Looking back, Joe Statler still can’t help but be amazed at the decided, non-reaction he got that day.
When he took the shotgun to school, that is.
Statler, who represents Monongalia County in the West Virginia House of Delegates, told the story in familiar territory on Tuesday night.
“I got right on the bus,” he recounted to Monongalia County Board of Education members.
The delegate, an outdoors enthusiast, was transporting the weapon to his shop class at Clay-Battelle High School so he could re-do its gun stock.
His classmates, he remembered, didn’t scream or duck under their desks. His teachers didn’t scramble to barricade their classrooms, while having students huddle away from doors and windows.
“Nobody asked if the gun was loaded,” said Statler, who served several terms on Mon’s BOE, including stints as its president, before he left to run for statewide office.
People weren’t even considering that something scary, mean and lethal could occur — because it wasn’t.
As the current members of the board grinned ruefully and shook their heads, Statler gave a world-weary shrug to the present-day dynamic in most of the country’s school buildings, including those in Mon’s district.
Structures now fortified with ballistics glass, weapons detectors and “man-trap” entrances to sequester visitors before granting full admittance — with many fearful parents saying even that’s not enough.
“Do that today,” Statler said, of that long-ago bus ride and walk down the main hallway with something on his shoulder that wasn’t a backpack.
Schools in West Virginia and elsewhere are different places these days.
There’s the specter of gun violence in the hallway, which social scientists and police say is now an inevitability, opposed to an anomaly.
Add that to seismic shifts in the learning landscape, especially in the Mountain State.
Charter schools are moving in, and math and reading scores are still languishing on the lower end, which is a COVID byproduct — or not — depending upon which think-tank you ask.
With the election in November and the Legislative session in January, the BOE asked Statler and others on the ballot to a dinner served up by students staffing the county technical education center food truck.
Dessert was a discussion of all things academic in Mon and the region.
Delegates Evan Hansen and Anitra Hamilton joined Statler.
So did senators Mike Oliverio and Charles Clements.
Diane Market Gaston and Summer Hartley, who are both running for the House, also accepted the invitation.
Eddie Campbell Jr., the school district’s superintendent, asked the lawmakers and those aspiring to be, for focus and creativity when crafting legislation and chasing funding for Mon’s schools.
What used to be, Campbell said, echoing Statler, sure isn’t now.
For example, a job opening for an elementary school teacher that in past years might have generated 60 to 75 applicants — will today only bring in half or less of that, he said.
Campbell, himself a former teacher and principal, said young people today are coming to school with angst and stresses that either weren’t there — or, more likely, weren’t as pronounced — back in his student days at Central Catholic High in Wheeling.
Schools and districts now feed students breakfast and lunch, he said, while offering needed essentials such as clothing and emotional health services.
Don’t get him wrong, he said. He’s happy to be able to provide things — especially if a student is lacking at home.
But there are only so many hours, he said.
And, the superintendent added, only so many state and federal dollars.
“That’s outside of trying to teach a little bit of reading and writing and math at the same time.”
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