By Stephen Smoot
In several months, the West Virginia State Legislature will convene its session for 2027. One of the primary topics of discussion will lie in the school aid formula.
The past 30 years have seen mounting costs for public education. For example, in the 1980s many, perhaps most, of the schools in West Virginia lacked air conditioning. Today, HVAC represents one of the most pervasive costs of basic equipment used in schools.
School buses in older times were more reliable and went longer without requiring maintenance. Modern emissions control devices in many cases have damaging effects on transmissions, leading to more transportation costs.
Schools have changed their focus as well. As society faces the impact of the decline of the traditional family, more children find themselves in homes that lack stability, or even caring. Grandparents now help or entirely raise about half of school age children in West Virginia. More children growing up without sufficient attention or care see developmental disabilities unaddressed, making their education more difficult.
Central offices have had to add staff to contend with modern issues, but the State will not cover their salaries.
Looking at where the area has been, however, in terms of education gives perspective on how the State can move forward.
In colonial times, education in Virginia came from the home library or that of family or friends. Those who had these resources and the motivation to use them could set themselves apart quickly. George Washington copied maxims from books on social behavior and taught himself mathematics and other fundamentals behind his first career as a surveyor for Lord Fairfax. He took this job at 16 and spent many months helping Lord Fairfax mark off lands in the South Branch watershed.
John Marshall grew up on the western frontier in Fauquier County. His father Thomas had a small collection of books and often borrowed from the library of Lord Fairfax. The young man who would grow up into one of history’s great legal minds spent what would now be called the elementary school and middle school years devouring Roman and British authors, such as “Livy, Horace, Pope, Dryden, Milton, and Shakespeare,” according to Jean Edward Smith, Marshall biographer and also Marshall University professor.
Smith described Marshall’s early years as “an exceptional learning experience.” Reading and rereading Alexander Pope gave Marshall common intellectual and cultural grounding with other Founding Fathers such as Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
Thomas Jefferson learned in a similar fashion, but saw this as a less than effective way to educate the masses. He proposed a public system of education, but the east and west of the Old Dominion disagreed. Eastern counties favored a system of public higher education while those west of the Allegheny Front advocated for early childhood and elementary education.
Harrison County hosted a meeting on the topic in 1841, with Judge Edwin Duncan explaining that the public Literary Fund paid for “a splendid university . . . accessible only to the sons of the wealthy planters of the eastern part of the state and to the southern states.” He argued that only two “from the northwest” attended.
“The men of small farms are left to their own means for the education of their children,” shared the Judge. Books came at a premium price in the days before industrialized printing techniques.
Some areas did develop their own schools quite early on. Old Fields serves as the first location for a community school in modern West Virginia. Washington’s 1748 surveying trip into the area noted that at one point he commenced work near “the School House.”
Interestingly, this school was established on the Van Meter family’s property near the fort. The current Hardy County Superintendent and future Harrison County Superintendent is Dr. Sheena Van Meter.
Impetus for more investment in expanding the school system prior to the Civil War came from continual reports that literacy in Virginia was in steep decline. In 1846, the General Assembly passed an act allowing county school commissioners to use local taxes to supplement efforts. Those funds were seen, as historian Charles Ambler wrote, “as doles to the poor” and “fettered by much red tape in the forms of petitions and referenda and thus made impracticable.”
Ambler added “instruction was, as a rule, poor and limited.” Teachers were hired first for the ability to keep order in class.
After West Virginia achieved statehood, the first priority of the Republican Party “statemakers” lay in establishing a system of free public schools. Families had the option of sending children to them. Lawmakers advocated for them on the basis of the needs of the State. Early on, the focus lay on preparing students for patriotic citizenship, acquiring knowledge and skills to succeed in the workforce, and also military arts.
The State also constructed the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and Blind in the former Romney Academy.
Free public schools became compulsory in 1897 when the Prussian system was adopted. After military defeat by Napoleon, the Kingdom of Prussia abolished serfdom and made childhood education mandatory. Prussia rose from secondary status in Central Europe to a dominant position by the 1860s. In 1872, it formed the leadership core of the industrial and military titan, the German Empire.
Prussian and later German success likely helped to recommend the model. State Superintendent of Schools and West Virginia historian Virgil Lewis also noted while promoting the legislation that only 15 percent of students attended and they came to class irregularly. Chronic absences bedeviled schools then as well as now.
Many of the same issues facing school systems in West Virginia today were seen then. The “good roads” movement did not start seeing benefits until after World War I. Some areas, such as Calhoun County, saw students boarding with families in town because they could not get from their homes to the schools.
Distance between home and school becomes an issue today when considering the cost of vehicles and fuel, as well as the dwindling number of school bus drivers.
School superintendents and other education administrators cite the fact that schools are continually asked to expand their roles. They are expected to provide support and assistance for students from homes facing significant challenges, stepping in where parents should all too often to provide for basic physical and emotional needs.
Historically, schools took care of education and almost nothing else. Their legal role as “in loco parentis” referred mainly to reactions to students, such as discipline, not in depth service and support.
School systems cannot undertake all of these roles and still have sufficient resources of time and money to educate. Yet until the traditional family returns as a predominant building block of society, large percentages of children will remain in need.
One option could be to build Communities in Schools into a mandatory part of every public school in West Virginia. They could operate within, but not as part of the county school system, or paid for by it. CIS would be the focal point of bringing together support and services to students, leaving school teachers and administrators with their focus on education.
CIS would then connect with other social service and mental health organizations to help the students in need while keeping educators’ focus on education.
The past teaches lessons about education much as it does anything else. One lesson is that children can accept more intellectual challenges than they currently face. Washington mapped out northeastern West Virginia at the age of 16. Marshall was better versed in poetry and history as a teenager than many college professors.
Also, Alexander Hamilton learned mostly from books his father sold as a peddler and was fluent in Hebrew by his teen years. Harry Truman’s favorite high school teacher in Missouri farm country was his Latin instructor.
These men worked broadly and thought deeply because they read books of true substance and/or artistry. They challenged themselves to become great, but understood the work and time needed to hit that mark. Washington taught himself surveying and also was one of the great experimental farmers of his day. These early skills and the time took learning them trained his mind for even greater achievements in life.
West Virginia’s alternative systems of education are well-placed to educate children on the margins of public education, whether one means geographic margins, developmental and behavioral margins, or parental preference margins. Homeschooling or the smaller classrooms of microschools have the flexibility to meet students at those margins because they are more free of regulatory and legal constraints.
Public school systems, however, will always be the workhorse educating most kids in the state. We will always require them to carry the majority of the weight of the system. One has to keep the “workhorse” well maintained and supported as well because the families who choose these models deserve an effective education as well. Starving the workhorse keeps the work from getting done.
Fortunately, the economic development coming to West Virginia in the form of energy production and data center establishment will go a long way towards solving these fundamental funding issues. While state and local government should avoid simply using the excess monies coming down the pike to expand government,, the hierarchy of state needs, including roads, health care, fire, EMS, law enforcement, and also public education, can be met at their level of need and provide a more effective level of service.
