CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Education will be a major focus of Republicans this session and officials expect two key bills to quickly move through the House and the Senate this week.
Del. Amanda Pasdon, R-Monongalia, chairman of the House Education Committee, said the committee plans to take up legislation dealing with alternative certifications for teachers while the Senate Education Committee tackles charter schools.
“It is a Republican caucus initiative,” Pasdon said about education. “We’ve made it one of our primary focuses.”
Pasdon said West Virginia’s teacher certification process is “outdated and overregulated,” ignoring many qualified teaching candidates because their degrees are not specifically in the field of education. Pasdon said she recently spoke with a man in Union, W.Va., who taught foreign languages and history at West Point, but was turned down for a teaching position in West Virginia because he lacked an undergraduate degree in teaching.
“As a parent I would be elated to have my child taught by someone with those credentials,” Pasdon said. “But he was told he couldn’t teach French in a high school because his undergraduate degree was not an education degree.”
Pasdon said the state already has a transition to teaching program, but it requires 18 hours of additional education, which can be time consuming and expensive for a person looking to go into teaching.
Pasdon said an alternative teaching certification bill would seek to further reduce that barrier and make it easier for county school systems to develop programs for certifying new teachers.
“I’m a big proponent of local control,” she said. “They could develop a program, contract through a RESA (Regional Education Service Agency), or a higher education institution.”
Alternative certifications were part of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s proposed education overhaul in 2013, but was eliminated from that bill during negotiations, Pasdon said.
The state has about 700 teaching vacancies statewide, and Pasdon said many schools and children are dramatically underserved because they cannot attract enough qualified teachers.
“Everyone understands we have a shortage and a massive challenge ahead of us,” she said.
Alternative teaching certification “is one mall step. This has to be one of the tools in the toolbox.”
Pasdon said she believes there will be bipartisan support for the alternative certification program, and she hopes to have the bill through the House Education and Finance committees and on the House floor this week.
State Sen. Dave Sypolt, R-Preston, is chairman of the Senate Education Committee and said Senate Bill 14, Creating Public Charter Schools Act of 2015, may take a little longer to bring to the floor.
“Unfortunately the language was out of date,” he said Friday. “We’ve been reworking it all week.”
Sypolt said the revised legislation will be brought to the education committee on Tuesday, but will be a working copy. Several groups, including representatives of labor organizations and a national charter schools group, will speak at the meeting, but there will be no discussion Tuesday.
“We want to give everyone a day or two to look it over, bring it back on Thursday,” Sypolt said. “I would anticipate having something ready to pass out of committee by the end of Thursday. However, if it’s not ready, we will hold it over until the next week.”
Sypolt said West Virginia is one of only seven states nationally that do not allow charter schools.
Charter school legislation “is extremely complicated in West Virginia because of the way education is organized,” he said. “Here it is very centralized with a state board of education that dictates policy to local school boards. Charter schools by nature are the opposite. They come from the bottom up, starting in the community.”
Sypolt said he and many state Republicans support returning control to counties.
“It seems ridiculous that we’ve been taking control away from the local level and putting it at a central board of education, yet we are expecting parents to be involved and invested at the local level,” he said. “The true challenge in West Virginia is to get the parents involved in children’s education again.”
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