Five years ago on Friday, March 13, 2020 Gov. Jim Justice announced a state of emergency, and all public places closed down. Private businesses were able to reopen sooner, but the public schools opened slowly because of concern for the health and safety of children. Randolph Co. Schools reopened after Labor Day 2020 with students going two days per week on a rotating schedule: those whose names began with A-L went on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was a deep cleaning day and those with names beginning with M-Z went on Thursday & Friday. Our own grandchildren continued with online schooling until April 12, 2021 when they returned to a nearly normal school schedule, but our local schools have never fully recovered lost learning.

The new “School Choice” laws and Covid-19 shutdown changed expectations for public schools. After the Hope Scholarship paid for a mass exodus of public school students using tax dollars for home schooling and private schools, WV rural counties are now suffering a lack of public school funds. Our Randolph County Public Schools rank 54th out of 55 counties in West Virginia by academic performance, and funding for the next school year is uncertain. West Virginia has been near the bottom of the list of state in academic performance consistently for several years.

West Virginia has the lowest percentage of college educated people, and we do not have much hope that most parents are prepared to provide good home schooling. The data suggest that we may have some of the least prepared students in the United States — perhaps — in the developed world.

According to a fact sheet from the WV Center on Budget and Policy enrollment in public schools has fallen by more than 11,000 students in the last five years. Our decline outpaced the national level of decline. West Virginia is the only state to have lost population for 50 years and the only state expected to continue to lose population for the next fifteen years.

We cannot attract new families as long as our schools are thought to be among the worst in the United States, and the chaotic Hope Scholarship does not add much real hope. At this point, the Hope Scholarship does not include a measurable concept of academic accountability for student performance or teacher preparation qualifications.

Now we need to hold WV legislators accountable because the current school funding formula does not serve children well in rural counties like Randolph. On average school districts receive $5,540 in state funding and $2,250 in county funding for a total of $7,790 tax dollars per pupil for 2024-2025. The state and local contribution ratio varies widely across districts in West Virginia because revenue depends on property taxes.

West Virginia is one of only a few states that does not consider the poverty level in each district, and poor counties are not able to pay a larger share of school funding. Randolph has the additional problem of needing to pay for buses to cover a larger land area.

Passing a school levy may help in Randolph County, but we also need to have a larger share of state funding to meet the needs of students in our large rural county.