W.Va. Book Festival Announces Featured Authors For 2024
West Virginia’s annual book festival celebrating national and regional authors will come to the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center this October.
Continue Reading Take Me to More NewsThe West Virginia Board of Education voted 6-2 Thursday to adopt an amended set of science standards for West Virginia schools. The amendments came at the request of Board member and previous Board President Wade Linger.
The controversy over the Next Generation Science Standards began in December of last year when Linger moved to amend the standards about climate change. At the time, Linger said he didn’t believe human influence on the global change was a “foregone conclusion.”
At that meeting, state Board members voted to return the standards to a 30-day public comment period instead of voting on the proposed amendments. The move came at the suggestion of the state’s Chief Academic Officer Clayton Burch.
During Thursday’s meeting, Burch and his staff presented the results of that comment period to the full Board. The Department of Education received nearly 7,000 comments and, of those, about 6,500 were positive, in support of the standards as written and adapted by West Virginia teachers.
After hearing the results, Linger again moved to amend the standards in three ways, however, the changes he proposed were less severe than those presented to the Board during their December meeting.
Those amendments include:
All three amendments were adopted by the Board. Board President Gayle Manchin and member Dr. William White both voted against the amended standards.
White told the board changing the standards would risk West Virginia’s alignment with 13 other states who have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. Manchin agreed with his assessment.
“I said from the very beginning I supported the standards as written by our science teachers in West Virginia and as approved by the National Academy of Science and that if any changes were made that effected that content in any way, I did not feel I could support it,” Manchin said after the meeting.
Linger said after the meeting he did not think the state should feel obligated to align with such a small group of states.
Manchin said while she did not support the changes, she doesn’t feel they make substantial changes to the science standards moving forward, only broaden the scope of information students will look at in the classroom.
Manchin also said she did not feel the change would impact student test scores. Those standardized tests are aligned with the Next Generation Standards as adopted in other states.