West Virginia’s superintendent of schools told lawmakers that communities around the state are having trouble sustaining the schools they love because several factors have come to a head.
School consolidations and closures have occurred around the state this year, Superintendent Michele Blatt said, because of declining enrollment. And she said some schools that were strained financially were able to stay afloat through federal covid relief dollars that are drying up now.
Blatt told members of the House Finance Committee that about two dozen school closures or consolidations had been anticipated statewide this year, although local boards have only approved about half that number so far.
Much of Blatt’s discussion was prompted by a question from Delegate Bob Fehrenbacher, a Republican from Wood County, where VanDevender Middle School and Fairplains Elementary School have been set for closure and merger with other nearby schools.
“What do you foresee? Are there things that can help or mitigate that, or this an unfortunate trend we see continue?” Fehrenbacher asked.
Blatt responded that the trend is likely to go on.
“West Virginia has a declining enrollment. We’ve been able to expand school choice to support our parents, and then we end up in these situations where the other piece of that perfect storm is, we had excess federal funding through covid,” she said.
“And I think those three things together is why we’ve seen this big influx of school consolidations and closures this year. We may have had two or three each year since 2020, but because they had the federal funds they were able to keep those buildings open. And now we’ve reached the point where those funds were expired.”
So the financial pressure is too much for many communities to keep all their schools open, Blatt said.
“With declining enrollment in our state, it’s just not feasible to keep all our facilities open,” she said, saying usage of school buildings across the state is at 51 percent.
“Consolidation is not something anyone wants to do. You don’t want your home school to close. But unfortunately if we’re going to maintain the budgets we currently have and we’re going to work on our certified teacher issue we’re going to see — not the numbers we saw this year, but additional closures over the next few years.”
Some county school boards did not approve the closure of local schools, Blatt said, but those situations are going to result in educator layoffs to keep budgets balanced.
“And so it’s a tough situation right now in several counties.”
The committee came back around to related questions about the financial pressures on local schools.
Uriah Cummings, school financial operations officer for the state Department of Education, described a decrease of about 3,000 students that will affect the school aid formula for the coming fiscal year.
The decrease in enrollment equates to about 300 overall educator losses across the state.
Delegate Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell, wanted to know more about the reasons for the student population loss.
“What happened there. Did people just move out of the state?”
Cummings responded, “It’s a blend of students taking advantage of school choice options, and then again we just have declining enrollment just naturally. We’ve had that even before the school choice options existed. So a blend of those two caused that enrollment to decrease.”