CHARLESTON — Education in the Mountain State was the main discussion, as members of the press and interest groups virtually attended the West Virginia Press Association’s annual Legislative Lookahead this week.

A panel made up of Higher Education Policy Commission Chancellor Sarah Tucker; State Department of Education Superintendent Clayton Burch; Fairmont State University President Mirta Martin; and Bonny Copenhaver, president of New River Community and Technical College, discussed the effects COVID-19 had on not only learning in PreK-12 but also in colleges and trade schools as well.

Burch talked about the experiences and the challenges the state went through, with the closing of schools state-wide on March 13, 2020. He said feeding the students and continuing to connect the students was the primary concern to the state.

Before the pandemic, about 500,000 meals by the state were served in the summer of 2019. That compared to 8 million served just this past summer alone, serving a total of 27 million meals to K-12 students by last December.

Burch later said that when switching to remote learning for the past nine months, it put a bigger spotlight on the “haves” and the “have nots” in the state. Some students did not have access to broadband internet due to many issues, including their locations not having service or finances. Burch said the Department of Education saw the impact of that has shown not only on grades but also the mental health of students as well.

“What we found is a renewed sense of what the public education system means to this state. There is absolutely no substitution for a teacher in the lives of a child. There’s no substitution for what that school means to the community and the families, not just for academics, but for that social, emotional, physical well being. It is truly a beacon to our service personnel,” Burch said.

The state received CARES Act funds that included $86 million in the first batch and $339 million in the second one which allowed officials to target everything from pandemic learning loss to broadband to now even being used on HVAC systems, allowing districts to target what their needs are individually.

Burch said they will be distributing $33 million from the CARES funding to districts targeting summer school programs to help make up for the lost time in the classroom.

“We decided that we wanted to support the counties. You want to make sure the resources are there, we want them to create these summer learning opportunities to help with the remediation,” Burch said. “We want them to be a variety of supports, not only to help those that might be in a high school for credit recovery. But we really want the ability for students who typically would not have been part of a summer learning environment to have an opportunity to really either hone their skills or have those refresher courses.”

Transportation and meals will be included in those funds as well, he said.

Virtual learning in the state saw a huge increase in students. The department found that many of the children were not prepared for the state’s virtual platform, but did see counties develop their own local virtual platforms that used their teachers for assignments to produce better results.

Prior to COVID-19, the state’s college matriculation rate showed that only 50.5 percent of seniors in the state go on to college, compared to 69 percent nationwide. Tucker said that rate was unacceptable and has worked with Burch to create pathways that benefited students from high school into a community college, university, or trade school.

However, the pandemic has also impacted those efforts. Tucker said despite getting $104 million annually for student financial aid programs from the legislature, Promise applications are down by 50 percent and 25 percent for FAFSA applications this year. One of the reasons why the numbers are low is because students are not receiving the same type of college counseling as they were receiving before the pandemic, according to Tucker.

“The students that we’re losing right now in this pandemic are the students that we cannot afford to lose. They’re the students that can’t afford to go to college without filling out the FAFSA,” Tucker said. “They’re the students that can’t afford to go to college without West Virginia investing, without the higher-end grant program, without Promise. Those are the students that aren’t getting the information that they need.”

Martin said Fairmont State executed a plan which delivered over 1,000 in-person and online training sessions to all of faculty and staff back in March just in three days to serve students remotely, along with offering off-site mental health counseling and tutoring.

Realizing that reopening the physical campus was critical to student’s educational success, social development, and mental health, Fairmont State successfully returned to face-to-face learning for the entire fall semester and experienced the highest year to year percentage increase in headcount enrollment of all of the public institutions in West Virginia, said Martin.