Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, has raised concerns that Hope Scholarship funds are being spent in public schools in other states.
Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, raised concerns at the May meeting of the West Virginia Board of Education that Hope Scholarship funds were being spent in public schools in other states.
The Hope Scholarship allows K-12 students to receive state funds that can be used for tuition at private schools, homeschool curriculum, and other qualifying expenses.
On Wednesday, Lee again raised the issue, claiming 29 out-of-state schools are receiving West Virginia taxpayer dollars including a public school in Steubenville, Ohio.
“At the end of the fiscal year I’ll have more information about where everything goes, but this is alarming to me,” Lee said. “Hopefully we can keep taxpayer dollars in West Virginia for our kids.”
Lee said he received the information from the Hope Scholarship Division of the state Treasurer’s office.
In an email to WVPB, the state Treasurer’s office said spending Hope Scholarship funds in out-of-state school systems is permissible and consistent with the “money follows the student” intent behind the Hope Scholarship.
“It should also be noted that West Virginia public schools charge tuition to Hope Scholarship students attending classes or participating in extracurricular activities,” the email said. “Like West Virginia, most other states require public schools to charge tuition to any out-of-state students wishing to access their curriculum or other services.”
On Thursday, Lee told WVPB he understands that the out of state spending is permissible, “but I still question why West Virginia taxpayer dollars are going to fund schools out of state of West Virginia.”
“We believe that parents have the right to homeschool or private school their children,” he said. “But our constitution provides for a thorough and free public education and they choose not to accept that, and I don’t think taxpayer dollars should be used to fund that.”
School Closures
The West Virginia Board of Education also approved the closure of three elementary schools in Kanawha County during its Wednesday meeting.
Marmet Elementary School, Grandview Elementary School and George C. Weimer Elementary School were all approved for closure at the end of the 2023-2024 school year and will be consolidated with existing local elementary schools.
These are the first school closures to be approved by the state board since Senate Bill 51 went into effect on June 5. The new law requires impact statements including transportation time of the affected students be written in certain instances of school closing or consolidation.
The application for the closure of allthreeschools carried the following impact statement:
The consolidation of these schools will enable Kanawha County Schools to operate their schools more efficiently.
The Kanawha County Board of Education voted to approve the closures in May, before the law went into effect.
A school guidance counselor from Belle has sued the Kanawha County Board of Education and Superintendent Thomas F. Williams alleging the defendants violated her first amendment rights.
Chelena McCoy filed a complaint through her attorney in Kanawha Circuit Court asking for injunctive relief and damages for violation of her first amendment rights along with her protection from retaliatory and discriminatory actions under the West Virginia Whistleblower law.
The complaint stems from temporary policy changes around the West Virginia General Summative Assessment (WVGSA), also known as annual standardized tests. The U.S. Department of Education requires a 95 percent test participation rate from students.
In 2020, these tests were canceled due to the pandemic. In 2021, the school system again required the test and the USDOE allowed a waiver from the 95 percent participation rate and instructed the county to offer various safe testing options for students.
According to the complaint, parents of students who chose to have their students learn remotely during the pandemic became concerned about sending their students into the school for the test, but they had not been informed of their rights to ask for safe testing alternatives.
McCoy asked to notify these parents of their options, but according to the lawsuit “Danielle Burke, Belle’s Principal, and Jon Duffy, Director of Counseling and Testing informed McCoy that she could not do so. Duffy said it was their policy not to preemptively share the availability of testing alternatives for fear it could lower test participation rates, not just that year, but also in future years when accountability standards are reinstated.”
McCoy then reached out to the news media to get the information out. WCHS-TV ran a story on the issue on April 19, 2021 with “interviews with McCoy and Duffy. In the story, Duffy conceded that children were not required to take the test.”
On April 27, 2021, McCoy received a formal letter of reprimand for allegedly providing inaccurate information to the news media.
According to the lawsuit, “McCoy was later informed by the Board that the letter of reprimand would go into the Board’s personnel file, the letter would follow her within and outside the Kanawha County Schools, including school systems in other states, and that McCoy could face further disciplinary action if there were future infractions.
“The letter of reprimand was also requested by both licensing agencies for school counselors, the West Virginia Department of Education and the National Board of Certified Counselors. Both licensing agencies also requested that McCoy explain in writing her shortcomings and failures as it related to the receipt of the reprimand received by Kanawha County Schools.”
In a brief email, Williams declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Through her attorney Hoyt Glazer, McCoy issued the following statement:
“My case is about the public’s right to complete and truthful information and the right of teachers and school counselors to be honest; it is about a school counselor’s ethical obligation to protect the public when a school board opts to place it’s narrow self-interest above the public welfare by suppressing information that the public has a right to know; it is about the right of public employees to be free from harassment, abuse, and retaliation for sharing factual information that the board may deem unflattering or harmful to them; and it is about basic democratic principles such as free speech and the government’s obligation to serve the people and not itself.”
West Virginia has not been immune to a countrywide shortage of certified bus drivers to provide transportation for students. The problem and its solution lies with each county and its school system.
West Virginia has not been immune to a countrywide shortage of certified bus drivers to provide transportation for students. The problem and its solution lies with each county and its school system.
David Barber is the director of transportation for the West Virginia Department of Education. He said the state averages around 4,000 bus drivers, but only has just more than 3,700 currently working.
“There’s a lot of factors and there is no true fix for this,” Barber said. “We’ve had a lot of retirements over the last few years. Unfortunately, we lost some bus operators and different employees to COVID.”
As with other industries, COVID-19 lockdowns caused many veteran workers to reassess their situation, and take retirement earlier than planned.
Barber said there’s not much the state Department of Education can do, but points towards a statewide effort to bring retired drivers, as well as drivers licensed in other states, to West Virginia.
“We’ve had some retired bus operators that want to come back to work, and so we’ve modified our training guidelines to allow that without them having to go through an entire training program,” he said. “We didn’t modify anything to compromise the safety of the training or anything.”
However, at the November meeting of the West Virginia Board of Education, Barber reported that the statewide waiver of Policy 4336 has so far only led to 16 bus drivers coming out of retirement or transferring their out of state certification. Ultimately, Barber said it’s up to each county to recruit, train and hire their own drivers.
Brette Fraley is the executive director of transportation for Kanawha County Schools, the state’s largest school system with more than 22,000 students. He said part of the issue in his area is the county faces competition from other industries when replacing retiring drivers.
“What they call the missing piece is those folks that are older getting ready to retire and how to replace those folks,” Fraley said. “Here in the county, if you’re a bus driver you have an opportunity to become a truck driver. You move from a 200-day employee to 261-day employee. You start to gain vacation, you get an increase in pay, and more flexibility. We lose a lot of our drivers within the county, and then we lose drivers to competitors because there’s more money available.”
Fraley said it’s not just an issue in transportation, but in education and support staff compensation more broadly. With unemployment at a historic low, things are getting competitive.
“Going forward, we have to be competitive to keep those employees, not just bus drivers, our electricians or plumbers, or teachers or cooks or custodians,” Fraley said. “It takes everybody to get these kids to school, and keep them in school.”
Fraley said his system has about 30 vacancies right now, but more than 20 people are already in training. He also said driver shortages are nothing new and the county’s transportation department works to reduce interruptions as much as possible.
“Most of our drivers are working hard together and working as a team, sharing responsibility,” Fraley said. “Not only that, they’re sharing responsibility between terminals and helping each other out, getting the kids where they need to be on a timely basis, covering all their field trips.”
Eddie Campbell is Monongalia County’s superintendent of schools. With about 11,500 students, the Monongalia school district is roughly half of Kanawha’s size, but Campbell said transportation logistics are difficult regardless of a system’s size.
“I’ve been a superintendent now for 12 years,” Campbell said. “In my previous county, when I was in Tucker County, a much smaller system, we only had 12 drivers. But you still dealt with the issue of personnel and the substitute piece of it. Bus driving is difficult, it’s a hard job.”
According to Campbell, the Monongalia County initially had to cancel bus services for some extracurriculars. More recently, however, he said the county has had to cancel regular routes about a dozen times this school year. Each time, that burden falls to parents to get their students to activities or to school itself.
Campbell said Monongalia’s biggest issue right now is its substitute pool, but that issue itself is a symptom of the bus driver shortage.
“Because there’s such turnover in the regular drivers, the ones that hold those full time positions, many times we’ll train two or three drivers, and once they’ve completed their coursework, and they’re certified as a bus driver, they walk directly, immediately into a full time job,” Campbell said. “They don’t even go into the substitute pool, because there’s vacancies already sitting there waiting for them to go ahead and take a full-time job and so then that cycle just perpetuates itself.”
Campbell acknowledges that the training itself, while necessary for providing the safest service possible for students, can be its own barrier for potential drivers. Trainees must complete more than 50 hours of coursework and practical training without pay.
“You have to make the commitment to the time and the coursework, the practical driving that you have to do in order to be certified,” Campbell said. “It means you’re giving up time on the other end. So if you do have a job, you’ve got to make arrangements to take the courses. You’ve got to step away from another type of job in order to be able to take that coursework. With that said, the training is essential.”
It’s an issue the state is keeping its eye on. Some counties have already implemented pay for bus driving trainees, but it’s simply not feasible for all counties.
“I think there’s other factors that steer people away from the profession, but for those people that do have a true interest in becoming a bus operator, I do think that offsetting paying them while they’re getting the training would really alleviate some of the burden that these individuals would have in order to try to make ends meet for them,” Campbell said.
For those interested, Fraley has a clear picture of the kind of person best suited for bus driving.
“Our drivers suggest that you be an early riser,” Fraley said. “You enjoy being around children, good communicator, you would have to study and pass written exams, perform and pass driving exams, require a good driving record, no DUIs. A high school diploma, required to pass a drug and alcohol test background check. And you have to be able to maintain your school bus by writing up anything that’s mechanically wrong with it.”
Fraley and the other sources for this story all acknowledge that bus driving is difficult work. Difficult, but rewarding.
“It’s a hard job, but the people that do it find it to be a rewarding job,” Fraley said. “We were talking here recently about the bus drivers that took the Hoover group to the state playoffs and the fact that they were part of something that would allow those students memories for the rest of their life.”
Those interested in becoming a school bus driver should contact their local school district.
As West Virginia counties return to school, the debate over masks in classrooms continues.
Last week, Kanawha County Schools — home of the state’s capital city — was the first school system to return for the fall. The county was also the first district to issue a masking mandate for all students in pre-K-5th grade.
In this week’s episode of our summer education radio series, “Closing the COVID Gap,” Liz McCormick sat down over Skype with Kanawha County Superintendent Tom Williams to discuss the first week back to school and the challenges ahead.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
LIZ MCCORMICK: Here we are at the start of a new school year, and this fall looks, in many ways, better from last fall. But we are still in the middle of a global health pandemic. Many things remain the same as they did last fall. Can you talk with us about how things are different this year compared to last year? And how did the first week of school go?
TOM WILLIAMS: Overall, the first week of school went well. We did have a couple of issues with HVAC and caused us to have to close two schools. But that meant that 64 of our schools were open. So that’s a positive thing. We are back with masks for pre-K through 5th grade. We also have many more students in our schools this year than last year. We don’t have e-learning, fewer students are on virtual, and most of our students are in-person. So those are all positive things.
MCCORMICK: Superintendent, I know that virtual learning may not be offered at all elementary schools in the state, and I understand that elementary-age students struggled more with virtual and remote learning compared to older students. Is Kanawha County offering a virtual option for elementary-age students?
WILLIAMS: Yes, we have virtual. We’re doing it a little differently this year. We are actually having live sessions in virtual with our elementary students, like for phonics and things of that nature. We also have teachers and coaches that check in with kids. I think it’ll be much better this year for our virtual students.
MCCORMICK: Kanawha County Schools was the first district in West Virginia to issue any kind of masking mandate, even before Gov. Jim Justice and the West Virginia Department of Education issued their own recommendations. Why did your county ultimately decide to require masks of pre-K-5th grade? What led to that decision?
WILLIAMS: I think the reasoning behind our board’s decision on that was the older kids had had the opportunity to be vaccinated, and those who chose to do so did, and our elementary students didn’t have that option. So that’s why the board felt that it was important to make sure our elementary students were as protected as possible.
MCCORMICK: Last week, state officials came out recommending that school systems work with their local health departments to determine masking guidelines and protocols. But the governor has said that he will not issue a statewide mask mandate for schools. I’m curious if this is something you agree with. Should it be left up to counties even though the CDC has recommended masks for all K-12 students, faculty and staff regardless of vaccination status?
WILLIAMS: I’m not going to second-guess any of our leaders in the state, but they have left that decision up to each local county, and that’s what we’re doing.
MCCORMICK: We know that there has been nationwide pushback to masking in schools this year. Some states are even seeing large protests outside of state school board meetings. It’s a contentious issue. Have you seen this level of division in Kanawha County?
WILLIAMS: We do have folks who feel that it should be left up to the parents to make that decision. But you know, our kids are in school, they’re masked at the elementary level. We’ve had very few, if any issues, with that. And we’re excited to have our kids back where they belong, so that we can meet them where they are and take them to the next level.
MCCORMICK: Last week, the West Virginia Department of Education released last year’s test scores. West Virginia saw drops in math, science and English language arts during the pandemic. But we are not alone in this, of course, as much of the nation also saw similar drops in their school systems. However, we do know that West Virginia has been below the national average in many core subjects for some time.
What do you think it will take to help West Virginia improve student achievement on the national scale? And what I’m specifically interested in is what are some concentrated strategies that you have in mind to tackle this issue head on?
WILLIAMS: We are focusing on English language arts and math this year. We have interventionists in our schools that are able to pull students out and work with them in small groups. We have computer programs that work with students and build upon their knowledge to make sure they’re mastering the standards.
We also have a program that puts all of this information right at the teachers fingertips. It has their test scores and all data, attendance and discipline issues, etc. We also have extra teachers in the schools this year, based on using the federal ESSER money that was passed down from the federal government.
So we’re using all of our resources possible to hone in on students and the standards they are missing and make sure that we are able to get them caught up.
MCCORMICK: All counties in West Virginia are expected to be back in school by Sept. 7. Looking at the state as a whole, all 55 counties experienced struggles this past year and are looking ahead at some of the challenges they’re going to be dealing with this coming year. What do you anticipate may be some of the biggest challenges for our school systems in West Virginia this year as we continue as a nation and as a state to work through this pandemic and toward closing the gap in education that’s been created by COVID-19 impacts?
WILLIAMS: One of the challenges would be attendance. We need to have the students in school so that we can work with them, and I think that’s probably around the state.
We need to get kids back into the school mode. It’s difficult. Some have been out of the building for 18 months. So we are seeing a few behavior problems, especially in the little ones, because they don’t have any school experience to draw on. The older kids remember what it was like before COVID and know how they’re supposed to act.
We’re in the second week now, and we’re bringing that along, and it’s working well. You mentioned earlier, the politics of all of this. If we could just get rid of the politics of everything and just give us the kids and let us educate them, then I think everyone would be much better off.
A traditional gathering place where the public meets the private becomes the critical point of contact for Appalachian families.
On any day in Appalachia, you can find gifts in front of houses, left on porches for the people inside: mushrooms just foraged, cookies freshly baked. The porch is an extension of the home in Appalachia—not only a gathering spot for conversation, but a traditional sharing place. If you want to exchange tools, plants, or hand-me-downs with your neighbor: you put them on the porch. In times of struggle, porches are the vessel to deliver food: frozen meals to new parents, casseroles for grieving families.
Now, because of COVID-19, those practices are becoming more important than ever. It’s not homemade food appearing on neighbor’s porches so much as home-sewn masks, or bags of groceries at the homes of senior citizens. And while school buses are no longer shuttling children to and from schools in the region, the buses are certainly not parked and empty.
More than half of all children in Appalachian Ohio receive free or reduced-price lunch, as reported by the Ohio PTA in 2013. At some elementary schools, the participation rate is almost 75%. In many cases, food distributed to Appalachian children at school feeds a family; thanks to programs such as Blessings in a Backpack, some children go home for the weekends with backpacks of shelf-stable food like canned tuna and peanut butter, designed to help out the whole household.
Credit Brian Ferguson / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
School buses line up at a loading dock in Charleston, West Virginia, on a Monday morning. The buses will be loaded with food boxes that will be delivered to Kanawha County students.
How are those children—and their families—getting food during the pandemic? Throughout the region, it’s from their school bus drivers.
School bus routes were already established, and the drivers known to families, so it was a natural step that a familiar person could deliver meals to children. In the Appalachian county of Athens, Ohio, in an email to parents, the school asked families to call if they needed food, and meals would be provided by bus drivers, whether or not children had previously been enrolled in free lunch programs.
In West Virginia’s Kanawha County, school bus drivers are leaving meals on porches. Every Monday, drivers drop off enough breakfasts and lunches to last a week. If children are sheltering at places other than at home during the pandemic, families have been asked to call the bus terminal, because the school district tries to reach as many people as possible.
By the first week of April, Kanawha County Schools was providing more than 12,500 meals, with food “delivered to every bus stop along our normal routes,” said district communications director Briana Warner. “Our school bus drivers have stepped up and are our heroes.”
One of those heroes is Rod Stapler, who has driven for the school district for 10 years. “The way we figure it,” Stapler said, “if we go through the end of April, we’ll deliver almost a million meals.”
Importantly, like Athens, Ohio, the Kanawha County School District is not discriminating: Families that say they have a need are having their needs met. “We know based on our data that the vast majority of our students need meals during this time,” Warner said.
And to see the familiar face of their school bus driver, “helps the kids,” according to Stapler. That normalcy “keeps them kind of going,” he said.
Because of their contracts, bus drivers in the county are not required to drive during the pandemic, but they are making the extra deliveries to help the community.
“Mostly all the drivers now that are working are voluntary,” Stapler said. “We can stay home and get paid by our contract, but [we] want to come out and deliver food.”
Credit Brian Ferguson / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
A Kanawha County school bus driver loads his bus with food boxes that he will deliver in Charleston, West Virginia.
Some bus drivers even delivered coursework in Kanawha County, packets of assignments alongside meals. As Stapler described it, “teachers ran out on some of the routes and delivered their homework [to students]”—providing another familiar, reassuring face in a time of upheaval. This work was not graded or collected, but was designed to help prevent children from falling behind, Stapler said.
That’s a necessity for many Appalachian children without home internet access. Because much learning across the U.S. has shifted online, schools have had to acknowledge that a number of their students still do not have reliable home internet service, particularly in more remote areas.
In Athens, Ohio, parents can pick up loaner technology, such as mobile hot spots and laptops, from the schools in special giveaway days. In Greenville, South Carolina, the school offers free Wi-Fi access with children’s meal pickup.
To address the inequity of households without consistent internet, some school districts in South Carolina equipped school buses with Wi-Fi and parked them in neighborhoods and rural areas. Parents drive children close to the buses to access the wireless, or children ride up on their bikes. In Cincinnati, school buses that functioned previously as bookmobiles, stocked with library sources, are being retrofitted with internet to serve as mobile hubs.
More and more districts outside of the Appalachian region are beginning to offer Wi-Fi in a bus, with school districts in such states as California, Florida, and Colorado enacting the idea.
Lack of internet services is also a perennial obstacle to the delivery of aid and communicating with people in remote areas, such as parts of Appalachia. To inform residents where or how to receive help, Athens volunteers are calling senior citizens, or if people don’t have telephone service, writing letters to them.
Geographically isolated and historically neglected by the rest of the nation, Appalachians are used to rising to the challenge of taking care of their own communities. And when schools closed because of the pandemic and senior citizens became trapped in their houses, these areas were able to mobilize quickly and tap into existing aid networks.
Credit Provided.
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Sharon Uppercue, from Martinsburg, West Virginia, routinely visits her parents, Charles and Waunita Hatmakers, with her daughter, Kaylee Uppercue, to deliver supplies and distantly sit on the porch to talk. Charles Hatmaker, a former coal miner, struggles with asthma, COPD and black lung, leaving him and his wife to rely on friends and family for supplies.
David Keller is development coordinator for the Southeast Ohio Foodbank & Regional Kitchen, which works with local, state, and federal organizations to serve more than 22,000 households in 10 Appalachian counties. But that was before the novel coronavirus outbreak. Comprising low-wage earners and many workers in the service industry, “the population we served wasn’t necessarily in the best situation before [the pandemic],” Keller said.
Mirroring the rest of the country as economic devastation spread, Appalachian food pantries began to see new people “coming into the emergency food network that may have never really considered that option before,” Keller said. “All they know is their family’s hungry and they’re out of work.”
Combined with burgeoning need, the more than 70 food pantries that Southeast Ohio Foodbank assists have had to deal with tightening restrictions and safety concerns, as information about how the virus spreads has changed quickly. “We have had to overhaul basically every part of our program, from what our process is when we come into work each day to how we organize and distribute food,” Keller said.
Changes include taking the temperatures of people working at pantries, distributing masks, and quickly shifting to no-contact food delivery. A food bank worker puts the box into the trunk of a client’s car, or simply leaves it outside to be collected.
This goes against traditional, pre-pandemic recommendations from the USDA about choice and food distribution at pantries. (Ideally, families know best what they need, and should be empowered to choose it themselves.)
The Athens City School District Food Pantry, which serves not only southeastern Ohio schoolchildren and their families, but all of Athens County, has moved to contactless food delivery, passing out pre-packed bags of food in drive-through distributions.
Anna Joyce Williams knows hunger doesn’t stop, even when the routine of daily life does. As student body vice president at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, she developed a food pantry with 12 community partners in the state to serve students and the greater community. “In Appalachia, and Marshall University especially, we are fortunate to see a lot of students come to college [despite coming] from adverse situations,” Williams said. “However, a lot of hardships can follow them during this transition, finances being the largest.”
Like most universities in the nation, Marshall University announced a shift to remote learning before the end of spring break. “During breaks, we [always] see a lot more traffic through our pantry as our food services on campus become more limited,” Williams said. “This time, though, we had a big increase in visitors and needs. I think the pandemic created a lot of fear for people. … The shelves nearly cleared out.”
Less formal means of delivering aid in Appalachia and other rural communities have existed for generations, through neighbors helping neighbors. In a small town, it is easy to know who is in need. What is less easy is asking for help—and reaching out and offering the same, something that some people may not have known to do before the pandemic.
“It’s really our hope that once we weather this, there will be systemic changes in support for hunger relief throughout this country,” Keller of the Southeast Ohio Food Bank said, “because a lot of people are being brought face-to-face with issues that, fortunately, they’ve never had to deal with [before].”
Appalachia knows need, and knows that in times of increased struggle, need increases for all. While much of the country might fall back at this time, Appalachia has stepped up in ways both official and grassroots. “Pandemic or not,” Keller said, “we still have a job to do.”
Bus driver Stapler echoed this statement. “You know the drivers could stay home, but they want to come out, make sure the kids are taken care of,” he said. “Mostly drivers in [the] county always felt that way. We want to look after the kids.”
This article was produced in partnership with YES! Media, 100 Days in Appalachia and West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the One Foundation.
On September 3, 2974, Kanawha County schools opened amid high tensions. Months earlier, school board member Alice Moore had objected to the content of new language arts books the county was adopting. She felt that many were anti-religious or anti-American. Fueled by the efforts of conservative ministers, an opposition movement to the books grew rapidly, particularly in rural parts of Kanawha County. Despite petitions bearing 12,000 signatures and public condemnation of the books by 27 ministers on the grounds of immorality and indecency, the board approved most of the books.
Textbook protesters called for a boycott of schools. When schools opened, picketing parents paraded outside. Attendance was down at least 20 percent, and the actual number could’ve been much higher. Some 3,500 coal miners walked off their jobs in support of the protest.
Violence soon erupted, perpetrated by both supporters and opponents of the books. Shots were fired, cars and homes firebombed, schools dynamited and vandalized, and 11 protesters arrested. Although the disputed books were finally allowed in schools, the board approved guidelines making it more challenging to adopt potentially controversial books in the future.
