A total of 28% of Monongalia County’s high school seniors qualified for West Virginia’s coveted Promise Scholarship last year, giving Mon’s public district tops in the state.
The district also outpaced the state in proficiency scores in reading and math during that same time frame.
“We’re pretty proud of that,” said Courtney Crawford, who directs accountability and assessment standards for the district, “but we know we still have work to do.”
Call that a long-standing mantra — “We know we still have work to do” — among teachers and administrators across the state’s 55 public school districts.
And that was even before the pandemic, state Board of Education Paul Hardesty said earlier this week in Charleston.
“Public education is important for our children, our communities and our state, and it needs to be a beacon of success locally and nationally,” he said, after results of the Balanced Scorecard for state schools was released.
West Virginia’s Department of Education annually compiles the data as a kind of running report card for progress and proficiency.
“Our education system must feed West Virginia’s economic engine with a productive and vibrant workforce,” the board president continued. “That means we must ensure our students and schools are meeting and exceeding academic expectations.”
Save for Mon Schools and a handful of other districts, that doesn’t always happen here.
And that’s because not all counties, and their districts, were created equal in the Mountain State.
Mon is home to West Virginia University and residents who traditionally support education levies at the polls. The most recent one is expected to generate an additional $30 million for school coffers.
That puts the local district in marked contrast to, say, the southern coalfields, or other districts where levies traditionally fail.
Mon Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. knows all about that.
He previously headed Tucker County’s district, which has never had an excess levy for education.
“We came close one time,” he said, during his seven-year tenure there. “It didn’t happen.”
In Mon, that levy supports teacher salaries and helps fund Advanced Placement courses and other unique offerings on the schedule, such as classes in conversational Mandarin.
David Roach, the newly named state schools superintendent who was appointed after Clayton Burch left over the summer to head the state Schools for the Deaf and Blind in Romney, said districts are inching forward — one lesson plan, one test assessment at a time.
Forty-five of those 55 districts in the state showed improvement in those aforementioned math and reading scores, he said.
And 53 out of 55 notched higher marks in math.
Thirty-three of 34 schools previously under oversight from the state department in the months leading up to the pandemic have also come off the list, Roach reported.
“We will aggressively target academic progress and achievement as a top priority,” he said.
Mon’s high school seniors, also outperformed the state and U.S. in overall SAT scores, Crawford said, with 32% meeting both reading and math benchmarks, opposed to 17% for their counterparts across West and 28% among other test-takers across the nation.
Visit https://wveis.k12.wv.us/essa/dashboard.html for the complete Mountain State assessment.
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