By Stephen Smoot
Since education reforms championed by State Senator and former Senate Education Chair Patricia Rucker, West Virginia has had two school systems. The traditional continued to serve the overwhelming majority of students while alternative systems used the virtual fertilizer, water, and sunlight of support from the HOPE Scholarship to educate and develop children along different lines. Within this system, parents, guardians, and, most importantly, children find individualized paths that lead to the same destination as public schools.
It is important and imperative to know that both school systems in West Virginia have labored diligently to address the expanding, and sometimes unpredictable, challenges created by fractured families and a similarly fractured society. Both have generally shown improvement since the COVID disruptions, even as bad apples have appeared here and there.
The state badly needs its traditional system to serve as it has while continuing to improve. The state also badly needs education pioneers creating various opportunities where children with very specific needs can find their own path.
What has not helped has been a specifically selected and rashly shared “example” of poor home school documentation distributed by Jackson County Schools Superintendent Will Hossaflook along with information and ideas to State Legislators and stakeholders. Some of that information actually did contribute to the discussion and debate over how to address current problems, but the “example” was a shot fired that formed a barrier to productive talks..
That “example” was a badly compiled and edited account of student grades and its placement implied that poor practice was common. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is as wrong to assume that all home schoolers and alternative educators document in this fashion as it would be to assume that all West Virginia middle schools are like the formerly dangerously out of control Martinsburg North.
West Virginia needs both systems to properly educate because different children have different needs. There is no way that the public school system can address all of those needs and it would not be fair to expect it to. Some children, for example, come from trauma or family dysfunction that renders it difficult for them to handle the stimulation of a normal classroom environment. Many of these kids tend to shut down, shut off, and do what they can to endure a difficult environment. Alternative education can shape itself to both educate and encourage children with these and other powerful problems better in many cases than a public school.
How do we bring two systems together that both have a fervent passion to educate and help kids face adulthood? Give each a stake in the other without one “lording it” over the other system.
Minds more grounded in the education system can come up with myriad ways this can happen, but here is a suggestion. Create a regime where the public schools can provide supportive services, such as nutrition, to alternative educators without any voice in the direction of curriculum or other facets of schooling, but public schools get something too.
Here is an actually potentially productive example. Create lists of supportive services from the public school system at certain tiers. The lowest tier would entitle the public school to, say one-fourth of each student thus served. Another tier would have more support, but the county schools would get the equivalent of half a student in state aid and that could, of course go higher.
Delegate Elias Coop-Gonzales (R-Randolph) proposed a bill that could help transition schools such as Pickens in his county, Hannan in Mason, or other very small public schools into HOPE Scholarship supported microschools. Pathfinder Institute in Evans, Jackson County educates over three dozen children. The small student population and class sizes also increase teacher-pupil interactions and allow for curriculums that emphasize students mastering student outcomes.
Additionally, microschools could pioneer a return to the best model of public education conceived, the one-room schoolhouse. In these environments, older children assisted in the teaching of the younger. This provided two outstanding outcomes. First, one learns much more thoroughly when teaching. Second, this inadvertently created a mass teacher education program where every teacher from rural West Virginia had multiple years of practical, but guided, instructional experience under their belt on day one of their professional careers.
It would be exciting to see this return in the 21st century. If they once again, in the form of microschools, dotted the remote hills and hollers, mountains and valleys, the costs of sparsely populated counties with large land areas could shrink.
Many ways exist to create “win-wins” between the public and alternative systems. With a commitment to finding the “win-win,” and the public schools respecting and honoring those working on other paths, both the traditional public school system and the alternative can come together to be greater than the sum of the original parts.
When a “win-win” happens here, the victory and laurels go to the children and parents who will benefit.