MORGANTOWN — West Virginia’s first charter school opened Tuesday, three decades after the first of these publicly funded, privately run institutions opened in Minnesota.
In a block building behind a bowling alley and strip mall, in the shadow of the closed Mylan Pharmaceuticals plant, uniformed children sat in classrooms as their backpacks dangled from hooks in the hall.
“You’ve got your first patient,” West Virginia Academy Director Heidi Treu said to the school nurse. A student trailed behind.
John Treu, Heidi’s husband and board chairman of the new school, pointed out a Latin class before discussing an issue with a teacher who said he somehow had three students in his class.
“It’s a scheduling thing where we had to shift some kids around,” John Treu said.
He introduced his son, who is attending the school in seventh grade.
He said only grades six to nine started Tuesday, and those students make up 134 of the current 475 enrolled. Work preparing the school for younger children was still ongoing Tuesday.
With preschool and elementary children arriving next week, teachers and others set up those classrooms while, outside, a worker jammed a post hole digger into the ground. John Treu said the playground would come in there.
He said this planned temporary structure, at the edge of West Virginia University’s Evansdale Campus, might house the school for anywhere from 18 to 24 months while a campus of possibly twice the size is built in the Cheat Lake area outside the Morgantown city limits. The school plans to add 10th, 11th and 12th grades in the coming years, and he floated the idea of keeping the Evansdale location as a permanent separate campus.
Although he said the charter learned last week it has no drivers, after the few it lined up found jobs elsewhere, it has purchased three school buses. Between those and vans, he said the school plans to offer transportation to students not just in Monongalia County but around Bruceton Mills, in neighboring Preston County.
By purchasing second-hand equipment from out-of-state public schools, John Treu, a WVU associate accounting professor, said the school got one bus with only 50,000 miles on it, classroom smartboards that cost $3 apiece and desks that averaged $1.25.
Research on charters shows they vary greatly in quality, like public and private schools do. West Virginia Academy’s educational track record is yet to be seen, but, at least in its design, it has distinguished itself from most public schools.
It’s opening earlier than any traditional public school in the state, save for Kanawha County’s Piedmont Elementary. John Treu said that — similar to Piedmont — it has a shorter summer and longer mid-year breaks for on-target students that serve as remediation periods for struggling students.
He said all the middle- and high-schoolers will be enrolled in the International Baccalaureate college preparation program, although the school’s application process to take part in that is ongoing. South Charleston High is the only public school offering that in West Virginia.
John Treu said the charter school plans to accomplish this generally without assigning homework.
“But we are a lot more intense in school, so we just tell them, you know, we do have higher expectations while you’re here, we’re gonna push harder while you’re here,” he said.
Fridays for all students will be set aside for activities like intramural sports, field trips and nontraditional learning, such as robotics, he said, and elementary math and English class groupings will be generally based on the child’s level of progress, rather than grade level.
The minimum requirement to teach at West Virginia Academy is a college degree, he said, not specifically an education degree or state teaching certification, but he said all teachers there must be working toward certification within three years, if they don’t already have it. He said the school has about 40 employees now, including full- and part-time, but he didn’t provide a breakdown of teachers’ certification levels Tuesday.
Some West Virginia Democrats pushed to legalize charters a dozen years ago, during the Obama administration and the national bipartisan embrace of these schools. But it was Republicans’ 2020 winning of supermajorities in both state legislative chambers that finally brought charters here.
Despite some defections, Republicans’ votes during the 2021 mid-pandemic session overcame lockstep Democrat opposition to pass a law that let charters open without any locally elected county board of education’s approval. Public school worker unions staged a statewide strike in 2019 against a bill to legalize charters, weaken seniority rules and much more, but they made no such protest in 2021.
A lawsuit from two fathers who also are teachers and union members could still end charters here, but the West Virginia Supreme Court has, at least temporarily, lifted a lower court judge’s injunction.
So, despite the justices’ final gavel still hanging over the issue, West Virginia education history was made Tuesday. West Virginia Academy became the first of the four planned Mountain State charters to open.
The other three, one in Jefferson County and the other two online, will start Aug. 22, according to the state Professional Charter School Board. That’s the unelected charter school approval board Republicans created, with members appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate.
The 2019 omnibus education law actually first legalized charters in West Virginia, but it generally gave denial power to the elected county school boards. The public schools those boards run would have to compete with charters for enrollment and the connected per-pupil state funding money.
West Virginia Academy was the only charter that moved forward with applying to open under the 2019 law, but the school boards of Monongalia and Preston counties shot it down. The Supreme Court then denied the academy’s appeal of that rejection but, when the academy applied to the new state Professional Charter School Board, it got approval.
The Monongalia school system didn’t comment Tuesday on the new addition to their county’s educational offerings.
