Wood County BOE maintains position cuts after hearings

PARKERSBURG -- Three social worker/attendance professional positions in Wood County Schools have been eliminated after a 3-0 vote by the Wood County Board of Education Wednesday.

The votes came during a special meeting for personnel hearings. Board members Judy Johnson and Sarah Townsend could not attend the meeting.

"It almost sickens me to have to be in this position," Board member Rick Olcott said about having to vote to terminate the three positions.

Board President Justin Raber said the situation is backwards since they are making budget cuts without having a budget.

"This is an issue for the Legislature to fix," Raber said. "We should be determining our budget before we determine personnel. We cannot do our employees justice, and most of all our students justice, in determining employee numbers before we even know what money we have. And I think that is something the Legislature needs to look at."

Olcott said a budget meeting is scheduled for May 18.

"We're making that a priority in that meeting to revisit this because it's a real critical area," he said.

Each employee talked about their work supporting students' mental health, safety and attendance needs. They all talked about how you can't teach an empty seat.

"These are the folks that stop a lot of things from falling through the cracks for these students and families," said Ryan Michael, American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia staff representative. "It provides (teachers, principals and staff) really critical support for their schools to function. When they know they have somebody that is taking care of the needs of the students and their families that otherwise they wouldn't get, that gets these kids to school."

Chris Rutherford, director of attendance and home services, presented data showing improvements in attendance for the current 2023-24 school year compared to the previous year. He said chronic absenteeism rate, which measures the percentage of students missing 18 or more days of school, dropped from 22.61% last year to 19.284% so far this year. Overall attendance rates have also increased, from 90.36% last year to 93.070%.

He credited the decrease in chronic absenteeism to the work of the social worker/attendance professional team in making over 20,000 family contacts to remove barriers to attendance. By connecting families to resources, the team aims to reduce chronic absenteeism by increasing instructional seat time for students.

"I'm one guy for the entire county. There's no way that I can replicate that by myself or anybody in my office," Rutherford said.

Raber said he hopes the board can revisit these positions during the May 18 budget meeting.

"Attendance is important," Raber said. "We can't teach empty seats. If we have any money that comes through budget season, my personal priority is that we bring these positions back. That, I think, is our number one priority."

The board is scheduled to meet in regular session on April 23 at 6 p.m. The meeting is open to the public and will be streamed online.

Douglass Huxley can be reached at dhuxley@newsandsentinel.com