Across West Virginia, boards of education are showing students where their priorities lie — and the rest of the country can see it, too.

Movement to address chronically low performance — bottom of the barrel in a significant number of categories for so many years that it has become a running joke — has come at a pace that gives lawmakers time and reason to expand access to charter and non-public schools.

Meanwhile, some could argue the flurry of legal filings that has led to this week’s mess in high school sports could have come at the beginning or at any point in the season. But the lightning-quick response to what the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission realignment meant for which schools made the playoffs (and which did not) is revealing.

So were the just-as-speedy counter injunctions.

These kids — specifically THIS group of young people — deserve better. If they are seniors now, facing their last games as high school football players, they were in the eighth grade, dreaming of high school football careers, in the fall of 2020. The majority of those in high school now spent parts of the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years just trying to navigate remote learning amid a deadly pandemic.

They’ve faced political upheaval on the books they can access and what can be taught in their classrooms. They’ve faced year after year of reports on too-slow performance improvement at their schools.

But where do boards of education make a show of leaping to stand up? Not in the academic realm, but on the football field.

These students — football players or not — are used to disruption. They’re used to waiting. They’ve become more resilient than some adults will ever be.

Goodness, they shouldn’t have to be.

They should be able to believe that boards of education have at least as great a sense of urgency about giving them the support they need to improve academic performance and prepare for life after high school as about where the football team landed in end-of-season rankings.

Adults across the state this week showed them, they can’t.