The best way to build our society is through policy support for excellent schools with progressive taxation to pay for schools and infrastructure. Often our legislature is captured by corporate donations and chooses to vote in the interest of big business profit not our students and school staff.
My top priority is for every student to reach their maximum potential. This means working to make every student outstanding and appreciated. School success should not be connected to the wealth or prestige of the parents. Parents, teachers, students, and school personnel should be a team working together to plan an exciting learning experience for students.
I believe public schools offer the most democratic way to insure equal education for all. Charter schools lead to reduced services for working families.
Our Plan*
My top priority is for every student to reach their maximum potential. This means working to make every student outstanding and appreciated. School success should not be connected to the wealth or prestige of the parents. Parents, teachers, students, and school personnel should be a team working together to plan an exciting learning experience for students.
I believe public schools offer the most democratic way to insure equal education for all. Charter schools lead to reduced services for working families.
Our Plan*
- Make West Virginia the best place in America to teach.
- Provide the biggest teacher and school service personnel raise in West Virginia history.We must index pay for West Virginia teachers, substitutes, and school service personnel to our highest-paying neighbors, and tie that payscale to inflation in order to attract and retain quality teachers.
- Include competitive benefits for professional and service personnel including low or no co-pay healthcare, mental health services at 100% coverage, and affordable dental/vision insurance for every public school employee.
- Gradually reduce class sizes to 15 max (preK-3) and 18 max (4-12), and provide additional support staff in the classroom.
- Planning periods for all full-time classroom teachers should consist of no less than 60 minutes of uninterrupted and duty-free time each day to be used at the discretion of the individual teacher. Planning periods are NOT...
- Covering a class when a substitute is not called.
- Administrative duties like answering phones in the office.
- Meetings with the principal.
- Training or replacing a CE or ISE day.
- Additionally, explore schedules that would provide educators with at least two periods per week of collaborative time that would allow the opportunity to consult and work with colleagues to jointly plan instruction across classes
- Student loan forgiveness for all WV public school employees who remain in WV and are employed in a WV public school. (See Take Me Home Plan.)
- Repeal the law allowing charter schools.
- Fund PEIA and change the 80-20 rule so “the state pays for at least 80 percent of the cost of future PEIA expenditures, while employees cover no more than 20 percent of the remainder.”
- Less testing, more teaching. Put WV teachers in charge of standards and classroom education--not out-of-state testing corporations.
- Give retired teachers and school service personnel cost-of-living raises tied to inflation.
- Provide the biggest teacher and school service personnel raise in West Virginia history.We must index pay for West Virginia teachers, substitutes, and school service personnel to our highest-paying neighbors, and tie that payscale to inflation in order to attract and retain quality teachers.
- Make West Virginia the best place in America for any kid, no matter who your parents are or what your zip code is.
- Adjust the school funding formula to better help rural (“sparse density”) counties, especially in covering the increased cost of transportation
- Less money at the top; more in the classroom. Create a West Virginia Public Education Taxpayers Council (majority comprised of teachers and school service personnel; but also including parent, student, administrator, and community representation) to re-write our educational standards and testing system, with the goals of:
- Directing more resources to hands-on learning; less on testing
- Maximizing the freedom of teachers to teach
- Minimizing testing requirements to the bare minimum required by federal law
- Saving money on expensive out-of-state testing companies (that charge West Virginia tens of millions of dollars per year) -- savings will be passed on in the form of grants to promote art, music, debate, life-skills, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and other programs
- Making West Virginia the best place in the country for technical education by funding all higher education (apprenticeships, colleges, technical college, certificates), encouraging expansion of Simulated Workplace, and developing flagship career education and “early college” programs that unite high schools, technical colleges, and apprenticeship programs to give West Virginia students a leg up when it comes to access to technical education (borrowing from the experience of Rosdale Tech in Pennsylvania);
- Pushing resources from Charleston, out to classrooms. The 2012 Education Audit identified more than $18 million/year in opportunities to reduce costs at the State Department of Education, and more than $70 million/year from regional efficiency.
- A small portion of these savings, about $3 million, will go to increase the state’s portion of funding for public libraries by about 25% for these areas:
- Digital resources - Provides support for homework, research, job skills
- Library Network - Helps provide internet access, tech support
- Grants-in-aid - Direct aid to libraries
- The vast majority of the savings will be passed on to reduce class sizes, encourage on-site child care for teachers, administrative assistants for counselors, stop (and eventually reverse) the trend of consolidation, and eventually secure a classroom supplies stipend for every West Virginia teacher.
- No teacher should have to spend money from his or her own paycheck to get the supplies to do his or her job.
- A small portion of these savings, about $3 million, will go to increase the state’s portion of funding for public libraries by about 25% for these areas:
- Seeking ways to begin reversing the effects of school consolidation
- Making recommendations for other areas of improvement:
- how to promote and incentivize regional collaboration to reduce costs of administration and be able to afford to repair and/or keep open more local schools
- make teacher licensure more accessible to properly-trained career switchers
guaranteeing every student access to Career and Technical Education, including partnerships with Union apprenticeship programs and Simulated Workplace programs (including finding ways for elementary and middle school students to get access to these sorts of skills/programs)
- Protect the right of parents to homeschool their children
- Make each school a place of prevention, healing, and recreation.
- Add restorative justice options to school discipline policies in order to heal students and teachers, and to provide better alternatives to expulsion.
- Guarantee that a combination of substance abuse prevention, crisis response (Narcan/etc.), life skills, and mental health resources exist in every school, every grade, every class.
- Support school nurses by following National Association of School Nurses (NASN) guidelines for the number of nurses needed in our school system per student, taking into account both the fact that 25% of WV students have a medical disability, and the special circumstances of the pandemic.
- Pursue the expansion of school-based health centers in order to assure every West Virginia child has access to healthcare.
- Another effective strategy for preventing drug use is to provide healthy, easily accessible activities for children and families. We will employ shared use agreements to transform public schools into after-hours community centers, complete with meals covered by federal grant reimbursement. We could conservatively serve an additional 10 million meals this way. These arrangements can also be extended into summer programs, when possible.
- Follow the lead of Pleasants County, and put at least one mental health professional in every school--to provide direct (reimbursed) mental health services to children, partner with local agencies to provide wraparound services for kids, support teachers and school personnel, and spearhead trauma-informed practices throughout the school environment for kids, parents, teachers, and school service personnel. Plus, we'll have these professionals available in pre-K. Counselor-to-student ratio will be aligned with the 250:1 ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association), and we'll alleviate counselor clerical work so that counselors are best able to serve our children.
- Prepare kids for real life.
- Make West Virginia schools a key partner in our efforts to end hunger - through afterschool meals, passing Summer Feeding Program legislation, Energy Express, and continuing the statewide march toward full breakfast and lunch programs in schools (set out in the Feed to Achieve Act).
- Expand partnerships between high schools and Community and Technical Colleges, where students are able to graduate from high school with a technical certification or even an associate’s degree - akin to what’s currently being piloted at BridgeValley Community and Technical College, WVU-Parkersburg, and elsewhere.
- Guarantee high quality, evidence-based sex education.
- Spread the efforts of West Virginia innovators nationwide.
- Work with local partners to certify 100 West Virginia schools as “America’s Entrepreneurial Schools.” (This nationally recognized entrepreneurship education program was piloted right here in West Virginia, where EntreEd is based.)
- Expand locally developed efforts to reduce bullying, reduce the school to prison pipeline, and welcome children of all abilities, genders, and sexual orientations.
- Aim to make every school in West Virginia a “West Virginia Sustainable School” within 10 years - developing and executing a plan for energy efficiency. Similar efforts have saved tens of millions of dollars in Marshall County.