When the dollars dry up – the people go with them.
That was the gist of the cautionary tale the Monongalia County Board of Education delivered area lawmakers in advance of the opening to next month’s 2023 Legislative session in Charleston.
Mon Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. and BOE members were referring to the stop-gap American Rescue Plan dollars, a federal allotment doled out nationally to school systems and other entities at the height of the pandemic two years ago.
Statewide, West Virginia received more than $250 million in the offering. Mon’s school district used its share to fund both summer programming and the hiring of 40 part-time academic “interventionists” for elementary schools.
The new hires, many of whom are retired teachers, have a full-time commitment to their part-time employment that couldn’t be more critical in the time of COVID, post-contagion or otherwise, as the district has said.
It’s their job to help K-2 students simply catch up and get to where they need to be after being sequestered out of their classrooms, and under the face-to-face interaction with their teachers, due to remote learning after Gov. Jim Justice ordered all schools shuttered in March 2020.
Right now, the superintendent and board members said, there’s a lot of catching up – to the catching up – to do.
Students in West Virginia are lagging in math and reading proficiency scores, as evidenced by recent national assessments. So are their counterparts across the country.
Sens. Mike Caputo and Michael Oliverio came out for the evening, as did Sen. Charles Clements, who will serve as vice chair of the Education Committee this coming session.
They were joined by delegates Evan Hansen, Danielle Walker and Joe Statler, who served several terms on Mon’s BOE before seeking state office.
Several ideas were fronted and several issues were addressed in the 90-minute session.
Topics included the shadow cast by burgeoning charter schools over West Virginia’s 55 public districts and how the Hope scholarship – which gives state dollars to qualifying families wishing to seek private education for their children could impact it all.
There was that, and the current bus driver shortage in the county, which has daily been forcing the cancellation of some routes across the district.
“We can’t educate them if we can’t get them to school,” BOE member Mike Kelly said.
The lawmakers pledged to key the fiscal focus on public schools – which Sen. Caputo giving a cautionary tale of his own, as more and more charter schools begin educating students in north-central West Virginia and elsewhere.
That’s because each time a public school student leaves to enroll in a charter school, he takes state aid dollars with him. Right now, that’s $4,300 per student, although that amount can vary from year to year based on enrollment.
Mon’s district over the summer lost $2 million from students leaving to enroll in the West Virginia Academy, the state’s first charter school, which has a brick-and-mortar building in Morgantown.
Charter schools, Caputo said, “are going to be a disaster” for the Mountain State because of the above.
Another slow-motion disaster is taking place every time a school administrator or parent tries to log on to WVEIS, the West Virginia Education Information System, Campbell and board members said.
WVEIS is supposed to be a storehouse of reports and other data on student progress, bullying incidents and like, but it’s constantly bogged down, Campbell said.
Many of those files and reports, he said, are now apparently irretrievable.
Campbell, who is the parent of a child in the district, found that when he tried to log on – not as a superintendent, but as a dad.
He came to Mon from Tucker County, where he headed the school system there, and as it turns out, WVEIS, in effect, didn’t make the move with him.
Addresses, login information and other particulars in the WVEIS storehouse were all for his old county – and not his new one.
“Think of how many thousands of parents that’s happened to,” he said.
The antiquated system, he said, needs a serious upgrade. The Vice Chair of Education agreed.
“Right now, we have computers in Charleston that can’t ‘talk’ to one another,” he said.
Changing that, he said, is a priority.
TWEET@DominionPostWV
