MORGANTOWN – Tuesday’s session of the Monongalia County Board of Education was the kind of gathering current BOE President Mike Kelly loves, he said.
“My favorite part of the meeting is anytime we get to do this,” he said.
That’s because some of the district’s top-achieving students were recognized during the proceedings.
University High’s state championship boys’ wrestling team was singled out, as was ProStart culinary students from the Monongalia County Technical Education Center – state champions, also, who are now headed to national competition next month in Baltimore.
Earlier incarnations of the grapplers and bakers have been under the lights before, which Kelly said is owed in part to traditional support of the county’s excess levy for education.
The measure that currently contributes more than $35 million to county coffers is up for renewal during West Virginia’s primary election, which is May 12.
Said levy has been on the books in Mon since 1973, and almost always gets voted in the affirmative, and by big margins.
In the meantime, the marketing for the upcoming renewal is running all-out by way of the Community for Monongalia County Schools.
The nonprofit was formed earlier this year with an exclusive marketing mission: To simply get out the word – and hopefully, the vote – on the next version of the levy.
Over the past few weeks, the group has organized gatherings, where kindred souls and those just getting educated can advocate for the levy.
The next session is online March 31 via Microsoft Teams, the group announced.
School athletics have a spin-off benefit from those levy dollars, but the real windfall, proponents say, goes to the academic side.
Dollars from the levy go to the salaries of school nurses, for example.
And the purchase of Chromebook computers – one function of which is to keep students connected.
However, Jennifer Secreto told the board, being connected only notches so much classroom real estate if students aren’t engaged.
While the laptops do well with the former, said Secreto, who taught freshmen Honors English for 35 years at Morgantown High before her retirement this past spring – it’s the latter, in which they’re lacking.
Speaking during the “delegations” portion of the meeting, Secreto asked the board to consider eliminating Chromebooks in the district altogether, saying they take away from actual learning.
The teacher, who is on the substitute list this term and is still in the classroom, cited studies from Europe that reinforce her call.
Under the mandates of state code, the BOE wasn’t permitted to respond to Secreto or launch a discussion.
Secreto was a Mon County anomaly related to technology. Her students didn’t use Chromebooks, she said, with the exception of quarantines during the pandemic.
And, she taught a unit on the importance of sending thank-you notes, handwritten.
She’s also lobbied the state Department of Education, asking the overseeing board to ban the laptops, though that decision would have to come from the local school board.
