ROANE COUNTY, W.Va.— Roane County Board of Education decided Thursday night to look at other options before they consider consolidating or closing two of their elementary schools.
Richard Duncan, Roane County Schools superintendent, said that the board wanted to keep consolidation for the last resort if nothing else helps.
“The board felt strongly that we should not consider any closures or consolidations at this time, use that as a last resort only, and try to look for additional things we can look do within the schools and in the system to cut down on costs, to realign staff, to find other ways to meet those funding other than actually closing a school,” Duncan said.
He also said that the plans to consolidate Geary and Walton elementary/middle schools were brought up as an option to help combat the county’s declined population.
“We’ve just seen such a loss of students in the last x years, you can go back 14 years, 30 years,” Duncan said. “Roane County has just lost population every year, and our student enrollment has dropped so much we’re just not getting enough in funding from the School Aid Formulating Board to be able to operate everything that we have.”
The School Aid Formula gives the schools money, based on the number of kids that one school has.
Senator Mike Stuart, who is against school consolidation, said that the school aid formula system is broken.
“I think the school aid formula is broken, I don’t think it needs tweaked it’s broken and let me give you can example, when East Bank Middle gets shut down and we move those kids to another school, Kanawha County is going to continue getting dollars for East Bank Middle as a warehouse school, that’s a problem,” Stuart said on Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval on Friday.
And he said that people want to blame the Hope Scholarship, charter schools and homeschool students because public schools hasn’t been cutting it academically recently.
Stuart also said when school boards vote to consolidate schools, they are ultimately hurting the communities and the students.
“And we break communities, and we harm our students by putting them on school buses that have to go across the county for 45, 50 minutes, an hour or even more,” Stuart said.
He also said that he thinks the goal should be not consolidating the bigger schools but focusing on having the smallest schools in the nation because of kids’ attention spans and the lack of focus on the students.
And at Thursday’s meeting, the board decided to put together a committee that will look into other options. One of those options is to share staff among the schools. Duncan says that if they do decide to do something like that it wouldn’t go into effect until the 2025-2026 school year.
“The way that our teacher contracts run, they all run through June 30th, so we really can’t make any changes in the middle of the year we would be studying for next year,” Duncan said. “Again, that’s just a reflection of enrollment, we got two schools that are smaller than the other three. Being able to staff those schools appropriately has become more challenging.”