Counties across West Virginia are making hard decisions about closing schools at the heart of communities, as student enrollment continues to decline.
“We’re looking at kind of a tipping point, you might say, as to the various things that are kind of hitting at public education right now,” state schools Superintendent Michele Blatt said today on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
“We have a declining population overall. We have multiple school choice options, which aren’t a bad thing. I mean, our parents deserve the option to choose the education that they think is best for their children.
“But when you start looking at some of our smaller communities and the businesses that have moved out over several years, then it does become important that we start looking at consolidation of our school systems so we can better meet the needs, really, of the students that we have in the public education system.”
Blatt provided a dire forecast that downward trends in West Virginia school enrollment will likely mean more closure decisions in the near future.
As of October, she said, the state has 241,024 students — down 4,023 from the last school year.
Blatt said there are 629 public schools in West Virginia — down 8 from last school year.
If the trajectory continues, Blatt said at a state board meeting last week, “We’re looking at a possible 26 school closures for this school year due to the enrollment and the funding that we’re facing.”
On “Talkline” today, she said those are some of the largest numbers of closures she’s witnessed over nearly two decades in the West Virginia education system.
In addition to overall population loss, Blatt described factors such as the Hope Scholarship, which provides financial support for families with students choosing to leave the public school system or for kindergarteners who are not going to public school in the first place. And she said federal covid relief dollars that once provided financial support for schools have fallen away.
“It’s the largest number I’m familiar with, and I’ve been here around 17 years,” she said. “But I think what has happened is almost like the perfect storm. You’ve had the declining enrollment, we’ve had the school choice options and we had the covid relief funding that sustained us for the last three years from the federal government.
“And so we’re at a point that we’re starting to see these facilities — some should have closed several years ago but were able to maintain — and with everything on the decline right now it’s time to really make sure we’re targeting our resources for better efficiency.”
Kanawha, the state’s largest county, is planning to consolidate Belle Elementary School, Malden Elementary School, Mary Ingles Elementary School and Midland Trail Elementary School into a new Eastern Kanawha Elementary Center.
Two other schools would be closed and the students would transfer to other existing schools: East Bank Middle Schools would be closed with students going to DuPont Middle School, and McKinley Middle School would be closed with students being absorbed into Hayes Middle School.
A crowd of people in Wetzel County this week expressed sharp views about the proposed consolidation of Paden City and Magnolia high schools into one and also Valley and Hundred high schools into one.
Nicholas County has been going through closure and consolidation hearings for multiple elementary schools.
Gov. Jim Justice, at an administration briefing this week, said the long-term answer for West Virginia to maintain schools is population growth. As he often does, Justice described recent state income tax cuts as a potential incentive to drive population. And he cited several new manufacturing plants around the state as employers that could cause growth over time.
“The best way to deal with this hands down is to have increasing enrollment,” Justice said in response to a question by reporter Steven Allen Adams of the Ogden newspapers.
Naming several recent companies laying root in West Virginia, Justice continued, “That’s where the Berkshire Hathaways and the Nucors and on and on and on and Prime Six and all this stuff that we’ve laid the groundwork — and we hope we’re going to have more and more and more employees and that morphing into more and more and more employees. And, therefore, with employees you usually have younger folks and they have children, and then all of a sudden before you know it we have what we want and that is increased enrollment.”
Justice, who is also a high school girls basketball coach and an advocate for the Communities in Schools program, said “It makes me sick to see a school closed. I don’t like it. I don’t like it a bit in the world.”
Justice, a two-term governor who will be sworn into the U.S. Senate in a few months, said policy options such as changing the school aid formula that largely bases funding on the number of students would be up to the next governor to consider.
“It’s a difficult, difficult problem,” Justice said. “But with all that being said, I don’t want those schools to close. I don’t want any schools to close.”
Roane County Superintendent Richard Duncan, in a written opinion piece for The Charleston Gazette-Mail, agreed that the student population issues in West Virginia are multifaceted. But Duncan said the main issue for policymakers to focus on is whether the school aid formula based on student population should be reformed.
“The true culprit here is rooted in our collective aversion to actually changing how we do things. Population dropped in communities all over West Virginia when we failed to adapt to changing economic conditions throughout the latter half of the last century. In spite of that hard lesson, we continue to offer only small tweaks to the system, instead of taking a critical look at what meaningful changes can prevent the outcomes we’ve seen over and over again,” Duncan wrote.
He concluded that the way the school aid formula is structured “has done more to drive consolidations and closures than any law or policy over the past four decades.”
Duncan advocated, instead, for a more school-based funding system.
“We need to fund schools, not systems, encourage stewardship of local school buildings and empower communities to focus on educating their kids, instead of operating antiquated
systems,” he wrote. “If not, the coming move to ‘consolidate’ counties may only further drive the extinction of local, community schools when county lines no longer limit how many schools a single district can close.”