Mary C. Snow Elementary
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The new principal of Mary C. Snow West Side Elementary said Monday she’d like for the high-poverty area school to get off the year-round calendar.
Cheryl Plear said she had about 320 students show up to the Charleston school on its actual first day, July 12, but about a hundred more showed up about three weeks later, on Aug. 8, the date classes started for the vast majority of other Kanawha County public school students.
Kanawha’s Mary C. Snow and Piedmont Elementary, which is on Charleston’s East End, are the only two year-round public schools in West Virginia.
Last school year, Mary C. Snow had the lowest English language arts standardized test proficiency rate of all Kanawha public schools.
“I worry about students who miss three weeks of school,” Plear said in a presentation she was asked to give to the Kanawha school board Monday. “I worry about that. There’s no way that you can make it up. Most of these students come here and they’re already behind anyway.”
She said a school family support worker contacted parents, drove through the community to try to find the missing children, found that a lot of students had transferred out of state, and eventually found all but 17 who were missing.
When asked by board members at Monday’s meeting, amid Plear’s presentation, about the year-round calendar at her current school, Piedmont Principal Beth Sturgill said she doesn’t have the same problem.
“At Piedmont, we feel very strongly that the balanced calendar, for our school calendar —” Sturgill said, before Plear cut her off by asking the board whether she could continue with her presentation. Plear said the Piedmont area students don’t have the same challenges West Side students have.
“We can’t help it when parents get evicted from homes, we can’t help it when parents are sent to prison, we can’t help it when parents overdose and then children have to be moved to another setting — a grandparent or in foster care,” Plear said.
She said a parent just overdosed Sunday night, and the school didn’t know whether the child will be relocated.
The board voted Monday to transfer Sturgill to Central Elementary in St. Albans, effective Oct. 24. Board member Ric Cavender, who has a son who attends Piedmont and one who will start there next school year, called Sturgill’s move “a big loss for Piedmont because she’s been an incredible principal,” but said she wanted to be closer to her St. Albans home.
Cavender said he thinks the year-round calendar has worked well for Piedmont, and said it’d be up to a vote of Mary C. Snow school faculty, administrators and parents — not a vote of the board — to change that school to a traditional calendar if they desired.
When asked why students aren’t showing up at the start of the year-round school year, Plear said the real problem is that West Side families may other have students who are going to schools on the traditional calendar.
“When our kids see other kids out playing, swimming, doing activities, they’re not going to want to come to school,” Plear said. “When they’re living in a home with a brother or sister who’s going to middle school, ‘They’re still in bed, asleep, I’ve got to get up and go to school.’”
Plear, who said the school system also offered beginning teacher training three weeks after her new teachers started, said the other West Side schools opposed going onto a year-round calendar. She also attributed some of the high teacher turnover at her school to the calendar.
Plear said Mary C. Snow just finished its first nine weeks, and students got back from a break Monday.
According to her report, 47 students already have six to 10 absences, 14 have 11-20 absences and seven have 21 or more. She said the seven students are some of the pupils the school couldn’t locate before the year started.
Of all Kanawha public schools, Mary C. Snow had the lowest percentage of students deemed at least “proficient” last school year on the statewide Smarter Balanced standardized test in English language arts.
Just 16 percent of students there were labeled proficient — meaning they scored a 3 or 4 on the 1-4 scale — compared to the 86 percent proficiency rate at Kenna Elementary, the highest-scoring Kanawha public school in English language arts, and the 80 percent rate at Holz Elementary, the county’s second-highest-scoring public school.
Those schools, both in Charleston’s South Hills, which is among the more affluent parts of the county, also had the highest math proficiency rates among Kanawha public schools: 78 percent at Kenna and 76 percent at Holz.
Plear said she was not only concerned by the school’s overall proficiency rate, but the fact that so many students were scoring ones. She called it a “tragedy” and “crisis” that only 4 percent of last school year’s 45 tested fourth graders scored a 3 or 4 in English.
Plear became principal at Mary C. Snow, where at least 60 percent of students are black, this school year after Kanawha school board members approved in May moving Johnny Ferrara to a central office position.
She said the school has four administrators, one of whom has never been an administrator elsewhere but is doing a “wonderful job.” She said that out of the school’s 21 regular classroom teachers, a third are new to the school, and five of those seven new teachers are in their first year of teaching anywhere.
Three of the school’s four special needs teachers are also in their first year teaching anywhere. She said the school has various other staff, including seven “Title I basic skills teachers,” a counselor, a social worker and a psychologist.
Also Monday, the board approved:
A $3.3 million contract to Flint Construction for additions and renovations to Andrews Heights Elementary in Tornado. Board President Jim Crawford said the work has been a long time coming, saying the work would give students a bigger place to each lunch and get rid of portable classrooms that have been there for 35 years.
Developing a rental plan, for $395,500 and up to four years, to use land owned by Elkview Drive-In Holdings for parking for Elkview Middle. Kanawha plans to put portable classrooms for Herbert Hoover High students, whose building was wrecked by the late-June floods and are awaiting construction of a new school, in the parking lot in front of Elkview Middle.
Charles Wilson, Kanawha’s executive director of facilities planning, said that previous plans included installing parking, bus access and road access on Elkview Middle’s football and baseball fields and then rehabbing the fields after those temporary facilities were no longer needed. He said the cost of renting space for parking — the lease can be canceled early if a new Hoover is constructed in fewer than four years — is substantially less than the cost of using the fields.
“Plus the benefit of concessions, being able to play at your home fields, and then we also had some expenses to take kids back down the river for athletic events,” at the Hoover facilities, Wilson said.
Reach Ryan Quinn at [email protected], facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.