A day after the state Board of Education labeled her whole school an F, putting it among only 15 public schools throughout West Virginia to receive the board's lowest ranking, Mary C. Snow West Side Elementary's principal reiterated she wants her school off the balanced calendar.
But for her students struggling with academics and attendance, Principal Cheryl Plear wants mandatory year-round instruction.
Not the kind of year-round synonymous with the balanced calendar, which provides students several three-week intercession breaks during the school year in lieu of the traditional long summer break.
Plear wants her school to switch to the traditional calendar used by other public schools but add a mandatory summer academy that will keep the kids who need extra help in school over the long summer break.
Plear, who started leading the school this summer, said she envisioned the academy just after the F rating was revealed.
"Since these children need as much time as we can give them, we had the extended day, but I would also like to do the extended year to have a real year-round school," Plear said last week. "We can't continue to keep moving these kids on, you know, unprepared."
She said the summer academy, which would take place in June and July, could provide individualized instruction and small classroom sizes. Plear said fresh-out-of-college teachers or retired educators could work in the academy.
Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Ron Duerring said Plear is looking to fund the initiative through grants and through reallocating existing Title I money that flows to her school due to its high number of poor children.
He said he believes the state school board would have to approve a policy waiver to enable the school to force struggling students to attend the academy.
In a presentation to the Kanawha County school board last month, shortly after the state Department of Education revealed her school had the lowest English language arts standardized test proficiency rate of all Kanawha public schools, Plear blamed attendance issues and inaccessibility to continuing training for teachers on the school's balanced calendar. She said she wants off the calendar.
Just 16 percent of Mary C. Snow students were labeled proficient - meaning they scored a 3 or 4 on the 1-4 scale - on the end-of-year English Smarter Balanced test. This is compared to the 86 percent proficiency rate at Kenna Elementary, the highest-scoring Kanawha public school in English, and the 80 percent rate at Holz Elementary, the county's second-highest-scoring public school.
Eighty-three percent of elementary and middle schools' A-F grades are based on students' scores, and their growth in those scores, on the math and English Smarter Balanced tests. The Smarter Balanced measures represent about 73 percent of high schools' grades.
Other factors, like attendance, make up the remaining part of the A-F scoring rubric.
Holz and Kenna were among the 45 schools throughout the state, and five in Kanawha, to get As. Mary C. Snow, one of the 15 F schools statewide, was the only F school in Kanawha other than Riverside High. Riverside scored high enough on the overall A-F rubric to receive a C, but it got an automatic F because the education department says it failed to give at least 90 percent of its students standardized tests.
Riverside Principal Valery Harper has spoken against the fact her school was the only one in the state to get an F due to this.
Department spokeswoman Kristin Anderson has said, "If a school fails to test 10 percent or more of the student population that should be tested, the school performance grade is not a valid representation of overall school performance."
Department data show Riverside had an 88 percent math test participation and an 86 percent English participation rate last school year.
Yet, in the 2014-15 school year, when Riverside had 97 percent participation rates in both subject tests, Tucker County High had a 52 percent participation rate, and Wayne County's Spring Valley High had about a 72 percent participation rate in both tests.
The state school board didn't give those schools, whose participation rates topped 90 percent last school year, automatic Fs, even though the A-F system used growth in test scores from 2014-15 to last school year to calculate part of the grades.
When asked about the apparent discrepancy, Michele Blatt, the department's chief accountability officer, wrote in an email the state "was granted a year of pause from accountability" by the U.S. Education Department in 2014-15.
Plear spoke Thursday, the day after the state board revealed its A-F grades, to about 60 people gathered at her school. She told the group, which included students, employees, volunteers and West Side community members, some of her plans to respond to the F rating.
When asked after her speech what, if anything, the school plans to do differently, specifically in response to the F rating, Plear reiterated her issues with the balanced calendar.
When asked why she'd prefer a traditional calendar with a summer academy rather than extra teaching for students during the existing intercession breaks in the balanced calendar, Plear said she'd like her staff's professional development and her school's off times to match "with what everybody else is doing in the county."
Only one other regular public school in the Mountain State uses the balanced calendar: Piedmont Elementary, where former principal Beth Sturgill, who left the school last month, spoke positively of the balanced calendar.
Plear also said Thursday the school has been working with its Local School Improvement Council since September to develop a master plan to address its needs.
She said the school needs smaller classrooms, more mental health support, more substitute teachers for when regular teachers can't work and a curriculum geared toward students suffering from urban poverty.
The Rev. Matthew J. Watts, a longtime West Side activist who has sought to improve the area, said Mary C. Snow didn't need an F for people to know the school had problems. He said the community has been pointing out the issues for years, as some problems have gotten worse.
"It's salt in a wound, it's an insult to an injury," he said.
But Thursday, Watts, a strong supporter of Plear, said the F referred to what happened in the past, the community is saying "enough is enough" and now is a new day.
Reach Ryan Quinn at
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