had just passed a $145 million operating budget for 2022-23.
The local district is often heralded as one of the more academically successful and financially prosperous in the state — but don’t be dazzled too much, Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said.
That dollar amount was, at time, what the 350 students from the local district now enrolled in the charter were taking with them.
And an all-at-once loss of that amount, he said, still causes pain, no matter how well off a school district with a $145 million budget may appear.
“It’s not like a fund we’re sitting on,” he said. “Every dime has been allocated.”
Morrisey in his filing Tuesday said most families in the Mountain State have to account for every dime.
And maybe those parents, he said, want something other than what’s already out there when it comes to the education of their kids.
The motion for a stay now goes West Virginia’s new Intermediate Court of Appeals — so new, in fact, that it just started working July 1 — which will take up the filing eventually.
In meantime, though, the state attorney general argued, 3,000 students are now in the amber of the court system.
“The lower court’s ruling undermining parents’ freedom to choose how they educate their children is legally wrong and deeply troubling,” Morrisey said.
Too much grading on a curve?
West Virginia Academy President John Treu supports the attorney general’s move, even as his school is escaping the fray.
Enrollment at the academy Wednesday was charting 476, said the president, who is also a WVU accounting professor, and none of the soon-to-be students have been impacted, either way, by the current legal wrangling around the scholarship.
He supports the motion, he said, because of the ideas of affordability and accessibility in a state that doesn’t always offer much of either.
“The Hope scholarship would create opportunities for many families who have only ever had one realistic option,” he said. “The low-income families who cannot afford private school are the ones most harmed — by those who oppose charter schools and Hope scholarships.”
Once all the filings and counter-filings rattle down, though, there’s still a matter of what actually happens, when those four unprecedented schools begin the work of actually educating students.
That’s what most interests Andrew Saultz, who teaches educational leadership at Pacific University in Oregon while studying equity and accountability in public schools and charter schools across the nation.
He’s also been a high school social studies teacher and elected member of a school board.
“I personally don’t buy into charters as being a great thing or a terrible thing, but you do need to have measurements and standards in place,” he said.
“It’s all about accountability.”
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