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West Virginia Department of Education Released Report On Educational Roundtables

Photo by Steven Allen Adams State Superintendent of School Steve Paine briefs the press on the results of the Department of Education’s education roundtables and online survey results.

CHARLESTON — The West Virginia Department of Education made a report available to the public Tuesday detailing the results from eight regional roundtables, which lawmakers and Gov. Jim Justice will use when crafting legislation for the resumption of the special session on education betterment possibly in weeks.

The report, “West Virginia’s Voice,” is a summary of feedback from the eight roundtable events held between March and April in Kanawha, Cabell, McDowell, Raleigh, Harrison, Ohio, Wood and Morgan counties, and from online surveys.

“We wanted to get these done so that we had good information in preparation for the legislative session,” said Steve Paine, state superintendent of schools. “I really believe this document should be used for the basis of all legislation that comes about in the special session.”

According to the report, 1,630 people attended the forums, with 60 percent of those being teachers, administrators, and school service personnel. Of the 17,010 survey results, 7,598 came from educators.

“I want to commend those folks for coming out to the eight locations, because they chose to show and express themselves,” Paine said. “I’ve heard some across the way in the Legislature say these were all educators that showed up at the forums. Yeah, there were a lot of them, but there were a lot of parents, community members, and others who chose to attend.”

The Consensus Building Institute, a non-profit used by the department during school consolidation concerns in Richwood last year, was brought in to help facilitate the discussions. The report also includes recommendations from the Department of Education for lawmakers and the governor’s office.

The Department of Education broke down the report into four top priorities. Based on the number of responses from educators, a teacher and school service personnel pay raise was priority number one, followed by increased funding for social and emotional support systems in schools, incentivizing high-performing schools by giving them increased freedom from certain regulations, and funding supplements to strengthen skills in shortage areas.

According to the report, 77 percent of survey respondents and 95 percent of comment card responses called for increased compensation for education professional.

“If we’re going to recruit teachers that can teach students so that student achievement levels rise, we need to recruit top-notch students to become teachers,” Paine said. “That is one of the areas of almost unanimous agreement.”

The roundtable sprang from the end of the 2019 regular session March 9 and the start of the special session called immediately afterward after the state Senate’s education omnibus bill died in the House of Delegates, and the governor’s promised 5 percent pay raise proposal for teachers and school service personnel never made it out of the senate.

Many proposals in the final version of SB 451 had support among forum attendees, including funding for additional counselors and nurses, incentives to curb teacher absences, funding the 11 smaller counties at a minimum of 1,400 students, voter approval for raising regular levy rates, freezing the local share cap at 2015-2016 levels.

The report’s recommendations also called for creating teacher leader positions, scholarships to put education majors into classroom settings and require them to work in the state for a period of time. The report found that 60 percent of survey respondents supported supplemental pay for math and special education teachers, while 58 percent supported supplemental pay for hard-to-staff counties.

When it came to school choice, a majority of respondents were fine with expanding the state’s Innovation Zones for existing schools, which give increased flexibility to schools and freedom from some Department of Education rules to try new educational approaches. But 88 percent of respondents opposed public charter schools, while 79 percent strongly disagreed with the concept of education savings accounts.

The report recommends that policy makers not implement education savings accounts – which give a portion of a child’s per-pupil expenditure to their parents on a debit card to pay for home schooling, tutoring, and other educational expenses – due to concerns of fraud, lack of accountability, and the possibility of higher-income families benefiting more than middle-to-low income families.

It recommends only implementing charter schools as long as oversight authority is placed with the state and local boards of education, prohibit for-profit schools and virtual schools, develop a minimal level of qualifications for teachers at charter schools, and evaluate the charters to see if the same flexibility can be given to public schools.

“If I knew that charter schools and educational savings accounts, for example, were the silver bullet solutions to raising student achievement in the entire State of West Virginia…I’d carry a banner through the hallways and say let’s pass that legislation immediately,” Paine said. “We have heard there is support for charter schools and there was support for the bill that passed out of the house last session. I think our posture is if we’re going to go down that pathway, then here are some recommendations around the notion of charter schools.”

Senate President Mitch Carmichael, R-Jackson, was one of the cheerleaders for the Senate version of SB 451, which had a more robust charter school and education savings account program. Carmichael said he wasn’t surprised by the results of the report and questioned the methodology.

“It was totally expected, the report, and we could have anticipated the results of it, but I’m glad they went through the exercise of going out to the communities,” Carmichael said. “What is probably the most disappointing thing about the report is the incredibly low participation rates. There is just such a very small segment of the people that even weighed in on that, and the majority of those were teachers.”

Paine made it clear that the results of the report came ultimately from those who took the time to attend the forums and take the surveys.

“You had strong advocates for charter schools and educational savings accounts who showed up and expressed themselves,” Paine said. “Our job was not to try to sway opinion. It was to give the opportunity for the expression of opinion.”

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