Senate Education Committee Story Archives - Page 2 of 5

New Disciplinary Measures Would Extend To Elementary Grades

Student discipline continues to be an issue in West Virginia schools, and lawmakers continue to try and address the issue through legislation. A bill in the state Senate is trying to expand on a law that was passed last year.

House Bill 2890 passed the legislature in 2023 and gave school teachers and administrators more leeway in school discipline. But the law that allows a teacher to remove a disruptive student to a different environment to protect the integrity of the class only applies to grades six through 12 and educators say more needs to be done.

Tuesday morning, the Senate Education Committee discussed Senate Bill 614, which intends to expand the ability to remove disruptive students to the elementary level, from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Committee Chair Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, is the bill’s lead sponsor and said discipline is the number one issue teachers bring to her, and is driving them to leave the profession.

“Teachers who have been teaching for 25 plus years have said ‘I’ve had enough, I’m done. I feel like my hands are tied. I do not have the backing of my administrators,’” Grady said. “A lot of our principals are great but a lot of the comments have been ‘My principal feels like we can love these kids so much that it’s going to change their behavior.’ God bless them for that because that’s what we try to do. But in reality, we can’t. A lot of them, we can’t change the behavior just by love.”

The bill requires that once a teacher determines that a student’s violent, threatening or intimidating behavior is creating an unsafe environment, then the teacher may take action. The student will be removed from the classroom for the remainder of the school day, parents will be notified to pick the student up from school – preferably immediately – and the student will not be allowed to ride the bus.

“If the student is not picked up by the end of the day, the principal or other district employee shall notify law enforcement,” the bill continues.

A student’s removal from the classroom under the bill would result in an automatic suspension for the next one to three school days. Alternative learning accommodations are then made and once that is done, the student may not return to school until a risk assessment is done. Even then the student’s return to school is on a provisional basis of five to 10 days, and if another incident occurs within the time frame, the student will return to the alternative learning environment for the remainder of the school year.

If the principal or vice principal disagree with the teacher, the teacher may provide documentation and appeal to the county superintendent.

Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan, invited Lindsey McIntosh, general counsel for Kanawha County Schools, to speak on the bill. She brought up several concerns, including a lack of funding for behavioral intervention programs required by the bill as well as no clear definition of the violent, threatening or intimidating behavior that could have students removed.

“They can’t express their emotions correctly, K through sixth grade,” McIntosh said. “I’ve had students that will literally say, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ They don’t mean they’re gonna actually kill you. They just mean that they, again, can’t express their emotions correctly, and they use that term because that’s the term that they hear. That could be considered violent or intimidating.”

McIntosh went on to say that the law’s requirement of suspension took administrators out of a serious disciplinary decision, and would take students out of the best environment for them.

“I think the law changed last year to allow more teacher input on that issue,” she said. “However, when we’re talking about suspensions, those are always made or should always be made by an administrator just for consistency’s sake.”

Appeals to the county superintendent was also a sticking point for McIntosh, who pointed out the significant burden that it would create in Kanawha County.

“This is the hard part about writing laws,” she said. “You’re writing them for the smallest county which may experience this maybe three or four times a year. We would experience this probably 10 times, I would say, a week. So for the superintendent to have to go in, get to that level of discipline would be a lofty assignment.”

Kanawha County Schools is the state’s largest school district with more than 23,000 students enrolled, accounting for close to 10 percent of the state’s public school enrollment.

Committee members, including Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, stated their support for the bill and ultimately for teachers.

“I have confidence in our teachers,” he said. “Many of them are certified or trained or experienced, and as far as fleshing out the language when a kindergarten through sixth grade teacher in elementary school determines that the behavior of a student is violent, threatening, intimidating towards staff or peers or creates an unsafe learning environment or impedes another student’s ability to learn in a safe environment. That’s pretty clear.”

Trump moved to lay the bill over to allow more time to work on language. All other senators spoke in favor of the bill and voted down Trump’s motion.

Grady conceded that the bill was imperfect but necessary for the sake of teachers. She said educators cannot put the needs of one disruptive student over those of the dozens of other children in the classroom.

“Is this a perfect bill? Absolutely not,” Grady said. “It’s introduced today or it’s on the committee agenda today, because I worked with counsel, I bless him, to try to get it perfect. And I realize we can’t get it perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. But does it solve the problem of what teachers are bringing to me? Yes, they feel like it does.”

The bill was recommended to the full Senate with the recommendation it pass. The committee adjourned shortly after approving SB 614 without taking up any of the other four bills on the agenda for the day.

Senate Education Committee Adds Another University To Promise Scholarship

Senate Bill 529 would add Salem University to the list of eligible institutions where the Promise Scholarship may be used.

The Senate Education Committee quickly moved along five bills today, many of which updated existing educational programs. One bill would add another university to the list of eligible institutions for the Promise Scholarship.

The Promise Scholarship is a merit-based financial aid program for West Virginia high school graduates planning to attend one of the state’s public or independent two- or four-year institutions.

Senate Bill 529 would add Salem University to the list of eligible institutions where the scholarship may be used.

Currently, 17 of the state’s four-year institutions are eligible for students to use the scholarship.

Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan, asked why Salem had not been included over the scholarship’s more than 20 years of existence.

Kristin Boggs, general counsel for the Higher Education Policy Commission, gave a simple answer.

“Salem University is a for-profit institution and at the time the Promise scholarship statute was passed, the included private institutions were private nonprofits,” she said.

The only private for-profit institutions currently eligible for the scholarship are West Virginia Junior College’s Bridgeport, Charleston and Morgantown locations.

Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, said he had previously sponsored a similar bill and that all qualifying students should be open to pursue their passions where they please.

“This summer we did our fact-finding visit to Salem, met with administration faculty, staff and students,” he said. “There are some exciting things going on that campus. There are a handful of West Virginia students who would meet the eligibility requirements to receive the Promise scholarship and we don’t want to stand in their way of allowing them to go to school there.”

The bill was recommended to the full Senate with a reference to the Senate Finance Committee. Senate Education Committee Chair Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, said with zero fiscal impact, the finance committee chair will be asked to waive the second reference.

Other Business

The Senate Education Committee recommended four other bills to the full Senate with the recommendation that they do pass.

SB547 – Authorizing legislative rules for Higher Education Policy Commission
SB563 – Updating Center for Nursing to Office of Nursing Education and Workforce Development
SB507 – Relating to repeal of WV EDGE
SB546 – Updating STEM scholarship program

All four bills were voted forward without discussion.

Student Pregnancy, Cybersecurity Focus Of Education Committees

To start the week, education committees in both chambers have focused on supporting students in difficult situations.

According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, West Virginia has the eighth highest teen birth rate in the country.

During their meeting Monday, the House Education Committee discussed House Bill 5179. Also known as Jaycie’s Law, the bill would require that each county board develop a written attendance policy for pregnant and parenting students and excuse all absences due to pregnancy or parenting related conditions up to eight weeks.

The bill originated from a social worker in Cabell County who had seen the school system requiring teenage girls to go back to school one week after giving birth.

Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, moved to amend language that would require schools to refer pregnant students to pregnancy health organizations.

“It requires the school to refer a girl to an unlicensed health care provider,” he said. “A lot of them also are religious based, maybe they’re not a member of that religion. There’s a lot of issues with that, sending somebody, putting it in code to go to this place that looks like a doctor’s office, but isn’t a doctor’s office.”

Pushkin’s amendment originally removed any reference to pregnancy health organizations from the bill. But after discussion, he reformed the amendment to make the requirement a permissive choice to refer students to the organizations.

Del. Rolland Jennings, R-Preston, said he believed the bill’s referral to resources fulfilled the lawmakers’ promise to support pregnant women made when the state’s abortion restriction was passed in 2022.

“This is giving support where the schools have to at least discuss with these young mothers places where they can go and get support for them,” he said. “If we make it permissive, some schools may do it. Others don’t want to get involved, won’t do it. And I think by making it so they have to do it, we’re doing the best for these young ladies.”

The amendment did pass, and the bill was recommended to the full chamber.

Other Business

The House committee also advanced bills regarding in-state tuition for all National Guard members and their dependents, as well as Hope Scholarship funding.

House Bill 4945 makes several changes to code relating to the Hope Scholarship, including permitting the Hope Scholarship board to provide an estimate of the program’s future enrollment to the Department of Education by Dec. 10 of each year for funding, rather than relying on the prior year’s enrollment.

“This would allow us instead of it being solely based on the number of applications received in the prior year, it would allow us to estimate,” said Amy Willard, assistant treasurer of savings programs for the West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office. “We would do that using trends that we’re seeing in the program, any data that we have on birth, stuff like that to try to estimate that incoming kindergarten class. But there is still the provision that if there was unused money, like at the end of the fiscal year, that that appropriation would be reduced. So we would still always estimate what our need was for the year.”

Pushkin again moved to amend the bill, this time excluding Hope Scholarship funds from being used out of state. About $300,000 in Hope funds were spent out of state in the program’s first year.

However, Del. Wayne Clark, R-Jefferson, pointed out that a similar restriction had been proposed when the Hope Scholarship was being created.

“One of the reasons why it was voted down at that time was because of the purchase of curriculum and purchase of, paying for field trips or paying for other things that the state does buy out of state,” he said. “And when we’re talking about, you know, the amount of students that do potentially attend border school, schools that are outside of our border are from border counties. Remember, we’re still trying to give the parents of West Virginia an option for their education. And that’s the whole purpose of the Hope Scholarship.”

The amendment was rejected, and House Bill 4945 was recommended to the full House, with a reference to the Finance Committee.

Other bills advanced by the committee:

H. B. 4882, extending in-state tuition rates to all members and veterans of the National Guard, reserves, and armed forces as well as their spouses and dependents.
H. B. 5038, relating to research and economic development agreements for state institutions of higher education.
H. B. 5050, relating to authorizing legislative rules regarding higher education.
H. B. 5056, relating to substitute service personnel positions.
H. B. 5153, relating to revising, updating and streamlining the requirements governing the West Virginia Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarship.

Teaching Cyber Security

In the Senate Education Committee Tuesday morning, senators heard from law enforcement about the need for students to be educated about online safety.

Senate Bill 466 requires the state board to develop an education program to teach safety while accessing technology. The committee previously discussed and laid over the bill on Jan. 18, and both times the discussion focused on the requirement for instruction on the risks associated with sharing sexually suggestive or sexually explicit materials.

SGT Jillian Yeager of the State Police’s Crimes Against Children Unit told the committee her office of 12 investigators has received 6,000 tips of sexual cybercrimes against minors in the past four years, mirroring a national spike during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. She said education like the kind proposed in Senate Bill 466 would go a long way to reducing such instances.

“I firmly believe that if we mandate cyber safety training in the state, that it will greatly reduce our number of cyber tips simply by educating children to help themselves not become victims to these predators online,” Yeager said.

The committee voted to recommend the bill to the full Senate, and laid over the only other bill on the agenda due to time constraints.

Documenting Special Education Help, New Human Development Education Requirements

The legislature’s education committees started off the week discussing who is responsible for maintaining records for special education, and teaching about human development.

Individual Education Plans (IEPs) and 504 Plans provide accommodations and services to students with disabilities. Accommodation logs are just one form of documentation that some counties have chosen to use, and not a statewide requirement.

“There’s no reason you have to verify that accommodations were given if you’re the general education teacher, but there’s no specific format that has to be used,” said State Superintendent Michele Blatt. “You could document something in your lesson plans, or you could do a narrative at the end of the week that these three children received online or oral reading of their test or two. There’s not a specific way, but there has to be a way to document that accommodations were provided.”

Blatt was asked to speak to the House Education Committee Monday afternoon as they discussed House Bill 4860. The bill changes code to clarify that a general education teacher cannot be made responsible for accommodation logs, because that responsibility falls upon the special education instructor.

The bill’s lead sponsor Del. David Elliott Pritt, R-Fayette, is also a middle school social studies teacher, and was joined by other educators on the committee to praise the bill. He said teachers were required to review and acknowledge each student’s IEP at the start of the school year.

“I don’t know that everyone quite understands what an unnecessary burden it is to go through a sheet of paper every single day for 50 students and check mark every single accommodation to prove that you’re doing your job that you’re already mandated to do by federal law,” Pritt said. “Not only is it increased, it’s creating more legal liability for teachers than less because what if I miss-mark a student accidentally on a day he wasn’t there, or they weren’t there and I mark ‘I provided accommodations’ and I didn’t and then it comes back?”

Committee Minority Chair Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, spoke in opposition of the bill. He said he trusts teachers to teach, but recognized the reality that a lot of students in the state have IEPs while there is a shortage of special education professionals and those that are in schools cannot visit every classroom every day.

“I think that it’s not practical to have someone who’s not in the room responsible for signing off on something that they can’t really verify whether it happened or not,” he said. “I share the concern to the superintendent that it could very well not be done, because we’re putting it in statute that the person responsible for it is not there.”

Blatt said there are close to 50,000 students in the state with IEPs.

“That would just be students with special education, with an IEP,” she said. “That does not include 504s and that does not count our gifted or exceptionally gifted students that we have.”

Blatt told lawmakers a general education classroom can have as many as 30 percent special education students in it.

The bill was recommended to the House floor.

Human Growth and Development Requirement

Tuesday morning in the Senate Education Committee, Senators discussed Senate Bill 468. The bill creates the Baby Olivia Act and requires the State Board of Education to provide courses on human growth and development related to pregnancy and specifically inside the womb. The bill specifies that a 3-minute video entitled Meet Baby Olivia – A Never Before Seen Look At Human Life In The Womb be shown in classrooms.

Senators watched the video and voted it to the Senate floor.

A previous version of the bill would have allowed the Attorney General to sue for damages and injunctive relief on behalf of any or all residents or citizens of West Virginia against any person or entity that violated the new Baby Olivia Act. That component of the bill was removed from a committee substitute.

Education Committees In Both Chambers Address Financial Issues

Now more than a week into the session, the Education committees of both chambers are addressing financial issues in the state’s schools.

The West Virginia Legislature is more than a week into the session and bills have started to move through their respective committees. The Education committees of both chambers are addressing financial issues in the state’s schools.

Many of these bills taken up and passed this week may seem familiar. That’s because most of them also passed both Education committees last year, only to founder in House and Senate Finance.

The House Education Committee took up issues of educator pay at their meeting Wednesday. House Bill 4202 would raise salaries for school service personnel by $670 per month.

House Bill 4767 raises the salaries of new teachers with no experience to $44,000. A similar bill, Senate Bill 204, passed out of the Senate Education Committee last year but did not make it out of Finance.

House Education Committee Chair Del. Joe Ellington, R-Mercer, said the two bills would make positions in West Virginia more competitive with neighboring states.

“Of note, that also brings up to the 50th percentile of our surrounding states,” he said.

Gov. Jim Justice already announced plans to raise the pay of all state employees, including teachers and school staff, by 5 percent this year. Legislative leaders have indicated their support of the raise, but union leaders and other advocates say the raise isn’t enough to address rising PEIA premiums, let alone bigger issues of teacher retention.

Related to the teacher shortage, a bill that attempts to define and limit the role of school counselors drew much discussion. House Bill 4769 aims to narrowly define the duties of school counselors, something Del. David Elliott Pritt, R-Fayette, said is necessary.

“I actually had a lunch meeting with a couple counselors that work in the county that I represent, and these counselors have over 300 unanswered counseling referrals because they’re being asked to fill in the role of teacher in positions that no long-term or short-term, day-to-day sub will take,” he said. “And it’s a problem. These are counseling referrals that could be potential suicide risk, abuse from a parent or guardian. They’re unanswered, because they’re being asked to fulfill other duties. This bill is incredibly important. I’m happy to support it. And I’m honestly very glad that we’re really addressing this, this year.“

Pritt works as a social studies teacher at Fayetteville PreK-8.

All five of the bills discussed were recommended to the House for passage.

On the Senate side, the Education Committee Thursday morning took up a bill regarding the Promise PLUS program, Senate Bill 259. First established in 2001, the Promise Scholarship is a merit-based academic award that pays in-state tuition and fees, or $5,000, whichever is less, at any eligible institution in West Virginia.

The Promise PLUS program would act as a supplement for individuals who meet more rigorous standards so that the total of both scholarships is equal to the actual cost of tuition.

Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, voiced his opposition to what he called the bill’s “held hostage” provision, which would require recipients of Promise PLUS funds to pay the state back if they left the state after graduation.

“I think the approach would better be to increase the amount of money that we give to all of the Promise scholarship recipients and continue to not have a “held hostage” provision over them and really live by that concept of, as a state, we should train and educate our next generation,” he said. “And if they leave, so be it, maybe they’ll come back. But if we don’t train and educate them, and they stay, we have a lot of problems.”

Senators also discussed bills to require age-appropriate education on the Holocaust (SB 448), as well as the development of an education program to teach safety while accessing technology (SB 466). All three bills were recommended to the Senate for passage.

Senate Education Committee Addresses Bus Driver Shortage

The Senate Education Committee took up a bill Thursday aimed at addressing the state’s bus driver shortage.

House Bill 2380 would clear the way for retired bus operators to resume working for their local school district without losing their benefits.

In recent years, a shortage of bus operators across the state has left school systems with no other choice than to cancel routes, interrupting students’ education.

The committee approved a functionally identical bill, Senate Bill 56, in the first days of the session, but that bill has languished in the Senate Finance Committee.

Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, identified a fiscal note of $250,000 attached to the Senate Bill as a potential barrier to passage.

“I think the fiscal note is completely misguided. I can’t see an additional dollar of cost of allowing a retired bus driver who comes back and subs as a bus driver, as opposed to paying somebody who’s not retired,” Oliverio said. “That retired bus driver who comes back and drives an extra 10 days maybe over the 140-day limit, he or she incurs no additional pension benefit for that so there should be no liability to the pension.”

Joe White, executive director of the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association told the committee that he and his staff were also greatly concerned by the fiscal note.

“I can only tell you what was testified in the other chamber’s finance, and that was that the amount on the fiscal note is what they put when they don’t have an answer,” White said.

Committee Chair Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, and a teacher, said she has seen the impact of the bus driver firsthand.

“We have these students who have missed 19 days of school this school year, that’s 19 instructional days. That’s not including days they may miss because they’re sick or they have a doctor’s appointment or something else,” Grady said. “So that’s 19 days of school just for not having a bus driver and I know if that happens at my school that happens at all kinds of other schools and I think it’s a huge problem. I would really like to get this fiscal note taken care of.”

Grady concluded by saying there would be further discussion with the Senate Finance Committee to resolve the impasse, and the committee reported the bill to the full Senate with a recommendation it do pass.