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WV Legislature considers ACT, school calendars

By RYAN QUINN

Charleston Gazette-Mail

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The West Virginia Senate Education Committee has started off this year’s legislative session by considering school calendar and ACT testing bills that somewhat resemble two bills that former governor Earl Ray Tomblin vetoed after the end of last year’s session.

Senate Bill 242, which the committee passed to the full Senate last week and is set for a final vote today, would delete the word “separate” from an existing law’s requirement that public school calendars provide “one hundred eighty separate instructional days.”

The bill also adds language saying that the instructional minutes that school systems build up over time by keeping students in class longer each day could be used to make up entire school days lost over inclement weather or emergencies.

Those are the same provisions of last year’s HB 4171, the final version of which passed the Senate 32-2 and the House of Delegates 94-5. Tomblin, who had pushed legislation in 2013 that implemented the 180-separate-instructional-days requirement, vetoed HB 4171 on April 1.

HB 4171, though, included a provision that is not in this year’s SB 242. It would have barred traditional-calendar schools from having students start before Aug. 10 or leave after June 10.

“With proper planning, a county school system should be able to achieve 180 separate days of instruction without encroaching on summer vacation to a great degree,” Tomblin wrote in his veto message last year. “Because this bill retreats from the comprehensive education reforms I championed in 2013, including the flexible school calendar concept, it is hereby vetoed.”

When asked where new Gov. Jim Justice stands on the idea of allowing accrued instructional minutes to make up entire missed school days, Justice spokesman Grant Herring wrote in an email that Justice “supports calendar flexibility for local school districts.”

“The Governor’s education reform bill will include provisions for greater flexibility at the local level,” Herring wrote.

He didn’t answer requests for further specifics.

The governor’s education reform bill hadn’t yet appeared on the Legislature’s website as of Tuesday evening.

Also, unless Justice was referring just to the limited specifics he provided during his Feb. 8 State of the State address, he still hasn’t released the education plan that he said during his Jan. 16 inaugural address he was “going to submit immediately for people to review.”

The Governor’s Office denied a Gazette-Mail Freedom of Information Act request for the plan documents.

Still being considered by the Senate Education Committee is SB 18, which would require the state next school year to “utilize the ACT and ACT Aspire assessments as the comprehensive statewide student assessment.” ACT Aspire tests are offered in grades three through eight, in which the federal government requires math and English standardized testing. The federal government also requires math and English standardized testing once in high school.

The bill also would ban using Smarter Balanced or PARCC as “the statewide assessment program.” Those are the two multi-state standardized testing systems that received federal government funding and were designed specifically to align with Common Core math and English language arts standards.

West Virginia uses Smarter Balanced tests as its statewide standardized tests for public schools.

Senate Education Chairman Kenny Mann, R-Monroe, appointed a subcommittee Tuesday to work on the bill, after it appeared on the full committee’s agenda twice.

Last year’s HB 4014, the final version of which the House passed 99-0 and the Senate passed 27-4, would have required the state to dump Smarter Balanced. The bill would have, at least, encouraged the state Board of Education to adopt ACT tests as the standardized tests — bill supporter and former senator Chris Walters even said the ACT tests were “kind of spelled out in this bill.”

Tomblin vetoed that bill, too. He wrote in his veto message that it would require the state to stop using Smarter Balanced “in a very limited timeframe,” and said this “discounts the time and consideration that will be needed to evaluate and establish a new statewide summative test.”

Since Justice took office, he has appointed four new voting members to the state school board, which has nine voting members as its maximum. Those new members also helped elect veteran board member Tom Campbell, a Justice supporter who also supported HB 4014, as their president.

Last week, the newly reconstituted board voted to move away from Smarter Balanced after this spring, but the board hasn’t yet chosen a new testing vendor.

When asked if Justice supports the current version of SB 18, Herring wrote in an email: “The governor wants to throw Smarter Balance [sic] in the trash and go with an option that will work for WV students at all levels.”

Justice mentioned something similar during his State of the State address, although he added then that he was proposing “we go to an ACT testing.”

Former Senate Education Committee chairman Dave Sypolt, who is still in the Senate but is no longer on the Education Committee, said he filed SB 18 before he knew he wasn’t going to be on the committee.

“It was more a bill to get us away from the SBAC [Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium] testing than it was to drive us toward anything in particular,” Sypolt, R-Preston, said. “I know that it specifically says ACT — you know I’m not hard set on that.”

Sypolt touted the fact that students can use the traditional high school ACT as a college-entrance exam. West Virginia isn’t one of the states that offers it freely to every student or one of the states that uses it as a statewide standardized test to meet federal accountability requirements.

Mann also said he isn’t set on forcing a shift to particularly ACT tests. He suggested the subcommittee will look into this and other issues. He said he generally supports using the bill as a way to force consistency in one type of standardized testing for West Virginia.

“We want our kids, you know, to have a test that’s worth taking and to kind of get them skin in the game and to want to do good on the test,” Mann said. “I’m not here to make it better for any vendor, or make it better for anything — the top priority here is to make sure that these kids are going to get the right type of test.”

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