“With concerns of closure sitting in front of us and the paths we have going forward, I think it’s important that we discuss this evening the other half of the situation if we don’t consider consolidation and closures at this point,” Dr. Shawn Dilly said during Tuesday evening’s meeting.

“We are looking at roughly 30 to 32 positions that we are going to have to reduce to balance the budget for next year,” Dilly said. “Our funding mechanisms that funded us have dried up. We’ve seen the loss in enrollment and that loss in enrollment has outpaced the amount of reductions.

“This board has taken proactive actions in trying to reduce staff, but the challenge we have when looking at those 32 positions, is we can only eliminate 11 positions right now, based on required positions under state code policy.” 

Dilly said the first positions to be affected would be custodians, secretaries, maintenance employees, cooks and coordinators.

Dilly

“We can’t take any bus drivers, we can’t take any aides away, so we pretty much have to look at these particular folks,” Dilly said. “We would also have to look at maximizing counselor ratios, nurses, librarians, art teachers, physical education, band, science and social studies. Assistant principals may have to be cut from our high schools, and we are looking at positions in the Central Office, as well as viable career technical education programs.”

Cutting support for athletic coaches and funding for Prevention Resource Officers were two other options Dilly said would be explored in order to make up for the $2.3 million less in federal money the school system will be receiving.

The $2.3 million figure represents what the school system will no longer have now that the federal American Rescue Plan Act funding has run out, Brad Smith, the school system’s director of finance and treasurer, told The Inter-Mountain Wednesday.

“That money was used for multiple things and many counties wound up picking up some salaries that they would normally be paying in order to increase their general fund,” Smith said of the funding the school system received from the American Rescue Plan Act, a COVID-19 relief package from Congress that provided nearly $123 billion in aid for K-12 education.

“Because we had a $2 million project at Jennings (Randolph Elementary School), and if we would have used the ARP fund we would have had to pay federal wages on that job, which would have skyrocketed well beyond $2 million. So what many counties did, us included, we actually picked up our salaries (with ARP funds), which freed up state money in order to do projects… We had all of our ARP spent by the end of last fiscal year.”

During Tuesday evening’s meeting, Dilly pointed out that “as you look at the breakdown of our budget for fiscal year ’25, 82% of that budget is related to personnel costs, which is normal for West Virginia schools, especially non-levy counties like ourselves; that is a fairly normal number.”

Next week, the public hearings begin on the proposed closings of the Harman and Pickens K-12 schools. The BOE will vote on whether to close the schools within the next two weeks.

The first public hearing for the Harman School closing will take place at Harman School on Monday, Dec. 9 at 6 p.m. The following day, on Tuesday, Dec. 10, hearings will be held concerning the other schools that will be affected if Harman closes. Those include: Midland Elementary (the hearing will be at Elkins High School at 6 p.m); Elkins Middle School (the hearing will be at EHS at 6:30 p.m.); and Elkins High School (also at EHS, at 7 p.m.).

The BOE will vote on whether to close Harman School that same evening, at 7:30 p.m. at Elkins High School.

The first public hearing concerning the closure of Pickens School will be on Monday, Dec. 16. That meeting will take place at the school and will begin at 6 p.m.

The following day, on Tuesday, Dec. 17, the other schools that would be affected in the potential Pickens closing will be the subject of public hearings at Tygarts Valley Middle/High School. George Ward is first on the list and will begin at 6 p.m. A public hearing for Tygarts Valley Middle/High School will be at 6:30 p.m. 

The BOE will vote on whether to close Pickens School at 7 p.m. Dec. 17 at Tygarts Valley Middle/High School.