LOCEA Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Legislators Receive Report On School Safety Needs

Student safety continues to be a concern across the nation. In West Virginia, a rash of hundreds of hoax threats made against schools across the state earlier this fall has renewed conversations about the safety of, and preparedness of, aging school structures and dwindling budgets.

Lawmakers on the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability (LOCEA) met Sunday, Nov. 10 to receive the annual school facility safety and security report from the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE).

The report is based on responses from county school districts, vocational centers and public charter schools regarding security measures that have been implemented and spent, as well as needs moving forward. The total request from all schools in the state for spending on security this year is close to $250 million.

Jonah Adkins, director of the Office of Safety & Tiered Support Systems, told the commission that much of that amount would be one-time expenses, and local school systems have spent more than $23 million to address school safety and security needs.

“We know that we would never be able to meet all this at once, but if we could chip away a little bit each year, I believe that we can make some good headway,” he said. “Our school districts are working with the resources that they do have available to them to address those needs as they arise, but obviously there is a greater need. It’s the unfortunate reality of our society that we live in, that we have people that are targeting children and targeting our schools to do bad things.”

Adkins told the commission that school entries are a top need because they are specified as the next distribution from the State Treasury’s special revenue fund, the “Safe Schools Fund”, after all public school facilities have been funded to meet special education video camera requirements.

Sen. Charles Clements, R-Wetzel, asked about the report listing 272 schools needing new entryways, or what he called “mantraps,” at an average cost of $319,000 per entry.

Micah Whitlow, director of the Office of School Facilities for WVDE, explained the number comes from the requests districts submitted as part of the report survey, professional estimates and the known cost of similar projects. He said a specific building’s needs can raise or lower the price significantly.

“We have a pretty good basis of knowledge that a mantrap is going to be in that $300 (thousand) to $500 (thousand) range,” he said. “Some of them could be super complicated and be a million, depending on the configuration and the age of the building. And some of them might be very simple and be maybe $100,000.”

Del. Joe Statler, R-Monongalia, expressed shock that so many schools were still without adequate security at their entrances, and pointed out that the legislature had allocated money for that specific security improvement several times.

“What is causing us to have so many at this point in the game that doesn’t have a safe entrance way?” he asked.

Whitlow replied that the number of schools needing to upgrade their entryways has decreased year to year, but the price is simply too high for some counties.

“Looking back at the previous reports, the number has been decreasing, it’s just expensive,” he said. “So it’s hard to pay for a whole lot of those, and especially if a county doesn’t have a levy or a bond or there’s extra ways of building things. It’s just been hard for them.”

Statler asked what the plan is to ensure the safety of students and staff in schools without “mantrap” entryways. Adkins replied that most schools have moved to restrict entry and exit from the building to one door, as outlined in their mandated Crisis Response Plan.

Del. Patrick Lucas, R-Cabell, asked about the implementation of weapons detection systems after a school administrator in Ohio was stabbed by a parent before being arrested in West Virginia in October.

“Can you comment on how successful the schools with weapon detection systems have been?” he asked. “Is it more of a deterrent, or are we actually catching people trying to bring weapons into the school?”

Adkins and LOCEA Co-Chair Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, commented that having someone to monitor and run a weapons detection system is often a barrier to implementation.

“I’ve had that conversation multiple times with with school personnel regarding, how do you if you have a high school with 1000 students, how are you going to get all those students through, through one metal detector, for example, and who’s who’s going to mind that, and who’s going to respond if they do find a weapon?” Adkins said.

Whitlow closed by providing more solid numbers on the declining need for new mantraps in schools. He said the number of schools without a mantrap is trending down from 327 in the 2021-22 school year, to 299 in the 2022-23 school year and 272 in this most recent report for the 2023-24 school year.

Virtual Charter School Data Show Low But Improving Scores

Of the close to 3,400 students enrolled in charter schools in the state, more than 80 percent attend a virtual charter school.

As charter schools enter their third year of operation in West Virginia, student achievement data is now available from the first two years.

Professional Charter School Board Executive Director James Paul presented the board’s annual report to an interim meeting of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability Sunday.

The report includes state assessment results in math, English language arts and science that showed students in virtual charter schools scoring below the average for state public schools.

Of the students at West Virginia Virtual Academy, 14 percent were rated proficient on the state’s math assessment, while 36 percent were proficient in English language arts and 15 percent were proficient in science. At the Virtual Prep Academy, 20 percent of students were proficient in math, 34 percent were proficient in English language arts and 14 percent were proficient in science.

The average proficiency rates across the state, according to data from ZoomWV are: 36 percent proficiency in math, 45 percent proficiency in English language arts and 29 percent proficiency in science.

Paul says he believes that’s due in part because students that opt into virtual learning begin with lower average achievement.

“It’s why, certainly, I’d like to see these numbers increase. I’m pleased that they’re increasing from year one to year two, but this is something certainly that we’ll continue to watch closely.”

Of the close to 3,400 students enrolled in charter schools in the state, more than 80 percent attend a virtual charter school.

Brick and mortar charter schools fared better, with data from two physical public charter schools meeting or exceeding the state average proficiency. Students at West Virginia Academy in Morgantown averaged 40 percent proficiency in math, 55 percent proficiency in English language arts and 54 percent proficiency in science. Students at Eastern Panhandle Prep in Jefferson County averaged 40 percent proficiency in math, 50 percent proficiency in English language arts, and 28 percent proficiency in science.

Paul also reported on the status of a school that chose to relinquish its charter.

“This was Nitro Prep Academy, which was originally authorized to open to serve students in Kanawha and Putnam counties,” he said. “This school was actually originally authorized as early as 2022 but they had problems identifying a facility for multiple years.”

There has been renewed discussion in recent weeks about allowing public charter schools access to state School Building Authority funds to help ease startup costs and facilitate the purchase of facilities.

In his presentation, Paul also reported that a public charter school focused on business, the Mecca Business Learning Institute, has been authorized to open in Berkeley County in the fall of 2025. Another charter school in the Morgantown area – the Wisdom Academy – is continuing its application process after initially being rejected by the board last year.
Legislators asked several questions of Paul pertaining to the assessment data and instructional practices, before moving on to the promulgation of rules and amendments. Three rules were recommended by the commission without discussion.

Lawmakers Tackle FAFSA, School Discipline And More Education Topics At August Interims

Fall classes are well under way across the state. But state lawmakers meeting at the Capitol in Charleston over the weekend learned about lingering issues with a federal form from last year.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA, unlocks both federal and state financial aid for students. An update to the form released late last year has been plagued with issues that continue to this day.

Sarah Armstrong Tucker, Chancellor of the Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC), told the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability (LOCEA) Sunday that paper FAFSAs are still being processed. She also warned the U.S. Department of Education has already announced the release of the form will be delayed again this year for next year’s students.

“Typically, the FAFSA is ready October 1,” Tucker said. “The department has come out and said that it will not be ready October 1. They are shooting for December 1.”

Tucker said she’s also concerned the change of administration after the November election will cause further delays.

“One of the things that happened with this FAFSA rollout was that nobody was paying enough attention to the vendor who was trying to build this form,” she said. “So as people are starting to leave now, and may not get higher leadership until January, February, what happens to the FAFSA? Who’s minding the shop to make sure that it actually comes out December 1? I have a lot of concerns about that, and I’ve asked a lot of questions about that. I’m not getting great answers about those questions.“

In late April, Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency in higher education, opening a path for the state to circumvent its own FAFSA completion requirement for state education awards. During a special session in May, the West Virginia Legislature formally extended the state of emergency to October via Senate Concurrent Resolution 102.

Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, asked Tucker about the $83 million loan package the legislature approved during the May special session to backfill federal monies delayed by issues with FAFSA. That package included some $32 million for colleges and institutions to help with some of their operation costs.

“The institutional dollars that were to help offset some other costs, that has all been deployed,” Tucker said. “The institutions have that money, and they’re using it okay in the way that it was intended.”

Tucker also said students are using the other portion of the package, $40 million, to supplement their financial aid awards.

“As far as emergency grants are concerned, most are helping students meet whatever that sort of gap is between what their state aid is, their federal funding is, and what their tuition and fees are,” she said.

Health Policy Changes

Hank Hager, counsel to the Senate Education Committee, told LOCEA about the proposed replacement and repeal of West Virginia Board of Education (WVBOE) Policy 2423 – Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

The changes would remove several existing health requirements including health and oral health checks for students in grades two, seven and 12. Requirements for those entering pre kindergarten or kindergarten are maintained. Similarly, a requirement that all students to receive a Tdap (Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis) vaccine before grade 12 is also removed for students who have completed the primary DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis) series.

The policy is open for public comment until Sept. 16.

In response to questioning from Sen. Rolland Roberts, R-Raleigh, state deputy superintendent Sonia White said the policy change was largely cleanup.

“This policy had not been touched since 2015, and since 2015 we’ve had a global pandemic and some other things, changes in state code,” White said. “So we just cleaned up the policy and added new pieces of code that had been put in there, cleaned up the language so that if, say, federal code changes, it’ll refer back to the most current federal code, and we wouldn’t have to open the policy over and over again.”

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School Discipline Data

State lawmakers also got a chance Sunday to see the direct impact of their work on the issue of school discipline. Passed in 2023, House Bill 2890 allows a teacher to remove a disruptive student to a different environment to protect the integrity of the class for the duration of that class period.

Jeff Kelly, assistant superintendent of accountability programs for the Department of Education presented LOCEA with disciplinary data for the 2023-2024 school year, the law’s first year of implementation.

“Per that code, which reads, ‘Students who are removed from the classroom three times in one month are required to be suspended,’ that number was 204,” Kelly said.

HB 2890 suspensions represent a fraction of the more than 29,000 students that were suspended more than 35,000 times across the state in the 2023-24 school year.

Kelly also pointed out that kids who have no discipline referrals represent about 80 percent to 82 percent of the student population.

More in-depth analysis of the data is expected to be presented at the upcoming WVBOE meeting Sept. 11.

“You’re talking about 60,000-plus pages of discipline data,” Kelly said. “Trying to get that down to a level where we can give you guys something to work with is kind of a hard place to get. We spent a lot of time talking about that very thing.”

FAFSA Issues, College Going Rate And More Presented To LOCEA

A change to a federal financial aid form for college students is having major ripple effects through West Virginia’s higher education system.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) unlocks both federal and state financial aid for students but a recent attempt to simplify the form has caused delays for college applicants across the country.

“At this point this year, we have six million students who have filled out a FAFSA,” said Sarah Tucker, chancellor of the Higher Education Policy Commission. “At this point last year, we had 17 million, this is across the country. So we have a significant deficit right now that we’re trying to make up and trying to figure out exactly what’s going on and how best to help our students.”

Tucker told an interim meeting of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability Sunday the Student Aid Index (SAI), which determines student need, is now being determined by a new interface between the IRS and the federal Department of Education that is not working correctly. Further delays occur because users of the new system are not notified of errors until after the form has been submitted.

Tucker told the commission the faulty SAI formula is causing delays for the state’s educational programs as well.

“I need to know how much money the federal government is going to be giving to all of our students in order to know what our award is going to be for West Virginia Invests,” she said.
“We’re really sort of stuck in limbo until this functionality gets fixed.”

The Higher Education Grant Program, West Virginia Invests and PROMISE Scholarships are all currently delayed.

Nationally, West Virginia is faring slightly better than average with the new FAFSA. As of last month, more than 6,000 seniors across the state have filled out the form, a number Tucker credits to hundreds of FAFSA workshops the HEPC and other organizations have hosted.

“We’re actually ranking 20th in the number of high school seniors who have completed the FAFSA,” she said. “The West Virginia Department of Education has done a lot of work as have all of our institutions in trying to do FAFSA workshops to make sure that our students know how to fill out those forms.”

Tucker said West Virginia Invest and PROMISE may revert to awarding the same amounts as last year without adjustments to ensure students are not further delayed.

“I think that may be where we end up because I don’t want to keep stringing students along,” she said. “I want to do the best we can to make sure that they know that they can go to college. Our college going rate is finally ticking up. We have this great momentum.”

College Going Rate

The oversight commission also heard a report on the state’s college going rate from Zornitsa Georgieva, director of research and analysis for HEPC. She highlighted a one percent increase in post-secondary enrollment from 2022 to 2023, including enrollment in trade programs or other career and technical pathways.

“For the class of 2023, the college going grade is 47.4 percent,” Georgieva said. “We’ve had more than 7,900 high school graduates continue into some kind of post-secondary education this year. I think that really speaks for the hard work of high school staff, high school counselors, teachers, our staff in our secondary system, as well as post-secondary institutions and staff that works around outreach. And providing information about financial aid.”

In 2021 the national immediate college enrollment rate was 62 percent, which puts West Virginia 15 percent below the national average. “Immediate college enrollment” is the metric used by the National Center for Educational Statistics and looks at students who enrolled in a post-secondary institution the fall after graduation.

Georgieva said when looking at the 12 months after graduation, including spring enrollments, West Virginia’s college going rate jumps to 49 percent. Rates differ from county to county, and 36 of 55 of West Virginia’s counties increased their college going rate year over year.

Benchmarks and Screeners

As part of House Bill 3035 – also known as the Third Grade Success Act – that passed last year, screeners or benchmark assessments must be administered at the beginning of the school year and repeated mid-year and at the end of the school year to determine student progression in reading and mathematics kindergarten through third grade.

Sonya White, state deputy superintendent, presented the results of the mid-year screeners to the commission.

“Overall, we were encouraged by the results, we had a decrease in the number of students… who needed that intensive intervention,” she said.

Even accounting for regular academic gains in the first half of the school year, White said the need for intensive intervention decreased from the start of the year to mid-year. She said the screeners are also identifying new students that need intensive interventions and are getting the help they need.

“On the front side are the literacy results,” White said. “We had an average decrease of 5.4 percent of students that needed intervention in grades K through three, and an average of 6 percent of the students in grades four through eight were scoring in the lowest category.”

White presented even higher decreases in intensive intervention for mathematics, “with an average of 6 percent for K through three and an average of 8.1 percent for four through eight.”

Del. Joe Ellington, R-Mercer, expressed concern at some of the numbers that showed an increase in the need for math intervention between first and second grade.

“Do we have schools looking at why there might be that big change from only 17 percent initially in first grade up to almost 40 percent when they get the second?” he said.

White cautioned that the state is still in its first year of collecting the data but theorized that those numbers could be a result of lowered learning opportunities three years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are being proactive,” she said. “We are also looking at getting more detailed data for each section so we know what pieces of mathematics are struggling with.”

Policy 7212

Earlier in the meeting, legislators heard a brief description of changes to Department of Education Policy 7212. The policy applies to the transfer of students, both inside and out of their county of residence.

Student transfers became a point of contention this past fall after legislation passed during the 2023 regular session changed eligibility rules for student athletes after transfer. Gov. Jim Justice and others urged the legislature to revisit the issue during this year’s legislative session, but no action was taken by the legislature.

The proposed changes to Policy 7212 include significant clarifications of the requirement for county boards of education to implement an open enrollment policy for nonresident students, including a new allowance for boards to revoke applicants for chronic absenteeism or behavioral infractions. There is no mention of athletics in the proposed changes.

The changes to 7212, as well as other policies, are open to public comment until May 13.

Literacy Program Unintentionally Pulling Resources From Special Education

As a side-effect of legislation passed earlier this year, 41 percent of special education aides in the state have moved into first grade literacy aide positions.

State Superintendent Michele Blatt told legislators during Monday’s meeting of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Educational Accountability that the shift is an unintended consequence of House Bill 3035.

The Third Grade Success Act is meant to address literacy and numeracy in early education by bringing more aides and specialists into first, second and third grade classrooms across the state. Implementation has begun this fall in first grade classrooms, with second and third grades to follow in the coming years.

Blatt said the data is based on a survey of 48 counties, and represents some 249 aides that have transferred out of special education.

Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, said legislation often creates unforeseen issues, but keeping special education aides needs to be addressed.

“We need to find a way that we can entice them to stay in those harder positions,” Grady said.

Del. Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell, asked how the special education aides were being replaced.

“Many of them have been replaced with people, new positions, people trying to get into the system,” Blatt said. “We can follow up and see how many of those are actually still shortages, but I do know, we still have some shortages and some day to day subs in those classrooms.”

W.Va. K-12 Schools See Rise In Popularity, Access For Computer Science

A report from the West Virginia Department of Education says access to computer science courses has notably increased over the past four years. This comes after a 2019 Senate bill that had the department create a development plan in K-12 schools.

The report was given to the Legislative Oversight Commission on Educational Accountability during Sunday’s legislative interim meetings.

Erika Klose coordinates computer science initiatives for the state’s Department of Education. She says the report indicates 76 percent of West Virginia high schools are now teaching computer science courses as of 2021. That’s 30 percent higher than before the bill was passed. It is expected to increase further this school year.

“Our goal is that every high school in the state will have access to a trained computer science teacher, every middle school will have access to a trained computer science teacher,” Klose said during the meeting. “If there’s one educator in each school at each grade level, they can support those that they teach with in providing that computer science instruction.”

More than 1,100 West Virginia teachers have undergone professional development courses relating to computer science since the initiative began in 2019, including 116 high school, 181 middle school and 819 elementary school teachers.

Digital literacy classes are similarly growing in popularity, with an estimated 242 schools in West Virginia offering courses this school year after a House bill required the state Board of Education to implement the Mountain State Digital Literacy Project in 2019.