Cabell County Board of Education Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Cabell Parks, Libraries Funding Cut After High Court Decision

Parks and libraries in Cabell County can now have their budgets cut dramatically after a decision from the state supreme court.

Last summer, the Cabell County Board of Education announced plans to cut the funding the county parks and libraries receive from the Board of Education Excess Levy by $2 million.

This decision came from a unanimous vote from the county board.

Lawsuits eventually made it to the state Supreme Court of Appeals. The high court issued a decision Thursday in favor of the board of education.

The library system said losing $1.5 million from a $4 million budget would be catastrophic. The parks commission said losing a half million from its budget would require looking at cutting park offerings and free events.

In 1967, the state legislature added funding for the Cabell County Public Library System onto the school levy. In 1983, they added funding for the Greater Huntington Parks and Recreation District to that same levy.

A Cabell County School Board representative said in August that the end of COVID-19 funding along with declining enrollment and rising costs made the school board prioritize levy money for the students.

The education excess levy is up for election every five years. It will come before voters in the May primary election this year.

Cabell County School Board Agrees To Implement Freedom Of Religion Training For Staff

The Cabell County Board of Education has settled a lawsuit in an out-of-court agreement with four families who sued over violations of religious freedom.

In February 2022 two teachers escorted their entire homeroom classes to a sermon by revivalist Nic Walker at the school. They later denied requests by some students to leave. The event was hosted by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and attendance was supposed to be on a voluntary basis.

In a video recorded by one of the students who was forced to attend the sermon, Walker preached about being punished by God, the importance of meeting God before you die, and asked students to know Jesus.

“You will sit there in that place, apart from God,” Walker said in the video. “And you will remember this service, you’ll remember this moment, you’ll remember this opportunity, where you had this chance, you had to get right. And you’ll be tormented with this memory. Over and over, and over, and over, and it never ends, like it’s eternity.”

The Cabell County Board of Education agreed to make significant changes in policy that would prevent future First Amendment violations. Subsequently the board announced that it will be mandating religious freedom training for staff. The school also implemented stronger specifications in its policy.

“The Board of Education has adopted an additional policy which provides for further training to board of education employees to remind them that the board of education and its employees must remain neutral as it pertains to issues of religion, prayer and religious worship. The board of education has implemented the foregoing policy to safeguard against the occurrence of similar instances in the future,” Ashley Stephens from the Cabell County Schools said in an emailed statement.

The families were represented by the nonprofit organization the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Attorney Patrick Elliot represented the families in the suit. He said that while the school had written policies in place, the school system had a widespread practice of allowing these types of things to happen. This was not the first time a religious event had taken place at the school.

“I think the good news is, you know, because of how egregious this was, I think people paid attention, and said we can’t allow this in our school,” Elliot said. “I think that was a huge benefit to trying to stop it before it was going into all schools in the state.”

He said he believes that this new training paired with the schools already sufficient written policies will protect this from happening again.

“So the way to do that is obviously to make sure that all employees are aware of legally what is required of them when they’re working in their role. And so they can’t, you know, kind of get out of that by saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t know’ or ‘it wasn’t clear to me what the school’s policies were’,”

The district’s insurers paid nearly $175,000 in the lawsuit for the plaintiffs attorney fees and $4 to the families. The Freedom From Religion Foundation gave each student plaintiff a $2,000 scholarship.

Cabell Levy Funding Battle Threatens Library, Parks Systems

The Cabell Board of Education recently voted to take a combined $2 million from the Parks and Library systems in connection with the excess levy. Voters will say yea or nay in the May 2024 election.

Every five years for decades, Cabell County voters have passed a Cabell Board of Education Excess Levy to fund school district operations. In 1967, the state legislature added funding for the Cabell County Public Library System onto the School levy. In 1983, they added funding for the Greater Huntington Parks and Recreation District to that same levy.

The Cabell Board of Education recently voted to take a combined $2 million from the Parks and Library systems in connection with the excess levy. Voters will say yea or nay in the May 2024 election.

Cabell Schools Superintendent Ryan Saxe said the end of pandemic funding, declining enrollment and rising inflation forced the district to prioritize that all levy funding go to students and classrooms.

“Since 2015, I believe we’ve lost close to 1500 students,” Saxe said. “We cut almost $4.5 million dollars out of our operating budget this past year. We had to reduce staff by about 80 positions. The same thing is going to happen this coming school year. It’s very difficult to make sweeping changes because our buses still have to go down the same roads, it’s going to still cost us the same amount to fuel that bus, we’re going to still probably have to have as many cooks in our kitchens.”

Executive Director of the Cabell County Public Library system Breana Bowen said losing $1.5 million from a $4 million annual budget will be catastrophic.

“We’re talking about potential layoffs or not hiring staff, branch closures, shortening of hours,” Bowen said. “Across the board, there’ll be mass changes for our library system, not in a good way.”

Greater Huntington Parks and Recreation District Executive Director Kathy McKenna said losing the $500,000 they’ve received every year for 40 years means taking a hard look at the extensive park system operations, maintenance and free public events.

“We maintain a lot of grass, maybe we don’t cut certain areas as often as we do,” McKenna said. “We bring on a whole team of seasonal employees for the summer months that help us, that’ll be something that we’ll have to take a hard look at. Our facilities might not look as well as we would like them to look. We do a lot of events for free. I would hate to see any of those things go away. So it may be that we have to implement fees for those events and not continue to offer those free to the public.”

Saxe said the school district has a constitutional mandate to provide a thorough and efficient school system for its students. He says any obligation to the library and parks system’s legislative inclusion in the levy was removed by a 2013 Supreme Court of Appeals ruling in a Kanawha County Library case.

“The Supreme Court ruled that those acts requiring 18 different counties to fund their libraries out of their levies were unconstitutional,” Saxe said. “That is why we believe that these acts will not hold us to being required to fund them through our excess levy.”

Bowen said that the Kanawha Library System ruling did not include Cabell and Lincoln Counties, which fall under a different legislative funding formula.

“Ours comes directly from an excess levy, so it comes from voters’ money,” Bowen said. “We’re saying we have legislation that currently says right now that we are entitled to that money.”

McKenna said any Library funding ruling has nothing to do with the Parks District being legislatively included in the excess levy.

“That hasn’t been challenged yet,’ McKenna said. “It hasn’t been challenged as far as what is on the books as law for Cabell County.”

Mckenna and Bowen said there’s no room in the Cabell County levying cap for them to propose their own levies. The two entities are jointly filing a lawsuit against the Board of Education to keep the current levy funding intact.

Saxe said rising costs for school security, for their own libraries and playgrounds, for vocational education, and athletic programs demand the levy cuts, not to mention teacher salaries.

“Cabell County Schools is the third highest paying school district for starting teacher salaries,” he said. “This excess levy includes the funding to make sure that that continues.”

Bowen said the Cabell County Public Library system is a statewide consortium leader and there will be ripple effects on this issue’s resolution.

“If we’re taken down and we’re not able to do those things anymore, it’s not just us that’s going to suffer. It’ll be the state,” she said.

Superintendent Saxe said he could not comment on the litigation at this time.

Families Sue W.Va. School District Over Christian Assembly

A group of parents and students are suing a West Virginia school district for allowing an evangelical preacher to hold a religious revival assembly during the school day earlier this month that some students were required to attend.

The suit, filed in a U.S. District Court in West Virginia on Thursday on behalf of families by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, says the Cabell County school system in the southwestern part of the state has a systematic history of disregarding the religious freedom of its students and instituting Christian religious practices.

“For years, school system employees have violated the constitutional rights of students by promoting and advancing the Christian religion, as well as by coercing students into participating in Christian religious activity,” the suit reads. The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a nonprofit that promotes the separation of church and state.

The suit follows a walkout at Huntington High School last week where more than 100 students left their classrooms chanting, “Separate the church and state,” and, “My faith, my choice.”

The Associated Press left a voicemail with Cabell County Schools spokesperson Jedd Flowers requesting comment Thursday afternoon. During an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, Flowers said the assembly was supposed to be voluntary, but two teachers brought their entire classes to the assembly. Flowers called it an honest mistake by the teachers.

“It’s unfortunate that it happened,” Flowers said. “We don’t believe it will ever happen again.”

In a statement on Friday, Cabell County Schools Superintendent Ryan Saxe said the district is investigating the revival event and that he believes some students’ rights have been violated. Saxe is named in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit says that on Feb. 2, two Huntington High School teachers escorted their entire homeroom classes to an assembly hosted by evangelical preacher Nik Walker, who had been leading revivals in the Huntington area in recent weeks.

Students, including a Jewish student who asked to leave but was not permitted to do so, were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, according to the lawsuit. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Students said they were told that those who did not follow the Bible would go to “face eternal torment.”

The mother of the Jewish student who was forced to attend the assembly is among the suit’s plaintiffs, along with the Huntington High student who organized last week’s walkout.

During the assemblies, students and their families were encouraged to join evening services at a nearby church, where they could be baptized.

Nik Walker Ministries also visited another district school, Huntington East Middle School, on Feb. 1 and held a similar assembly.

Saxe said last week that the district honors students’ rights to express their views and respects their right to religious expression but that “forcing religious expression on those with differing beliefs is not acceptable and is not in alignment with district, state, or federal policy and will not be tolerated by my administration or the Board of Education.”

Freedom From Religion Foundation lawyers say that religious services — voluntary or not — should not be allowed during school hours. The foundation alleges it has written several legal complaint letters over the course of years that have been ignored by the school district.

In 2017, the foundation alerted Cabell County Schools about two separate religious assemblies that were held during the school day at Huntington High School, according to the lawsuit.

In 2019, the foundation said it wrote to the district regarding concerns that adults had created and were running religious clubs within Cabell County Schools.

Plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction barring the district from sponsoring any religious worship services, adult-led religious activities during the school day or participating in such events with students during the school day. They are also seeking damages of $1 per plaintiff, plus costs and attorneys’ fees.

Students Walk Out Protesting ‘Mandatory’ Religious Service

About 200 students staged a protest Wednesday outside Huntington High School during their homeroom period over the constitutional protection of the separation of church and state.

The students were protesting a recent evangelical Christian service at the school. The service was supposed to be optional, but some students were forced to attend anyway.

Senior Max Nibert, organized the walkout, saying the service was a violation of his student rights.

“It’s one of the founding tenets of this country that everybody gets to practice what they want to practice,” he said. “And we’re guaranteed a religiously neutral public education experience by the establishment clause.”

He was referring to the clause in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that prohibits the government from establishing a religion.

According to UScourts.gov, the test for an “establishment of religion” is often governed under the three-part test set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971).

Under the “Lemon” test, government can assist religion only if (1) the primary purpose of the assistance is secular, (2) the assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion, and (3) there is no excessive entanglement between church and state.

Nibert said, moving forward, he would like to have some communication with the school administration and the Cabell County Board of Education.

“They haven’t gotten back to anybody. They were invited to a town hall meeting we’re putting on tonight to discuss the issue,” he said. “The board members declined so it doesn’t seem like they’re open to hearing us out and seeing what we want. I would love to see the possible creation of a policy related to what happened just to make sure this kind of thing never happened again.”

Cabell County Schools spokesperson Jedd Flowers was quoted by the Associated Press as saying he “didn’t believe” an incident like this would happen again. West Virginia Public Broadcasting reached out for comment, but did not receive a response.

Explorer Academy Students Exploring New Space

A group of elementary aged students are starting their first full week at a new facility on
Huntington’s east end today. The $15.1 million dollars Explorer Academy is in its second year of existence, but parents and teachers both agree the newly renovated building that will house the experimental learning program will only continue to expand the educational opportunities for their students.

The academy, which uses a new teaching philosophy called expeditionary learning, will now be housed in a fully renovated Beverly Hills Middle School after spending its first year crammed into Geneva Kent Elementary School.

Expeditionary Learning is a unique and new model of learning adopted in Cabell County when its Board of Education chose to consolidate Peyton and Geneva Kent Elementary Schools. In conjunction with the Marshall University Harless Center, the Explorer Academy was the first to take on Expeditionary Learning in the state.

EL as it’s known, is a learning model that veers away from the tradition of students sitting behind desks listening to lectures. Instead, students work on year-long, hands-on projects across grade levels. Special education teacher Jason Dillon said under the Expeditionary Learning Model, teachers are more like moderators than instructors.

“Traditionally speaking classroom teachers were the masters of everything, here we embrace that we’re not the master of any of that,” Dillon said. “But we know masters and we’re going to bring them in and have them work with you. We facilitate professionals coming into our building and just try to coordinate the chaos.”

Brittany Hicks is a third grade teacher at the school. She said aside from just new and innovative learning models, her students are also asked to analyze their learning progression and communicate that with their parents during student-led conferences, even as young as the second grade.

Third grade teacher Brittany Hicks with Carson Elkins.

“I welcome the parents into the room and the students take over,” Hicks said. “They have portfolios where they get all of their high quality work that they’re really proud of, they organize it in binders and have these conferences with their parents and discuss their data, so where they started at the beginning of the year, where they are now with their benchmarks and they talk about what they feel like got them there and what they need to help them get where they want by the end of the year.”

Those different and unique ways of teaching kept Mark Brown and his wife from leaving West Virginia. They both work in Kentucky, but after hearing about the Explorer Academy, decided to keep their son Nathan in the school district. He’s entering the second grade.

“In a traditional school you sit in a class and get lectured to, you take a test and then you go onto the next thing,” Brown said. “But here they’ll work on something and turn in a draft and get it critiqued by the teacher and you learn how to be, agreeable disagree if you need to do that, like most people can’t do now. And then you work on it and turn it back in and do that several times,” Brown said.

450 elementary students will experience that learning style in the renovated facility. Principal Ryan McKenzie said while the first year of the academy in the consolidated space worked, the new school will provide things they didn’t have before like large spaces that allow cross-mingling, creative learning environments that are crucial.

“We have a lot of flexible use spaces here in the building, some studio spaces that we can use, we have a great art room, great music rooms and dedicated science labs, so really great facilities here to work with kids,” McKenzie said.