OK, we say: Stay home.
And you say: Mountaineers.
Stay home.
Mountaineers.
Call the above a new version of the legendary hometown football cheer, amended, for the moment, in response to a huge season-opener Saturday.
However, it only works if you happen to be a Mountaineer — enrolled in Monongalia County Schools.
The district announced that it is canceling classes Friday in anticipation of the next day’s WVU-Penn State football match-up in Morgantown.
Kickoff is noon Saturday at Milan Puskar Stadium for the contest between the two teams that had a legendary gridiron rivalry for decades, before Penn State joined the Big 10 in 1993.
The game is sold out, WVU officials reported earlier.
In Morgantown, Mon Schools deputy superintendent Donna Talerico said, big-time gridiron also means big-time gridlock.
The district made the decision to call school in advance Wednesday afternoon after talking with MECCA and other authorities, the deputy superintendent said.
“Just look at the numbers of people who are going to be pouring in,” she said.
“All the fans, the celebrities. We don’t want our kids on buses for hours and hours, if they don’t have to be.”
In the meantime, she and her colleagues are busying themselves with numbers related to seats in classrooms, opposed to ones in football stadiums.
And right now, the score is tied.
The district is wrapping up the second week of the new academic year the same way it did this time last year for the previous one.
The county is showing 11,222 students enrolled across the district, Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. reported Wednesday . “Again, with no real surprises,” he said.
“We went into last year with 11,200 kids,” the superintendent said.
“So we’re pretty much where we thought we’d be.”
The district talked numbers, which won’t become official until the state’s roll count Oct. 1, during Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting.
Said numbers are locally showing 650 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten and some 1,760 enrolled at Morgantown High — meaning the school on Wilson Avenue once again has the largest enrollment in the state.
“It’s been that way for the past several years,” the superintendent said.
What is different, he said, is the overall academic landscape in the Mountain State, given the rise of charter schools — both brick-and-mortar and virtual — along with an increase of home-schooled students.
“Families have been taking advantage of opportunities with the Hope Scholarship,” he said, referring to the school choice voucher now offered across West Virginia.
All of the above, Campbell said, has contributed to a steady decline — not a gush, but a trickle — of enrollment in Mon’s school buildings over the past five years.
The district has lost 300 students during that span who would have attended public schools here otherwise, he said.
Talerico said there will be fluctuations between now and October, as students continue to register for the fall term.
She expects pre-kindergarten numbers overall to end up at 700, for example, with another 40 or so bound for MHS — making an enrollment there of 1,800 for the year.
Because the Goshen Road attendance area of Ridgedale Elementary is growing, the school is too, she said.
There are 500 students in pre-kindergarten through 5th grade currently enrolled at Ridgedale, the deputy superintendent reports.
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