Cassie Porter's Crusade Against PCHS

Wetzel County Schools Superintendent Cassandra Porter faced a verbal barrage at the June 25 Board of Education meeting because of her decision two weeks earlier to close Paden City High School. She was clearly exasperated by the end of the meeting.

“I would surely hope that you're not judging my motives,” Porter said to one board member who asked her to explain the logic behind closing PCHS.

But Porter’s critics need not judge her motives. Her actions have been on public display for all to see. They tell the story of a new superintendent determined to force the students of one county school into the halls of two other schools in the city to their north.

Legally speaking, only the property that housed PCHS is closed for now, but Porter seems intent on making that fate irreversible in every respect. She has engaged in what appear to be a series of calculated moves, as outlined in a timeline of recent events in Paden City.

A newcomer on a mission
Porter assumed the role of superintendent on July 1, 2023. Four days later, the Board of Education met to discuss options for consolidating Wetzel County schools.

Board members pondered two big ideas: 1) merging Magnolia, Paden City and Valley high schools into one new facility and keeping Hundred High School separate, or 2) consolidating all four schools into one. Neither Porter nor the board hinted at merging PCHS and Magnolia. That option also never came up at a briefing that the board’s lawyer presented a month later.

Despite an apparent consensus not to merge PCHS and Magnolia, that is exactly the direction Porter tried to push the board on Aug. 14. She asked for permission to research that option.

Board members were baffled by the proposal in light of their lawyer’s previous explanation of the school reconfiguration process. “Is this step necessary?” then-board member Robert Christen said. “Because my understanding was that it wasn’t.” He said instead the issue of consolidation should go to Wetzel County voters in the form of a school bond issue.

Porter’s plan died amid procedural confusion on how to vote that night, but the board’s failure to take a vote meant Porter could raise the idea again.

A change in board membership delayed any action, perhaps because of new political dynamics. Between the Aug. 14 and Aug. 28 board meetings, Christen resigned over alleged threats to himself and his family, and the board picked Brian Price as Christen’s replacement. Price is a PCHS alum and previously served as school board president.

A scheme is borne
The idea of combining PCHS and Magnolia high schools seemed to die after Price joined the board. At a Sept. 25 meeting, he questioned the merits of Porter’s plan, and members ultimately voted 5-0 against it.

But Porter did not accept defeat. A longstanding environmental problem in Paden City resurfaced during the thick of the PCHS/Magnolia merger debate, and it created a pretext for her to bypass the school board.

Soil, water and air contamination in Paden City was well known years before Porter became superintendent. The pollution came from a dry-cleaning chemical known as PCE, and the source was the defunct Band Box Cleaners, which did business near the high school. The government first pinpointed the problem in 2010 — the year the Wetzel County Board of Education first tried and failed to close PCHS.

The presence of PCE in the city’s water grew bad enough in 2020 that the federal government funded an upgrade to the water system. Then in 2022 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identified an area that included the high school as a Superfund site. With the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic, the school stayed open all those years.

Porter publicly admitted at the June 25, 2024, board meeting that she thought PCHS should have been closed “at the time of the designation of the national Superfund site.” But she waited until the circumstances were more favorable to push the issue again.

The political environment started trending her way when the actual environment in Paden City took a hit. Two days after Porter first raised the issue of merging PCHS with Magnolia last August, West Virginia health officials ordered Paden City residents not to use their water because of a spike in PCE levels.

Although that order was lifted a month later, the bad news for Paden City and its high school mounted. The West Virginia Public Service Commission opened an investigation into the city’s water department; the EPA and PSC held field hearings in Paden City; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on Paden City’s water.

The health and environment experts eventually concluded that the water and air at Paden City High School are still safe, but the situation looked bad — or, more to the point, like a good excuse to close a school. President Ronald Reagan once quipped that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Unfortunately, the folks of Paden City now know exactly what he meant.

Superfund bomb away!
The chain of events since early this year suggest that Porter has been deliberately strategic in her decision-making about closing PCHS.

After the board vote last year, she didn’t publicly mention the idea of merging PCHS and Magnolia for months. But she later admitted that there was movement behind the scenes. “Going through the process of temporarily closing a school, as you know, does take some time, and we had to have some legal representatives … to make sure that we did that properly, along with the [involvement of the] state Board of Education,” she said June 25.

Keeping the plan on the downlow let Porter secure her job before revisiting PCHS’ future. On Feb. 27, the board voted 5-0 to extend her one-year contract for three years. Five weeks later, she raised the issue of Paden City’s water woes at the April 3 board meeting.

The discussion centered on a letter that West Virginia Schools Superintendent Michele Blatt sent to Porter. Blatt voiced concern about the potential for a PCE-related “vapor intrusion” into the high school. She acknowledged that the CDC does not expect any “harmful health effects” in the air but still asked if PCHS staff and students could go to another county school.

Porter insisted incredulously that “there’s no plan to move the students at this point,” but Price wasn’t convinced. “I’ve been around education-speak long enough to know that I think the state’s got in their mind what they want us to do,” he said.

Price was right — but a few more unfriendly developments for PCHS had to occur before Porter dropped her Superfund bomb. First, Wetzel County held a board election on May 14. Voters re-elected two members and Christine Mitchell to replace Price as of July 1. (Linda Stillwagner from Paden City lost the race.) Then the school year ended.

The fact that the PCHS community didn’t see the school closure coming was evident on Facebook. On May 25, the high school posted an invitation for the annual PCHS baseball camp. It was scheduled to run June 26-28 — two weeks after Porter shocked the school’s faculty and staff with an impersonal letter about relocating them to New Martinsville.

By contrast, Magnolia coaches in football, basketball and volleyball didn’t seem surprised. They posted well-timed invitations to joint PCHS/Magnolia meetings and practices within days of Porter’s announcement. Then they complained to state sports regulators when neighboring Tyler County Schools engaged in similar outreach to PCHS students.

The EPA disagrees with Porter about a health risk at PCHS, and schools within Superfund sites do stay open. But she has plenty of support, including from the state board, a U.S. senator and the largest local newspaper.

An uncertain, ‘temporary’ future
Under questioning from Price, Porter acknowledged that PCHS still exists as a separate entity. Diplomas will say “Paden City High School,” and seniors can wear their school colors of green and white when they graduate in a joint PCHS/Magnolia ceremony. But PCHS students who choose to stay in Wetzel County will have to go to classes and participate in sports, band and other extracurricular activities as part of Magnolia or New Martinsville School.

Rather than going there, PCHS students could go to Valley High School, although it is a farther drive from Paden City and on windier roads. Juniors who are interested in trade school could attend the Wetzel County Technical Education Center for a half-day, and seniors with limited course loads could spend the whole day there.

Thanks to a new state law that fosters open enrollment, PCHS students also could choose to attend public schools outside Wetzel County. Paden City is split between Wetzel and Tyler counties, so Tyler Consolidated High School is an obvious option. Some students from Paden City already attend there. People have suggested St. Mary’s High School in Pleasants County as well. That school got a new building in 2015.

Wetzel County families that want to ditch government-run schools altogether could try homeschooling. A 2016 law eased those rules in West Virginia, and the state now ranks fifth in homeschooling, with 8.2 percent of families trying it for at least one child.

No one knows how long PCHS will be closed. It is supposed to be “temporary” under the authority Porter cited as justification. But as Price said on June 25, “There's nobody in this room that believes once they're out of [the PCHS building] they'll ever come back.”

The record shows that for whatever reason, Porter wants part of her legacy as superintendent to be folding Paden City High School into Magnolia. Although a permanent path to that reality isn’t yet clear, it sure looks like she will get her way unless the as-yet-undefined temporary decision leads to a lawsuit.