Walker back as MON BOE president

By Jim Bissett, The Dominion Post

MORGANTOWN — A very familiar face on the Monongalia County Board of Education will help marshal Mon’s students through a very unfamiliar world of school this fall – as COVID-19 rings the morning bell.

Nancy Walker was elected to a two-year term of BOE president during a special meeting Tuesday night.

Walker has wielded the gavel before during a tenure that dates back to 1996.

She was most recently the top vote-getter on the BOE ballot during Mon’s primary last month.

Meanwhile, her fellow board member Ron Lytle, who also successfully ran for re-election, will step down from president to serve as vice president for the next two years.

During her 24 years on the board, Walker has amassed a portfolio of business-as-usual BOE experiences, from PowerPoints on textbook offerings to hard votes on the closing of beloved schools, due to declining enrollment and other factors.

Now, she and her fellow board members are going to class next month with COVID-19.

The first day of school here is less than seven weeks away – Aug. 20 – and the district wants to ease back in that first week, with a staggered schedule of in-building instruction and remote learning.

Ideally, the district wants all of Mon’s students in every building, every day, come Aug. 31.

Donna Talerico, Mon’s assistant superintendent of schools, said the district is meeting regularly with principals, teachers, parents and other staffers of the school in preparation of that day – which hinges upon whatever path the pandemic will take.

A standing meeting with the county health department is scrolled on everyone’s day planner and tapped into everyone’s phone, Talerico said.

“There’s a lot to consider and everything is subject to change,” she said.

Mon’s school district, she said, will have a definitive, back-to-school document by the end of July.

The document, the assistant superintendent said, will be a primer and owner’s manual of pandemic particulars for Academic Year 2020-’21.

Social distancing, in the classroom and at recess, she said.

Face masks – “It looks like they’re going to way of life for us,” Talerico said, of the coverings.

And those parents, she’s quick to add, who are simply going to be too skittish to send their kids back to school while a lethal virus is still upon the land.

“We’ll have the technical provisions for those families,” she said.

It will all happen – again, she said – with a certain coronavirus making the final call as to how the learning will ensue.

As of 7 p.m. Tuesday, Mon County had reported 297 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to numbers from the county health department and the state Department of Health and Human Services.

That put the statewide total that evening to 3,505. To date, the coronavirus has 95 lives across West Virginia.