West Virginia might let counties switch standardized test from SAT to ACT

CHARLESTON, WVa. — West Virginia’s state schools superintendent expressed openness Wednesday to allowing counties in the future to give their public high school students the ACT instead of the SAT as their standardized test, despite the state previously picking the SAT over the ACT to become the statewide standardized test for public school juniors starting this spring.

Also at Wednesday’s state Board of Education meeting, the board, in voice votes with no nays heard, hired Schools for the Deaf and the Blind interim superintendent Mark Gandolfi to that role on a permanent basis, with a $116,000 annual salary; hired School for the Blind Principal Jamie McBride-Vittorio as the combined schools’ chief academic officer, with a $97,000 annual salary; and transferred Jason Butcher, who oversaw the now-dissolving Regional Education Service Agencies in a role that had been directly under the board, into a roughly $77,300-annual-salary position in the state Department of Education’s Office of Adult Education.