What’s good for St. Francis Central School and Trinity Christian School — isn’t so much for Monongalia County Schools.
Enrollment in the district is 500 students down from this time last year, Mon Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. told Board of Education members Tuesday evening.
Which means enrollment is up at St. Francis and Trinity.
That’s because the above private schools offer 5-day-a-week, in-person classes and extended daycare services, the superintendent said.
Families have either transferred their children to the schools or opted to not go at all, choosing to home-school, instead.
The demarcation line, he said, bisects the elementary grades versus middle school and high school.
“Nearly all the 500 are elementary students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade,” Campbell said.
“And we saw a lot of parents electing not to enroll their kids in pre-K,” he said, because of concerns over COVID-19.
Some 200 of those students are now being home-schooled, in fact, he said.
With the coronavirus casting tenacious shadows over the Mountain State, Campbell said Mon’s school district is going to hold to its hybrid attendance model of remote learning and limited face-to-face attendance for now.
Especially during the second nine-week calendar that contains breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas, he said.
Especially with dire predictions of a second, more infectious wave of the virus, he said.
Campbell said those holidays are concerning, in that they are built around families simply getting together, doing what families do.
Any such gatherings, he said, now carry the potential of morphing into super-spreader events.
“There’s a feeling West Virginia hasn’t seen the peak yet,” he said.
“We don’t want to take a chance of bringing large numbers of students back to school.”
Not that it hasn’t been met with sacrifice and angst, he said — both for students and their parents.
“This is really hard for our parents to have to work through this,” Campbell said.
“Just all the patience and tolerance our community has had through the first nine weeks has to be commended.”
No grading on a curve
In the meantime, the district is readying in earnest to work through the 371-page application presented for approval by West Virginia Academy Ltd., a proposed charter school that could be Mon’s first and West Virginia’s first.
Under statute, local school districts have the authority to approve charter applications or send them back, based on any deficiencies that may be present in the document.
There’s that, plus the core question that could be a subjective headache for any district tasked with a review: What can a charter school do — that the public schools in your district aren’t already doing?
It’s in the state code, Campbell said.
Mon’s district will weigh the application of West Virginia Academy Ltd. against 25 or 30 criteria in the code, the superintendent said, applying red ink to each one not fully addressed.
In a public forum last week, John Treu, a WVU accounting professor and chairman of the proposed charter’s board, said West Virginia Academy Ltd. would board year-round learning in its International Baccalaureate curriculum.
And its teachers, he said, would enjoy a higher salary than the public district coming in — with the enticement of merit-based raises thereafter.
Mon Schools, meanwhile, will give its final word no later than Nov. 30, after allowing West Virginia Academy Ltd. to address any deemed deficiencies in its application during the review.
Treu and other board members met with Mon Schools last week in addition to the public forum.
Both sessions were transcribed and will be available to the public today at the district website: boe.mono.k12.wv.us/.
The review process, though, prompted Mon BOE member Ron Lytle to wonder aloud about its particulars, while using a school analogy.
If the application by West Virginia Academy Ltd. is a term paper, or take-home test, of sorts, and Mon Schools wields a red pen — and then sends the document back for resubmission — what’s left for Mon Schools to decide?
Plenty, Campbell said.
Because it then becomes a matter of how the Academy board would react to such mark-ups, Campbell said.
The district, the superintendent said, is obligated by law to note deficiencies, if any.
After that, though, it’s all up to West Virginia Academy Ltd., he said.
“It’s not our responsibility as a board of education to tell them how to ‘fix’ their deficiencies.”
