The Kanawha County Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday evening to close Midland Trail Elementary School.
Tuesday’s vote came after the final public hearing regarding a school consolidation plan that Superintendent Tom Williams released in early September due to budget cuts that stem from years of declining population and enrollment in the county. The plans included East Bank Middle School consolidating with Dupont Middle School, McKinley Middle School in St. Albans consolidating with Hayes Middle School, and four eastern Kanawha County elementary schools consolidating into one, new school.
The plan had Belle Elementary, Mary Ingles Elementary, Malden Elementary and Midland Trail Elementary School merging into a new facility at the site of the old Dupont Junior High School if the School Building Authority provides the funding. If funding is provided, the building would be expected to be completed in the fall of 2028.
Tina Randolph, a teacher at Midland Trail Elementary, says this school means a lot to her and the community.
“I’ve seen our school go through many ups and downs, and we finally have some of the top (test) scores in the county and we are a family,” Randolph said. “I know things are all about money, but sometimes it’s a lot more. Even though I know it’s the inevitable, it’s still heartbreaking for not only the staff and the towns, but also the students more above anything.”
Randolph also says she would have liked to see more options presented to the community before the board made a deciding vote.
“I wish they (the board) would have crunched some numbers and tried to pull some from other areas, maybe consolidate to two schools instead of one,” Randolph said. “There’s always got to be a plan B, and I don’t think anybody presented a plan B to the communities at all. It was just this and that’s it.”
Some of the main topics brought up in each of the four public hearings were the number of children in the area with autism, and the worry that there will be only one resource room and one counselor in a potential new school from what was shown in building renderings. Williams answered the question Tuesday evening, saying the renderings were not final, and whatever the demands were from a student standpoint, the county would appropriately meet those needs.
Randolph says a lot of the students in the county also have trauma and are in need of counselors to talk to.
“These kids come from very poverty-stricken areas. A lot of grandparents raise these kids and there’s a lot of drug families, and one school counselor isn’t going to cut it for that many kids,” Randolph said. “They (the board) says, ‘the levy, the levy,’ well, there’s no guarantee there’s going to be a levy, especially closing this many schools, these people aren’t going to vote for it up here anymore.”
One of the nearly 20 public speakers from the Midland Trail community asked the question to the board, saying, “why us,” talking about the upper Kanawha Valley feeling the bulk of the effects from recent consolidation plans.
Randolph says her area deserves fair treatment.
“The community on this end of the valley, we deserve everything that everybody else does, but you’re taking so much at one time. I don’t know how they expect these kids to recover,” Randolph said.
Board member Kate White says she understands why the citizens in eastern Kanawha County are feeling the amount of frustration they are.
“I know that this feels like we have focused on one area, and I understand that and I feel that. I get it,” White said after the meeting. “We are feeling this across the county. There have been consolidations and other areas of the county are feeling it as well.”
White says she appreciates the passion she saw and wants that to continue through the difficult process.
“I want them to be involved in what this looks like moving forward, to be engaged, to continue speaking up and showing up like they have because it’s important,” White said. “Each area of Kanawha County is very different, and we need to make sure that we’re meeting the needs as best we can.”
White, who was emotional in multiple meetings addressing the audience, says the board sees the hurt in the communities.
“It’s not about me, it’s about these communities and the parents and the teachers, and it’s been very hard on them,” White said after the meeting while fighting tears.
White also said multiple times over the past three weeks, that she believes community schools are the best learning environments for young children, but the state funding formula makes it challenging to keep the schools opening when counties lose students.
“As a state, we’ve got to figure out how to stop losing people, and we’ve got to figure out how to support our community schools. It’s the only way, economically, we’re ever going to grow and thrive, is to get educated kids and have jobs and opportunities available for them,” White said.
In the public hearing for both Malden Elementary and Midland Trail Elementary, Williams told the audience that the board wants to make sure the small communities do not get lost in a new, large school. Williams referred to the new Clendenin Elementary School and how the architects of the building found a way to honor the once-popular oil and gas industry in the town by incorporating oil derricks into the design of the pillars.
Williams also mentioned how, when Stonewall Jackson High School and Charleston High School consolidated into Capital High School in 1989, the school included trophy cases from each respective former school. Williams suggested that architects could find a way to do similar things at the potential new elementary school.
Despite concerns from citizens about having their children in a larger environment, White says a large, state-of-the-art facility will have its benefits in child development.
“I think there’s a ton of resources that can be concentrated in a school that has more people,” White said. “There can be robotics, there can be extracurricular activities and things that might just not be possible in a small school where there’s only so many staff (members), so I think there are some really exciting things.”
White also says she appreciates the feedback that was given to keep the communities alive in a new school.
“I really appreciate all the comments that folks had made about trying to keep the values of these small, community schools incorporated into this new one,” White said. “I really hope that, if the funding is approved and this all goes through, that people will continue to be vocal about how to keep our communities involved in this school, even if it will be a little bit bigger.”
The board expects to find out if the SBA will approve the funding of the building or not by mid-December.