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Boone school board members hope Trump, Justice will help avoid school closures

By RYAN QUINN

Charleston Gazette-Mail

FOSTER, W.Va. — President-elect Donald Trump and West Virginia Governor-elect Jim Justice promised during their campaigns to revive the coal industry, despite significant evidence it won’t rebound to previous levels, especially in Southern West Virginia.

A couple members of the school board of Boone County, in Southern West Virginia, said before an audience of about 100 people at a board meeting Monday night that the victories of Trump, a Republican, and Justice, a Democrat who is similar to Trump and has played up his conversations with Trump, factored into their abrupt decision earlier this month to cancel public hearings on proposed school closures.

Some Boone school employees questioned Monday why the board had abandoned consideration of closing the Whitesville and Van elementary buildings at the end of this school year. Jeff Nelson, principal of the Boone Career and Technical Center, said he handed the board a petition signed by 127 employees, asking the board to at least hold the public hearings.

Boone schools Superintendent Jeff Huffman, who had proposed those school closures, said the closings will now not move forward. State law requires local school boards to vote by Dec. 31 if they want to close schools at the end of a school year.

“I felt like we needed to give President Trump and Jim Justice a chance to see if the economy can be helped and bring back the coal jobs,” said board member Joe Tagliente, who said it was the board majority’s sentiment to give things another year to hopefully improve.

Earlier this month, Tagliente’s fellow board members appointed him board president after Mark Sumpter, the former board president, resigned. In the face of state Schools Superintendent Michael Martirano’s orders this summer for the Boone school board members to drastically cut their 556 public school system employees’ pay and benefits in order to save money for this school year, Sumpter had cast blame for the county’s situation on President Barack Obama and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Charles Gibson, another Boone board member, said he’s heard five mines in the county are reopening, though the Gazette-Mail couldn’t independently verify that statement Monday night. In a brief interview after Monday’s meeting, Gibson called Justice a “coal man,” and similarly praised Trump.

“He’s for coal,” Gibson said. “We think it’s going to be turned around.”

The Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., told residents of another Southern West Virginian county, McDowell, earlier this month that he believes Trump will address “frivolous” and “over-reaching” regulations that help neither the environment or the safety of coal miners. State Board of Education member Tom Campbell noted the election results in expressing hope at a meeting earlier this month that a coal upturn could mean a better “long-term potential” for Boone.

Susan Pauley Kimbler was the only Boone board member at Monday’s meeting to say she wanted the school closure public hearings to move forward in order to “hear both sides.”

Most experts say that while air pollution regulations have played a role in coal’s decline, the Appalachian coal industry’s problems are due more to the rise in competition from cheap natural gas, competition from coal basins in other states, plummeting prices for renewable energy and in Southern West Virginia by the mining out of the easiest-to-get and highest-quality coal seams.

The cuts Martirano ordered this summer included a $3,800 to $4,000 decrease to the annual salaries of each full-time professional Boone employee, including teachers and school administrators. Boone school board members, after twice voting not to follow the state superintendent’s orders, finally agreed to do so under the threat that the state Board of Education would take away their power.

In the months preceding those cuts, which took effect for this school year, the Boone board had voted to close three elementary schools and cut 80 positions. All of those cuts were approved as Boone’s school system was seeing that it had received millions of dollars less in property tax revenue than what it had expected for last school year, a situation largely blamed on coal company bankruptcies.

All of those cuts were meant to save money for this fiscal year, which began July 1 and runs through June 30. But, yet again, revenues aren’t meeting expectations: Huffman said last month that it seemed like the school system would end this school year at least $1.7 million below projections.

Amy Willard, executive director of the stated education department’s Office of School Finance, said the Van school changes were projected to save $770,000 annually, including both personnel and facilities savings. Van Junior/Senior High ninth-12th graders would’ve been transferred to Scott High, and the Van Junior/Senior High building would become home to a kindergarten- through eighth-grade school, enabling the Van Elementary building to close.

Willard said the closing of Whitesville Elementary, whose students would’ve been transferred to Sherman Elementary, would’ve saved $492,000 in personnel and facilities costs.

Huffman said after Monday’s meeting that he doesn’t yet know exactly what he’ll now recommend to the Boone board regarding cuts for next school year. He also wasn’t yet sure what areas will be cut in this school year’s budget to absorb the proposed $171,000 decrease that’s part of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s $11.1 million statewide mid-year cut to state school aid.

The Boone superintendent said part of the response to the $171,000 loss was the board’s action Monday, effective immediately, to do away with the $500 incentives to system employees who provide notices of their retirements by a certain date each year. He said only classroom teachers will continue receiving $500 incentive payments for those early notices because those are state funded, but the extra $500 in local dollars the school system gave to them and other school employees is now nixed.

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