ELKINS, W.Va. — Two schools in Randolph County will now be staying open after it was being proposed they close their doors for good.
The Randolph County Board of Education voted 4 to 1 Tuesday night to keep Harman School open. This comes after ongoing talks for the past few months to close the school.
Following the move to keep Harman open, Randolph County Schools Superintendent Shawn Dilly released a statement Wednesday that the BOE would formally withdraw the proposal to close Pickens School. The statement came hours prior to another meeting that was scheduled for Wednesday night regarding the schools’ potential closure.
Dilly said he is ultimately disappointed in this move to keep the schools open as the board had asked him to develop plans and address the school systems’ ongoing budget shortfalls and challenges.
“Obviously it has been affecting the county for quite some time and we’re kind of at a dire situation right now,” said Dilly. “The fact that the board has rejected those proposals pretty much ties our hands and leaves us in a difficult position of finding a viable path forward of balancing the budget for next year.”
Dilly said the school system has lost a significant number of enrollment over the last few years and the board was viewing consolidations as a last resort, however, he said with the loss of Covid relief funds, the system now faces a nearly $2 million dollar fiscal shortfall. He said consolidations were the most viable option at this point.
Dilly said now the situation remains up in the air as the board must figure out what to do moving forward.
“Now it’s going to be us working with them to try and find solutions moving forward, but right now we don’t really have a strong plan that can meet those goals going into next year,” he said.
Many in the communities of Harman and Pickens have been pushing back against the closure of the two schools, which house K-12 students, for months since the potential closures were announced.
A local pastor, Justin Murray said while it feels good to know their efforts paid off and the schools will stay open, now the work really begins as they navigate the evident spending challenge.
“We have to find a way to manage the finances better in the county, and on the flip side, how do we help the schools and the educational system, because they’re ranked 54th out of 55 for their education,” Murray said.
He said now their focus lies in helping the board and superintendent balance a budget while also figuring out a way the students have a better education than what they were receiving prior.
Murray is pastor of a church in Moorefield, West Virginia in Hardy County. He said for about 18 months now they have started going into smaller communities like Harman and supporting them through doing work such as fundraising at fire departments, schools, and recreation centers.
Murray said when the announcement came out that Harman School was potentially subject to be closed down, they felt they had enough connections within and outside of the community to be able to help them in the endeavor of keeping it open.
He said while finances have driven much of the previous proposals to close the schools, they knew there was a more important obligation to keep them afloat.
“What we pushed for was, we’re supposed to do what’s best for the children and what’s safe for the children, driving them from Harman to Elkins certainly wasn’t safe, even without the snow we’ve been dealing with these last couple of weeks, but, what’s the best thing for the children, and I think the Board of Education made the right vote last night what was best for the children,” he said.
If the decision was made for the schools to close down, Harman School, in the northeast corner of the county, would have gone to Elkins schools and Pickens, in the southwest corner, would have gone to Mill Creek.
Geographically, Randolph County is the largest county in the state.
Murray said with the size the county is, it’s particularly crucial to keep these smaller schools open for the sake of the entire community.
“If you take a small school like Harman and you close it, it just kills the local community,” he said. “It would affect the local businesses, it would affect the amount of population that would want to move there,
and so that hurts.”
However, Dilly said not all parts of the Harman and Pickens communities were happy about the move as they recognized this was one step of a 5-year plan to balance the budget, and now that plan is off the table.
He said the decision not to close the schools now puts them one step closer to a full-on state take-over of the county school system. Dilly said it’s time to go back to the drawing board to see if it’s at all possible to avoid that.
“I’m going to be asking the board to provide some additional guidance next week, we had rescheduled our board meeting to next week just because all of the hearings that were scheduled this week, and we will be asking the board on some additional guidance on what they’re willing to do and hopefully provide us a little more explanation to why they have chosen to step away from some of their original sentiments,” said Dilly.
Regardless, Dilly said they will continue to work with the state Board of Education to re-design a plan in moving forward the best they can.
Story by Katherine Skeldon, MetroNews