MetroNews
By Katherine Skeldon
October 22, 2024
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — After a number of counties choose to take the consolidation route, State Senator Mike Stuart is advocating the opposite.
Around two dozen schools in the state are up for proposal to close down within the next few years. Stuart said on 580 Live with Dave Allen Tuesday that these closings should not be happening, rather a plan to undo them should be implemented instead.
“We’ve gone the wrong way on this entire subject, consolidation…We have great teachers in our schools,” said Stuart. “The challenge we have is consolidation, we should be talking deconsolidation.”
Wood County Schools are now one of the districts with the most recent proposal to close down some schools.
In a public hearing Monday night, Wood County Schools administration proposed to consolidate by merging VanDavender Middle School into Hamilton Middle and Jackson Middle School.
The reasoning, like other county school districts, is a decline in student enrollment and not enough funding to keep all of the schools operational.
Wood County Schools Superintendent Christie Wells said Vandevender’s enrollment has dropped from a high of 415 students in the 2017-18 school year, to just 248 students in the start of this school year. She said Hamilton and Jackson middle schools have also seen a drop, but not to the extent which VanDevender has experienced.
In Kanawha County, within the district Stuart serves, there have recently been votes made to close six county schools, including East Bank Middle, McKinley Middle, Mary Ingles Elementary, Belle Elementary, and Malden Elementary schools. A vote was set to be taken by the Kanawha County Board of Education Tuesday night on the final proposed school up for closure, Midland Trail Elementary.
East Bank is set to consolidate with DuPont Middle and McKinley would move to Hayes Middle School. The four elementary schools will merge into one big new school.
Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Tom Williams has stated that the district has lost 5,000 students in a matter of ten years.
There have also been votes made, or at least proposals to close schools in Harrison, Clay among other counties within the next few years as well.
Stuart said school boards aren’t spending enough time considering the impacts the closings will have on the surrounding communities as well as what it will have on the students themselves.
He said this challenge with enrollment is something that could be worked out without consolidations, and each district is telling themselves the same story that in order to address this challenge, a school must close.
“These hearings, these are fake hearings, I’m just telling you, they’re fake hearings,” Stuart said. “You don’t need to have these hearings and they’re going to vote exactly the way they are, these are good people that serve on the school boards, I don’t mean to disparage them, but the result is already written in stone, if this were a football game, the score boards already filled out like at the end of the game before the game even gets started.”
As far as saving money goes, Stuart said he’s always a big proponent of this, but not when it comes to education.
He said districts should be choosing to invest in schools that they already have instead of closing some down, consolidating, and in some cases, building brand new schools.
“I’m fully understanding of the issue of the cost of operating local schools, if we need to spend more we need to spend more, but we need results in the classroom, we’re not getting those,” he said. “We can consolidate down to one school in West Virginia, it’s a bad idea.”
Stuart said certain schools that have been proposed to shut down but haven’t are an example of why deconsolidation needs to happen.
He said in Boone County, it had been proposed to close Van Junior and Senior High School and potentially have them merge with the Scott High School district, but Van’s test scores are through the roof and hitting above average. He said he believes this is because they haven’t consolidated.
Stuart went onto to say that some states that have led the way in consolidations are now changing their minds.
“You know, Florida was one of the first states to talk about consolidation and to do it, Florida was also one of the first states to start talking deconsolidation, and I think if you track test scores that have dropped and dropped and dropped, you match it with consolidation,” he said.
He said low test scores aren’t the only negative example of why consolidation is a bad idea, but also in regards to longer bus rides for students, lower participation in sports and extra-curricular activities due to those extended bus trips, as well as students’ overall mental well-being.
Stuart said he’s going to continue to push deconsolidation, and one of the ways he will start to do that is by requesting that the district he represents across Lincoln, Logan, Boone, and southern Kanawha counties be a pilot program for deconsolidation.
“If you let me have that pilot program, I can guarantee you after a period of time, my schools will far out perform those consolidated schools, I guarantee you,” said Stuart.
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