Community Bulletin
Women's health care is available close to home at four central West Virginia clinics through Vandalia Health — the not-for-profit founded by the Davis family more than a century ago, whose Foundation still funds local scholarships and programs. Read more →
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By Tre Spencer, Mountain State Spotlight
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HINTON — Eighteen-year-old Avah Meadows still remembers Friday nights when her cheer squad had to beg parents for rides to away games, piling pom-poms and duffel bags into sedans because there wasn’t money for a bus.
She remembers the flickering lights in the auditorium, worn bleachers in the gym and the old, dented locker she used to store all her books.
None of it felt unusual at the time. Looking back, Meadows said she now sees how far her school lagged behind neighboring districts.
“It’s definitely well known that we don’t have as much money to put into things as a lot of the other schools in the area,” she said.
Now, after Summers County voters rejected another school levy in May, Meadows says those experiences illustrate problems that can’t be solved by local fundraising alone.
Rural counties like Summers, where nearly a quarter of the population lives in poverty, have smaller tax bases to raise local money. But the state’s decades-old funding formula doesn’t account for the difference in revenue needed to operate the county’s school system.
As enrollment declines and federal pandemic aid runs out, many rural districts across West Virginia are struggling to maintain staffing, transportation and aging school buildings and are now weighing school closures and consolidations.
A levy that hasn’t passed in decades
Summers County has three elementary schools and one high school serving about 1,100 students. In May, voters rejected a school levy by roughly 80 votes, continuing a streak that’s left the county without an excess levy since 1979.
The levy would have generated about $1 million annually to help pay for improvements to aging school buildings, transportation for student athletes and salaries for more teachers and service personnel.
Board President Greg Angell said the district used about $13 million in temporary federal COVID-19 relief money to subsidize many of those things after the pandemic, including after-school tutoring and school resource officers assigned to keep kids safe.
When that funding expired, many of those programs disappeared. Due to the loss of funding, the district lost both of its school resource officers and over half a dozen teachers and staff.
Angell said officials reduced the proposed levy from 30% in previous years to 20% this year, hoping to make it more acceptable to voters.
“We felt like any money we could get was better than no money at all,” he said.
He said the board plans to put the levy back on the ballot for November’s general election, but hasn’t finalized whether or not the amount will be changed again.
While several West Virginia counties rely on excess levies to supplement state education funding, Summers County has gone decades without one, even as neighboring counties have continued renewing theirs.
Some voters took to social media opposing the levy because they said they could no longer afford higher property taxes amid rising costs for groceries, electricity and insurance.
Others questioned whether local taxpayers should shoulder expenses they believe the state should fund.
Lauren Crook, the district’s chief school business official, said the district needed those levy funds to stay in the black.
“It’s a vicious cycle in public education right now,” she said. “Because the state aid funding formula isn’t giving us enough money.”
Crook said districts receive state funding through a formula that determines how much money schools receive for personnel and other operating costs.
But she said Summers County often spends beyond those allocations to meet student needs, and rural counties across the state have the same problem.
Rethinking how schools are funded
West Virginia’s public schools are funded from a mix of state, federal and local revenue. The state’s school funding formula determines how much districts receive based on student enrollment data and resource costs.
Under the current funding formula, state aid largely follows student enrollment. As rural counties lose population, districts receive less money even though many costs remain fixed.
A school still has to heat its buildings, transport students over long rural routes and employ enough teachers to cover required subjects regardless of whether enrollment drops.
Officials have called the formula outdated, warning that without reform, more schools across the state could close or consolidate because of financial hardship.
For educators, funding decisions aren’t just reflected in the state’s budget, but they shape what happens in classrooms.
At Jumping Branch Elementary, Principal Susan Newsome said teachers increasingly take on responsibilities far beyond teaching, because there’s a shortage of other faculty members.
“You’re no longer just a teacher,” she said. “You’re a counselor, you’re a nurse, you’re a detective and you’re a parent.”
Newsome said she wishes lawmakers spent more time inside rural schools to understand the challenges both students and teachers face.
Her concerns mimic those reflected in a recent report from RAND Corporation researchers whom House lawmakers hired to determine how they could help public schools.
In their report, researchers recommended that lawmakers increase funding for public schools, give counties with higher populations of students in poverty and with disabilities more funding and cap the state’s Hope Scholarship program.
Earlier this year, Sen. Vince Deeds, R-Greenbrier, introduced legislation to update the state’s school aid formula.
The proposal would have overhauled the formula to give additional consideration to rural districts, bus transportation and students with disabilities.
But Sen. Jason Barrett, R-Berkeley, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, did not put it on his agenda. He didn’t respond to questions about the committee’s priorities.
Deeds, who grew up near Jumping Branch Elementary and attended the school, said the current formula no longer reflects the realities facing rural districts like Summers County.
“It’s going to have to be updated and improved upon,” he said. “It just really is one of those things we’re just way behind.”
Deeds said he plans to reintroduce the legislation next year because he believes the state must continue investing in public education.
House lawmakers did move a bill that would’ve increased public school funding for students, but ran out of time to pass it because of debates over state spending.
Sen. Jack Woodrum, R-Summers, said lawmakers have to balance tax cuts with ensuring the state has enough revenue to fund public education and other essential services.
“I have a real problem with cutting taxes with the belief that revenue will increase just because we cut taxes,” he said. “Things like public education are the type of things that I think will ultimately suffer if the revenue doesn’t appear.”
‘I’m a product of public education’
Christina Cochran, a Jumping Branch resident whose two children will soon enter the Summers County school system, said she hopes lawmakers revisit the state’s school aid formula so public school funding better reflects the needs of Summers County schools.
“I’m a product of public education, and I just never imagined that when my kids were going into school that we would be faced with these cuts,” she said. “It just seems really crazy and scary to me.”
For Meadows, the debate over school funding is about more than a levy or a line item in the state budget. It’s about whether students in Summers County have the same opportunities as those in neighboring districts.
She watched buses disappear from cheerleading competitions, teachers leave and classmates transfer to schools in surrounding counties that offered more programs and better facilities.
Even now, she still hears Summers County High School described as “the poor school.”
As she prepares to begin college at Marshall University this fall, Meadows hopes lawmakers and local voters don’t lose sight of what students are asking for.
“It’s not even that we want to have more things,” she said. “It’s that we want the activities that we do have to just be improved.”
