The ‘Closing Costs’ of Consolidation

Wetzel County Schools Superintendent Cassandra Porter sounds like a broken record on school consolidation. She’s stuck on one talking point: It’s best for the kids.

But the history of school consolidation in West Virginia suggests otherwise. The Charleston Gazette explored the topic in depth in 2002 and concluded in the series “Closing Costs” that consolidations are not best for the kids in rural counties.

“‘Closing Costs’ came out more than 20 years ago, but I think the findings would still be found true,” said Scott Finn, a co-author of the series. His summary of those findings:

That history is worth remembering this week as Porter plans to announce public meetings about her school consolidation proposal. Otherwise, Wetzel County may be doomed to repeat the mistakes of West Virginia’s past.

A masterpiece in education reporting
Finn and his co-author, Eric Eyre, are two of West Virginia’s most successful journalists of recent years. Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid crisis in the Mountain State and wrote the corresponding book “Death in Mudlick” in 2021. Finn helped transform public broadcasting in both West Virginia and Vermont between 2013 and 2023, and he now advises clients how to rebuild local journalism.

They wrote their series on consolidation several years after then-Gov. Gaston Caperton’s education policies led to a wave of school closings. Academics who have studied the impact of consolidation in U.S. schools for the two decades since then regularly cite Eyre and Finn’s work. They won the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting in 2002.

The merged Charleston Gazette-Mail keeps the “Closing Costs” articles behind a paywall these days, but I accessed them via the Wayback Machine, an Internet archive. The series debuted with four articles in the Sunday newspaper on Aug. 25, 2002. Another article that day described the thorough work that went into the first four stories.

The reporters interviewed more than 80 people and reviewed thousands of bus schedules and other documents. They also used the Freedom of Information Act to get details on more than 1,500 bus runs in West Virginia’s 35 most rural counties. The newspaper created a database from that information to help provide insights for its coverage.

By my count, the Gazette published 11 articles and two editorials about consolidation between Aug. 25 and Oct. 6. That included three bonus articles about the West Virginia Department of Education’s decision to start tracking the amount of time students spent on buses, a change prompted by the paper’s coverage.

The long road to and from school
Busing was at the heart of the series, with the first four articles focused on that topic. One of them opened with an anecdote about Tommy Evans, a 4-year-old from the unincorporated community of Snowshoe in the ski country of Pendleton County. He spent nearly 1 ½ hours on the bus every day, leaving at 6:30 a.m. and not getting back home until 4:40 p.m.

Evans’ parents moved to the area before they had Tommy. “If and when we move from this mountain, it will be because of the long bus rides,” his father told the Gazette. An 8-year-old student quoted in the article said after his long ride home every evening, he only had time to eat and do homework before going to bed.

A second article described the impact of long bus rides on students’ health, educational achievement and social lives. Constant exposure to diesel exhaust from buses poses a risk to children’s lungs, according to studies cited by the Gazette. And long bus rides keep many students from competing in sports, band and other extracurricular activities. Students who don’t participate tend to get lower grades or drop out of school.

“School administrators across West Virginia have repeatedly ignored transportation laws and guidelines, forcing thousands of children to spend two hours or more on the school bus each day and leaving them more likely to get sick, less likely to learn,” Eyre and Finn wrote. On top of that, school transportation costs soared after consolidation.

A Gazette editorial scolded state and county education officials for pushing consolidation despite the impact on children. “This situation is intolerable,” the paper argued. “Grownups could not deal with commutes of this length, and the grownups in charge of state schools should ensure that young children are shielded from them.”

Here are the headlines and excerpts from other articles in the series:

Several years after the series was published, Finn revisited the poor record of school consolidation on his West Virginia Public Broadcasting podcast “The Front Porch” with two other self-described “consolidation skeptics.”

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Finn said. “How kids get educated, how long they spend on the bus, how much money we spend on them, your community and whether it has a school or not — these are really foundational issues.”