The Intermountain – 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.
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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.
