MORGANTOWN – Donna Talerico can give you a multitude of reasons – 2,200 of them, to be exact – as to why she thinks the “Summer Avalanche” is an effective learning program for Monongalia County Schools.
That’s how many students took part in the popular enrichment camp which completed its 2026 go-around last week, she said.
“It just keeps getting more and more popular,” said Talerico, who began her career in education in front of an elementary school classroom.
Seminar-type seriousness for the older grades and hand-on fun were successfully linked up, she said
Like most avalanches, Mon’s started with a lot of snow.
“If you remember back to 2014, we’d had 18 snow days,” the deputy superintendent said. “So we opened up the school libraries that summer. As a way to keep the kids engaged.”
Call it a case of pre-Avalanche inspiration, she said.
Meanwhile, notions and practices of intellectual engagement while away from school couldn’t have been more urgent – just seven years later.
It was the summer of 2021 in that virulent year at the height of the pandemic.
The district was coming off months of remote learning, given the hit-or-miss nature of the contagion.
Students and teachers came down with COVID that school year.
Whole classrooms were sent home and sports teams were benched as positive diagnoses continued to mount that school year.
Meanwhile, the Summer Avalanche came piling down. In a good way.
The county was able to pay for both it and an accompanying literacy program, The Summer Sizzler, through a $1.4 million outlay from the federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief Fund, also established in response to COVID.
Students took deep dives into computer coding, screenwriting and hands-on science projects of the “Bill Nye, the Science Guy” variety.
That funding ran out, however, and sweeping federal cuts to the U.S. Department of Education last fall quelled the idea of finding any alternative source – even in a district with an operating budget of more than $170 million at the time, Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said.
“Every dime and dollar,” the superintendent reported, was already accounted for and spent.
“It’s not like an account we’re sitting on,” he said.
At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, District Treasurer Nicole Kemper discovered some $1 million in carryover dollars, which were promptly applied to both summer programs for 2026.
Board of Education members, meanwhile, applauded – current president Shawn Smith, especially.
“Now,” he said, “I don’t have to worry about trying to hit the lottery.”
It’s all jackpot, all the way around, Talerico said.
“Summer Avalanche is just part of the weave for Monongalia County Schools,” she said. “It tells our story.”
