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We are looking forward to the Forest Festival homecoming season in Elkins. In 1930 the original reason the Elkins merchants began planning for a homecoming festival was to bring back those who had moved away from town. One great characteristic of American culture is the shared experience of community in schools. The Elkins High School Homecoming Parade last Wednesday made me think about what is being lost when we dismantle public schools. Music, sports, even higher math may be endangered.
Elkins Middle School band led the EHS Homecoming Parade with a variety of brass, percussion, and woodwind instruments. EMS band members did not wear their Green Hornet uniforms, but they all had their band sweatshirts. They had started learning music in elementary school and had been playing together this year for about six weeks at EMS. Elkins High School Band brought up the end of the homecoming parade in their casual blue jeans, but we will see their orange uniforms at the Forest Festival. Band members played clarinets, drums, trumpets, and even gleaming sousaphones that encircled the players' heads. The whole Elkins community supports the EHS band at the annual Corn Roast in the City Park.
Opportunity for music education is one thing that has changed for people who do not go to public schools. Bands make music a shared experience. Some parents pay for private music lessons for home-schooled students, and Augusta does offer choir for a fee, but there is nothing here like a real marching band to give kids daily opportunities to play music with peers. In some larger cities there are high school orchestras; however, that is a totally different cultural experience.
In addition to band music, emphasis on local sports is another shared community experience that our EHS Homecoming Parade made me reconsider. When my generation was in high school, participation in competitive sports was strictly limited to boys. Girls could be homecoming queens, band majorettes, and cheerleaders, but those roles did not include athletic scholarships. Now, with Title Nine, girls can be active in competitive sports and earn their way to college.
Nationally, academic learning may be the component of public education that is declining most, but from what I can see in West Virginia, there is no academic accountability for the Hope Scholarship. If home schooling parents have a good education and spend much of their time preparing and teaching their children, they may be able to individualize and focus on academic learning. However, parents, who are not well educated or interested in good teaching, may be using their children's allotted school funding for other purposes. Furthermore, most local private schools do not prove that their students score higher on objective academic achievement tests than students in public schools.
The school-age population is declining slowly all over the world, but it is dropping faster here. Randolph County Schools have lost 400 students since West Virginia started the Hope Scholarship, and small towns like Harman have no good options now. Randolph County Board of Education tried to help by selling the school building for $10 to Harman citizens working to provide a hometown school, but several Harman students were left out of the deal. They must ride a bus to Elkins for three hours a day.
Local schools are stronger when small communities can work together to support the next generations.