photo by: Shelley Hanson

Marshall County Board of Education member Lori Kestner, left, and Vice President Christie Robinson listen to information during Tuesday’s meeting.

Marshall County Board of Education members heard an update regarding the county’s vocational educational programs during their regular meeting Tuesday.

Bob Wilson, director of career technical education and adult education for the district, said the adult education center has been moved to the board of education office from the former state penitentiary building.

“With all the changes that were going down at the penitentiary, we couldn’t have a normal schedule down there,” he said. “So we moved to the board office here, and it’s working out really well.”

Wilson said today a Project Lead The Way program is being held at John Marshall High School to showcase CTE programs to industry leaders and other educators from the Ohio Valley and across the state. He said Marshall County was chosen by state educators to do this.

“We’re one of the few in the state to have engineering, biomedical and computer science,” he said.

Regarding robotics programming, Wilson said several fifth grade teachers completed training at Carnegie Mellon University on coding and building this summer.

“So we’re going to have teams at all the elementary schools except for two. We’re very excited,” he said.

Wilson said there are now 18 different CTE concentrations at John Marshall High School and four at Cameron High School. He added there are 130 JM students who will potentially become CTE completers, meaning they will have completed at least four different CTE courses during their high school career. He noted Cameron has 24 potential completers.

“We have at least 600 participants at John Marshall. That’s a student who has had at least one CTE course while in school there. At Moundsville Middle and Sherrard we are at over 300 participants at each school,” Wilson said.

Wilson also highlighted that a speaker series for students at JM will include those in industry on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month, and a WVU Medicine employee on the third Wednesday of each month.

In other matters, the grandmother of a student with autism inquired about getting some relief from the county’s absence policy as her grandchildren must attend frequent doctor’s appointments in Morgantown. She pointed out that athletes who have away games are often excused from missing classes. Board President John Miller said he would pass on the woman’s request to Superintendent Shelby Haines, who was attending an event in Charleston.