Enrollment, School Safety Among Reports Made To State Board Of Education

Enrollment in West Virginia’s public schools continues to decline. 

Public school enrollment this fall has declined 2.52% from the previous year according to Superintendent Michele Blatt. She told the West Virginia Board of Education Wednesday the state’s declining population as a whole is affecting public schools.

“Fifty-three of our 55 districts did decrease in enrollment this past year, with only Tyler, which is here with us today, and Doddridge having an increase in enrollment,” she said.

According to the data, public school enrollment has decreased by nearly 16,000 students since the 2021-2022 school year.

Blatt said that despite those numbers, more than 98% of the state’s students are served in some form by public schools.

“There’s a chart on there as well that shows the headcount in our county schools, our public charter schools, our schools for diversion and transition, and also for our schools for the deaf and blind,” she said. “We also have numbers in there of our non public school students, for our private and parochial schools, as well as our home school students. And also looking at the number of Hope Scholarship students that we serve in the public schools, because, you know, those students can apply and pay tuition to come into the school.”

Micah Whitlow, director of the Office of School Facilities for the West Virginia Department of Education (DoE), discussed the procedures for county boards to enact school closures and consolidations. Such reductions have increased in frequency in recent years due to declining population in the state and declining enrollment in schools.

“These things aren’t done on a whim or just woke up one day thinking about this,” he said. “There’s been a lot of thought process into the reasons. Some of them are staff shortages, finances, deteriorating facilities, or some of them, all those together. They’re making these decisions on real problems.”

School Safety and Security Report

Whitlow also presented the state’s annual school safety and security report, in which schools collectively asked for $250 million to address security upgrades. That number remains virtually unchanged from the 2024 report.

Board member Gregory F. Wooten asked why there is such a discrepancy between what is requested compared to the roughly $40 million schools ultimately spent in 2024. Whitlow told the board the number is high because schools’ safety needs are broad, from safety officers to cameras.

“There’s also some things in here that we’ve identified, one of them being like security cameras. [The] Legislature in the past year has asked, ‘What would it cost to put security cameras in all the schools?’” he said. “Some of these numbers include things that the legislator has asked numbers for. So it kind of has a few different levels of requests there. That’s kind of the difference in the two numbers. One is kind of a, I don’t want to say wish list, but it’s what they’re requesting.”

For the second year in a row, safe school entries are the state’s top security priority. Requests for safe entries that isolate people entering the building into a vestibule – also known as “man-traps” – represented more than $50 million, the bulk of requested school safety funds.

There are still 232 schools that still need safe entries, down from 272 last year.

The second safety priority, representing $30 million of all requests, were prevention and resource officers.

Positive Notes

The meeting started on a positive note, with the board recognizing the state’s Blue Ribbon School nominees. Although the Blue Ribbon School program was eliminated at the federal level, the WVBE recognized the excellence that Neale Elementary School in Wood County and Steenrod Elementary School in Ohio County achieved.

The DoE also highlighted the recent student culinary challenge at Oglebay Resort in Wheeling. For the second year in a row, a production crew from Netflix’s “Baking Impossible” show – after which the state’s culinary challenge is modeled – were on site.

Blatt said it was important that the state’s educational leaders continue to highlight successes.

“We’ve seen that today with our ‘not’ Blue Ribbon School nominees, along with our students that were performing in the culinary challenge,” she said. “I think that was one thing that really hit home when meeting and talking with the Netflix staff. They’re like, ‘We had no idea that things like this occurred in West Virginia. This is something that we’ve not seen in any other state, and you all need to do a better job of telling your story.’”