The Do-Something School Board

Back in 1948, President Harry S Truman won the presidency in part by mocking the Do-Nothing Congress for constantly blocking his plans. Wetzel County residents should be so lucky. They are plagued by a political animal of a different sort — the Do-Something School Board.

The five members of the board and the superintendent they hired are so set on consolidating schools that they will entertain any proposed means to that predetermined end. They have been floating consolidation trial balloons and pushing divisive school mergers for a year without making any headway, all because they don’t want to follow the normal, years-long process.

The board’s one-track mind was on grand display when members hatched their latest plan of consolidation by chaos on Aug. 30. “I think we have to do something,” President Linda Fonner said in setting the tone. Every single board member echoed that mantra.

Groupthink in governance rarely results in smart policy, but it is especially dangerous when driven by an ambiguous desire to “do something.” Vague, emotional responses to pervasive, seemingly intractable situations tend to make matters worse.

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic at every level of government is the most recent example. The virus that caused COVID spread so rapidly that it overwhelmed the world. Experts didn’t quite know what to do, but they knew they had to do something.

The misguided policies started with travel bans. Next came the lockdowns, social-distancing rules, and mask and vaccine mandates, to name the most prominent “something” solutions.

Then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo foolishly sent elderly people with COVID into nursing homes because he thought it would save lives. It ended up being one of the deadliest mistakes of the pandemic. A Cuomo aide warned behind the scenes that the decision “is going to be the great debacle in the history books,” but Cuomo became a media darling for doing something.

Anyone who dared question COVID-19 policies at the height of the pandemic risked the wrath of the majority. Journalists shamed critics as unpatriotic grandma killers, and the most draconian states and cities sicced the do-something police on defiant businesses and citizens.

As the pandemic waned, the tyrants in government loosened their grip and the experts eventually, albeit reluctantly, admitted they were wrong about almost everything. One of the biggest mistakes they readily admit now is the long-term closure of schools.

Even The New York Times conceded the point. “Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of COVID,” one expert told the paper, but the policy had a detrimental effect on students.

Ironically, the misguided school closures of the pandemic contributed to the low standardized test scores that Wetzel County educational leaders are seeing now. But rather than learn from the rushed policy mistakes of the past, they are selling school consolidation as a quick fix.

They won’t commit to a specific plan, but they have to do something — and consolidation in one form or another is the only idea they will consider. If they can just get all of the county’s high school students in one or two places, the thinking goes, they can hire enough certified teachers to educate a declining county population.

Send all of the students from Magnolia, Paden City and Valley high schools to one campus and leave Hundred High School where it is? Consolidate all four high schools into two new buildings? That’s how the discussion started a year ago.

Merge Paden City High School into Magnolia? They tried and failed to do that the legal way. Then they tried again and failed to do it the illegal way.

Now they’re back to the idea of two high schools — but with a strange twist. The county will create two from the four that exist now. The students in two of them will stay put while students from the other two commute to class, sometimes far from home. All students will get new school names, mascots, colors and missions.

A few years from now, they could go through the whole process again as Superintendent Cassandra Porter pursues her dream of one high school for the whole county.

At the Aug. 30 nonvoting work session, she teased reluctant board members with the idea of possibly creating two schools for the long term. But Porter revealed her true intention in an interview last week and upped the pressure by playing the “crisis” card.

“We can’t wait for four or five years,” she said. “I wish there was a magic number or a magic contractor that could put that [one] school up for the next school year but that’s just not realistic. And right now we have a crisis.”

She still has to convince three of five board members to swing her one-campus way. But they all want to “do something,” so the odds are good that a majority will rubber stamp whatever plan Porter gives them.

Wetzel County students may be the worse for it.