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OPINION AND COMMENT By Dianne Weaver
Consider the future of public education and its connectedness to communities and the taxpayers that support it.
In a world where power continues to flow to centers of government, will community-based schools disappear in the next few years?
Unless parents and taxpayers take a stand, the answer is yes.
Like county and community government, education will be "globalized." The biggest losers, poor, rural and sparsely populated areas, even though 40% of America's students are rural.
Certainly, in WV, the State Board of Education has been given enormous power by the legislature over local school systems, with hundreds of small community schools already closed and several hundred more on the chopping block.
The message seems to be ... WVs 55 county school boards are burdensome, often composed of "under-educated citizens" who are ill-informed, and whose constitutional powers have already been diminished.
State education experts claim that taxpayers can no longer afford small schools, an economies of scale model that has placed tens of thousands of Mountain State children on school buses for well over an hour each way.
State education experts say local schools can no longer provide a diverse curriculum that will prepare students for the 21st Century, including the placement of trained teachers.
Research overwhelmingly supports that children do better in small schools.
"Choice" Has Ramifications
While Challenge WV has been fighting a battle to keep community schools within counties, the issue has moved into a greater arena that challenges the existence of county systems, or an erasing of county lines to allow children to attend a "school of choice."
The erasure is linked to the creation of RESAs, which were originally established to help local school boards improve their purchasing.
Choice has been politically sold nationwide as a good thing, and has wide appeal, but at the same time, indelibly linked to choice is the loss of community control.
The Lincoln County finance officer has indicated "choice" may bankrupt the Lincoln school system, with state officials supporting a large number of the county's students to attend school in a neighboring county.
A new paper by Kenneth R. Stevenson expands even beyond, discussing the possibilities and critical issues related to what the future holds for the field of education and the facilities that house it.
Stevenson asks "Will schools as physical places disappear and be replaced by virtual schools?"
Value Of Place-Based Schools
Feeding the assault on place-based education, some parents fear that their child will come to physical harm at school, also fearing that the values and beliefs that may be taught at school to their child will be in direct conflict with their own.
There are growing signs of "cocooning" in America within homogeneous
communities as evidenced by the increasing number of gated neighborhoods and housing developments catering to specific groups.
Families who move about every five years because of frequently changing jobs, have become less connected to a place, not rooted.
Unless schools come to be seen as integral to the lives of those without children in school, tax dollars will slowly but surely dry up for public education.
Challenge WV would remind education leaders they should be broadening their mission so that places called schools are viewed as community centers.
Certainly, in Calhoun County, the school has become open to many outside activities, often in use about every evening the the week.
The creation of distant, large, cookie-cutter institutions must surely risk the delivery of public education that America has held close to its heart.
Maintaining community schools has support from that community to tax itself for new schools or to upgrade existing ones, says Stevenson.
If Stevenson's assumptions could become reality, education could become a cyber-space activity, with virtually no input from those it directly affects, parents and their children.
Even more threatened are the basic cardinals of public education and how it directly effects democracy.
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