Charleston Gazette-Mail – West Virginia has a people problem. From its counties to its cities and towns, and particularly its school systems, the state simply doesn’t have sufficient population for many of these institutions to operate effectively.
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Consider that the largest high school in West Virginia, Morgantown High School, has about 1,800 students. As state Board of Education President Paul Hardesty recently pointed out, 12 West Virginia county school systems have total student enrollments of less than 1,400. That means if every elementary, middle school and high school student from one of those counties were magically placed in Morgantown High, they would fall well short of filling all the classrooms.
Yet, each of those micro school systems still has a superintendent of schools, a school board and a central office bureaucracy to oversee as few as 900 students, much as the state’s largest school system, Kanawha County, which serves more than 23,000 kids.
