The Consolidation Boom

A few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic hit full force, the Wetzel County Board of Education made a big decision. Members voted 5-0 not to change any of the county’s existing schools, an implicit rejection of various potential ideas for school consolidation that had been raised at the time.

The vote formalized a facilities plan that was supposed to guide decisions for a decade. Four years later, a school board comprised of five different members has effectively trashed that plan to pursue its own vision of consolidation by chaos. They will have to amend the facilities plan to move forward.

County taxpayers who elected both boards may be wondering what changed. The explanation is simple — money. Wetzel County has more of it these days thanks to oil and gas exploration, and the officials in charge of the money eventually want to spend a bunch of it on a new, state-of-the-art school.

The Marcellus moneymaker
Money isn’t a significant factor in the two presumably short-term consolidations that the school board is considering right now. School officials actually argue that closing Paden City and Hundred high schools will save some money.

But Superintendent Cassandra Porter is playing the long game. She wants to get rid of all four community high schools and build one centrally located facility on par with the one in neighboring Tyler County. The property taxes that have been flowing into Wetzel County’s coffers from oil and gas exploration in the Marcellus Shale help make that possible.

The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy featured Wetzel County in a 2014 briefing because of its significance in the natural gas boom. Total production had increased by more than 6,000 percent back then. A 2019 report by the property tax firm KE Andrews provided more details about how much Wetzel County’s property taxes have increased because of oil and gas.

A decade’s worth of budgets obtained through the West Virginia Freedom of Information Act shows what that has meant for Wetzel County Schools. (The budgets appear in a document at the bottom of this article.) Property taxes increase as property owners collect royalties from oil and gas exploration, so the school system is flush with cash. It nearly doubled the annual take in property taxes from the 2014-15 school year to last year.

Wetzel County Schools collected a total of $35.6 million in revenue in 2014-15. Most of that came from property taxes, which totaled $21.8 million. The state provided about $13 million, while another $800,000 came from federal and local sources.

Property taxes alone skyrocketed to $42 million in 2023-24, and the county’s $7.5 million contribution from the state was a noticeably smaller part of the total — 17.8 percent compared with 36.5 percent in 2014-15. The federal portion was $860,000, and local sources added $2.2 million to get to a total of $52.7 million in revenue for 2023-24.

The property tax portion of the school system’s revenue fluctuated a bit between 2015-16 and 2022-23. But even the lowest amount ($28.5 million in 2018-19) was still about 24 percent more than the 2014-15 baseline for property taxes.

Wetzel County Schools also gets a small amount of revenue in royalty payments for mineral rights the school system owns. Through leases with EQT Production, Equinor USA Onshore Properties, SWN Production and Tug Hill Operating, Wetzel County Schools collected nearly $34,000 in royalties from 2014 to 2024.

Follow the money to a new school
The new school board and superintendent have benefited politically from the influx of money. Porter’s tenure started during the biggest boom year in property taxes, and the school board first broached the subject of consolidation four days after she took office.

More money means more political capital to spend on divisive changes like consolidation.

For now, school officials say they have to consolidate four schools into two as a stopgap measure because of declining county and student populations, a teacher shortage, and curriculum limitations. But one of the impact statements acknowledges that the budgetary timing is also right for consolidation.

“In terms of finances, Wetzel County Schools maintains a strong unrestricted general current expense fund, with a steady balance over the past five years,” the document said. “... Overall, consolidation offers both financial and operational benefits.”

That steady balance could be even more beneficial in the long term. Since at least the Sept. 25, 2023, board meeting, Porter has been clear about her long-term goal — a new school that she said probably would cost more than $60 million to build.

A survey that Wetzel County Schools conducted in the summer suggests that Porter is trying to move that direction. The firm that conducted the survey also offered to evaluate potential sites for a new school, help get state grants to fund such a project, and provide full engineering and architectural services to build the school.

“Do I think that the students of Wetzel County deserve that?” Porter said less than three months after she became superintendent. “I a hundred percent do. If I could wave a magic wand and get a piece of land tomorrow and build that beautiful facility to house all of our students, I would do that.”

The magic wand is a favorite talking point of Porter’s, but school officials don’t actually need one because they have the money wand. The politics weren’t right to wave it four years ago. Now the new board is testing the waters with short-term consolidation plans.

They are just waiting for the ideal time politically to build the beautiful facility Porter has envisioned since day one.