Volume 4, Number 7 July 2002

INSIDE THIS ISSUE West Virginia Court Says School Board Blocked Citizen Participation West Virginia Plans for Mega-School on Hold A Chink in the Armor: Update on Vermont's Act 60 Alabama Supreme Court Backs Away from Enforcing School Finance Improvements Iowa Suit Challenges Use of Local Option Sales Tax Study Finds Child Poverty Worst in Rural Areas About RPM RPM Archives

West Virginia Court Says School Board Blocked Citizen Participation

West Virginians who support small schools won another court victory in June when a Raleigh County circuit judge blocked the closing of Marsh Fork High School, concluding that the county's ten-year planning process was flawed.

Judge H. L. Kirkpatrick III said Marsh Fork residents were denied "basic fairness" because they were not included on the committee "vested with the responsibility of researching and compiling the data ultimately expanded upon and utilized as justification for the closure of their own high school."

"It's not surprising that these people feel disaffected and alienated from a local board that, from all outward appearances, seems to ignore them," Kirkpatrick said. "Equal representation is a fundamental principle of democracy."

Attorneys for the school board were unable to identify members of the county's Comprehensive Educational Facilities Plan (CEFP) committee or say how many people served on it, stating only that the committee was "fluid."

Every school district in the state was required to submit a comprehensive facilities plan in order to compete for school building funds, and the plan was supposed to reflect large-scale citizen participation.

The Raleigh County school board voted in March to close Marsh Fork on a 3-2 vote. Kirkpatrick said there was no input from residents prior to the vote.

"It stretches the imagination to believe that any of these citizens from the Marsh Fork area who have commissioned studies, compiled statistics and packed both hearing and courtroom on behalf of Marsh Fork High School, would fail to seize the opportunity to serve on a CEFP committee if invited to do so," Kirkpatrick said.

He said if the CEFP had been properly constituted and operated in the manner intended, the facilities plan would be very different than the one submitted to the state.

"Deficiencies in the underlying composition of committees render the entire work product suspect," Kirkpatrick said in his ruling. "To gloss over the flawed establishment of the underlying planning team and committees...is to deny these residents basic fairness."

Kirkpatrick's conclusions support those reached by Challenge West Virginia, a statewide school reform group. Challenge conducted surveys and research into the state facilities planning process and discovered a process that discouraged, rather than encouraged, citizen participation.

"Basically we found that the CEFP committees at best didn't listen to those who support small schools," said Challenge coordinator Linda Martin. "In the worst cases, people were denied access to information, bullied by architects and school planners and ignored when they did manage to state differing opinions.

"Judge Kirkpatrick's opinion is so significant because it confirms what ordinary people told us about the facilities planning process -- it wasn't fair, it wasn't democratic and the facilities plans that were developed didn't belong to them."

Earlier this year Fayette County Circuit Judge John Hatcher stopped the closing of four schools after ruling that the county school board violated the state's open meeting laws by voting without public comment. He said the board committed "an egregious affront to the principles of democracy" when it held closure hearings for 12 schools on one day.

---by Beth Spence, Co-Director of Challenge West Virginia, a statewide organization of parents, educators and other West Virginians committed to maintaining and improving small community schools. For more information, visit http://www.wvcovenanthouse.org/challengewv/about.html.