By Stephen Smoot
Last week on June 18, the Harrison County Board of Education opened with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Board chair Gary Hamrick opened the meeting by mentioning his impending vacation of the chair position. He informed the Board that he will be taking the gavel with him when he leaves the position, saying “I used it quite a bit, especially during COVID.” He added “I hit that pretty hard a couple of times.”
John Rogers, principal of Mountaineer Middle School, provided an update to the Board. He expressed frustration with the challenge of reducing the numbers of students considered “chronically absent.” The West Virginia Department of Education defines the term as meaning “a measure of the total instructional time missed by a student and is defined as individual students missing at least 10% of school for any reason.”
Rogers stated that 75 percent of students there are not chronically absent, but said that number “is lower than I’d like it to be.”
“I have not found a way to get kids there,” he shared. Rogers explained that the school had tried a number of programs that found success elsewhere, such as rewards. He and his staff tried “all they could think of,” and none of the ideas helped.
Chronic absences includes both excused and unexcused together in total. Rogers stated that a student could get 10 absences excused, but that many have accumulated as many as 30 unexcused absences.
“Coming to school is just not a priority to some people,” Rogers admitted, also stating that “the consequences aren’t there. It goes back to the court system.
Mary Frances, Board member, asked “when do we get to the point where the kid says ‘I’ve got to go to school.’ . . . How do we make it important to the parent?”
Rogers said “I can’t find an answer . . . they don’t see a need in their lives” and suggested that some parents may have had a poor school experience that sours them on sending their own children.
Mountaineer Middle School staff and faculty attempted a personal backpack delivery to each student household last year to build connections with parents and guardians. The backpacks were crammed full of student supplies. While some parents showed appreciation, Rogers said, many registered little or no response at all. Still others were not around at all.
When asked what he thought chronically absent students did, he responded “sleep, play video games, do things that are important to them. Rogers also offered that “I don’t think that sometimes kids understand what they need in life because they never had it.” He added that some “have never been to the beach. They may have never been out of Salem or Clarksburg.”
Rogers explained that if a child is not exposed to better, they may not decide to seek better in their own adult lives, seeing it as unattainable.
One bright note lay in the fact that more parents had chosen to involve themselves with the school.
In other business, the school system had started interviewing bus drivers. The situation for the county is “in pretty good shape because it has “not lost a lot of drivers.”
The Board also discussed implementing phases two and three for the Siemens safety alert and notification system. They approved an amount of not more than approximately $345,000. This would include alert signage for rooms with occasionally loud environments, such as gymnasiums or band rooms. It also has outdoor beacons visible to bus drivers and parents.
Each alert system can work with the county’s color code system.
Finally, the Board debated what to do with the Board member pay raise system passed by the state. The State provided a pay raise for members, increasing the pay from $160 per meeting to $260. It also cut the number of meetings from 50 to 40.
This effectively gives longer tenured Board members a pay cut. Hamrick called it “the most asinine thing.” To not penalize new members, however, hey passed enabling action to put the raise in place for county Board members.