Small schools get push from Marshall on-site study

June 20, 1999

LAWRENCE PIERCE/ Sunday Gazette-Mail
Consolidation isn't always the answer, some Marshall University researchers argue. To prove it, they've developed a three-year program to turn tiny Hannan Junior-Senior High School in Mason County into an educational showplace.

By Tara TuckwillerSUNDAY GAZETTE-MAIL
ASHTON - There's something odd about tiny Hannan Junior-Senior High School in southern Mason County.
It still exists.
While West Virginia's wave of consolidation closed one small school after another in the 1990s, Hannan parents fought a hard legal battle to save the little mismatched cluster of buildings.
But a decade on death row left Hannan - like other small schools that have survived consolidation - a run-down shell with a decimated curriculum. Its supporters have been searching for a way to salvage it and preserve its nurturing, close-knit atmosphere for the 270 children who learn there.
Enter Marshall University. Rural-education scholars there have taken Hannan under their wing for a three-year study. The idea is that with a little technology and expertise, small schools can actually educate rural students better than West Virginia's new, consolidated schools.
The Hannan experiment will employ realistic, cost-efficient methods that any rural school in the state or nation could use, said Stan Maynard, the Marshall education professor who's heading the team.
When the three-year study is up, Maynard wants to have a model that communities and school districts can follow to build and sustain top-quality small schools.
"This will have an impact on rural education in West Virginia, maybe nationally," Maynard said. "Wide-ranging implications we can't even fathom. This will be something the state can learn from."

'Inexcusable. Indefensible'

Visitors drive for miles on a meandering county road until they see the bent metal sign inviting them onto the Hannan campus. Tattered tennis courts waste away off to one side. Inside, floor tiles are missing. Glass in the classroom doors is cracked.
Talk about ripe for consolidation. By state School Building Authority standards, Hannan's 30 graduates a year can't justify the expense of keeping the battered school open.
Hannan parents thought differently.
"I don't mean to be wisecracking, but the main positive is that the children can get to it," said Shirley Gue, a Hannan-area parent who was elected to the school board last year. "We've got children on the bus right now an hour to an hour and a half one way, just to get to Hannan."
The previous school board got School Building Authority money to build a new high school for all of Mason County's children, near Point Pleasant in the county's northern tip.
The new school board voted to give the money back. For one thing, they argue, Hannan children would have had to ride the bus three or four hours a day to attend the Point Pleasant school.
For another thing, the only reason Hannan is run-down is because officials wanted to consolidate it, say Gue and board President Darrell Hagley.
For example, even though Hannan's enrollment was at an all-time high during the 1990s, school boards yanked class after class out of the curriculum - French, Spanish, honors English, advanced placement history. Previous school boards also appear to have withheld maintenance money, board members say.
"Unfortunately, once a school is marked for consolidation, administrators take the mental stand that they're not going to spend another penny on that school," Gue said.
"Potentially, we end up graduating generations of children whose education has been neglected. It's inexcusable. Indefensible."

Long-distance learning

Consolidation supporters argue that larger schools can offer a wider variety of classes, and they cost less to operate than small schools.
Parents at Hannan have argued that small schools offer something more important to a 15-year-old than, say, the opportunity to take Advanced Piano.
"A child feeling they are important," Gue said. "Someone caring if they're at school. Being known by their name, not their ID number.
"These children know their existence is important to someone. Unfortunately, for a lot of children, the only place they get that is at school."
A growing number of researchers have found the same thing. Also, rural-school researchers have found that while suburban and urban children sometimes learn better in bigger schools, rural children learn better in small community schools. Maynard's program follows that research.

LAWRENCE PIERCE/Sunday Gazette-Mail
Teachers at Hannan met for their first training sessions this month. Researchers plan to bring new teaching methods and distance-learning classes to the school, which the state has placed on probation for low standardized test scores.

"I believe a lot of children who get lost in the shuffle in bigger schools can be identified and worked with in smaller schools," Maynard said.
Some researchers are also finding that consolidated schools don't actually deliver the savings or the enhanced curriculum they promise. Even if they do, Maynard said, that's not an obstacle anymore.
If students need more classes, Hannan can offer them through distance-learning. The satellite's already there, left from a grant Hannan got in the early 1990s for a physiology class via satellite. Marshall has pledged to send graduate assistants to monitor any new satellite classes Hannan wants to offer.
Maynard's team of professors has also joined with representatives from RESA II, an arm of state government that provides services to schools in the Mason County area. Maynard's wife, Barbara, heads the RESA team.
"This is one thing RESA ought to be involved in," she said. "National research shows it costs as much as 16 percent more to run a smaller school. But if those children are doing better when they leave here, how much does that save society in the long run?"
The team has started training teachers at Hannan and its feeder school, Ashton Elementary, this summer. All next year, Maynard will bring in master teachers in every subject area once a month to continue training teachers in new methods and technologies.
Mason County is paying $68,000 over the next three years for the whole program. Maynard's team is applying for federal grants to help offset that cost.
"It's our job to make certain the children in rural America have as much opportunity as everyone else," Maynard said. "But it's got to be realistic. We've got to ask, ëWhat can I do with the existing budget?'"

Scattered farms

Parents and teachers, veterans of the consolidation fight, sat around a school library table at Hannan last week. They met to count Hannan's battle scars.
"OK, they keep telling us nothing's wrong with that toilet," began Don Linger, the school's math teacher and girls' basketball coach. "Well, it won't flush. Now, I'm not the brightest man in the world ..."
The room dissolved into laughter as others around the table ticked off things that had been allowed to go down the tubes while Hannan sat on the chopping block. The wiring's so bad, the power keeps going out. The mismatched buildings could use a coat of paint.
"I'm off the paint selection," Linger vowed, as others in the group began suggesting colors. "Well, I guess we could go with a red-brick color. It's been red brick for decades ..."
"No!" parent Darlena Long interrupted, straight-faced. The rest of the group guffawed as Linger hid his head in mock shame. "We want a light, bright. You're out of the paint choice, son."
It's hard sometimes to get people to band together in an area like Hannan's, Maynard said. For one thing, there's no town nearby, so no common ground there. People live on scattered farms with nothing connecting them but a few churches and the school.
But in the Hannan area, many people met and developed close friendships during the consolidation fight, as they joined group lawsuits and car-pooled to school board meetings.
Those people must now channel that camaraderie and passion into rebuilding their school, said Maynard, who has organized other rural-education programs in Mingo and Lincoln counties.
"It's put up or shut up now," Long told other parents at the meeting last week. "We've fought consolidation all this time. Now we've got our school and we've got to show what we can do with it."
The idea is that a county doesn't have to give in and consolidate just to get state money. With a little creative financing, a county can keep its small schools solid and up-to-date.
To make it work, everybody has to get in on the act, Maynard said. Parents, students, teachers, local businesspeople, the county school board and higher education have to work together.
"Not every school has a Marshall at their back door," Maynard said. "This must be a model so anyone can do it. That will be [Hannan's] legacy."
For example, to keep costs down, parents and neighbors who are electricians might agree to help rewire a building. Others might want to help paint.
"Get some of the kids to design the flier," Linger suggested. "They're better at computers than we are."
"What about the new window place in Huntington?" Long added. "We could ask them to donate a window. They've got a lot of our graduates, Tommy Meadows and all those boys."
Maynard said his team will make reports throughout the study, and it plans to track graduates starting this year. Not only whether graduates went to college, the military or the work force, but how well they did there.
"By the end of the three years, there will be a total package here," Maynard said. "When people come along wanting to do what we've done, we will have documented everything.
"If we find a cure for this disease, so to speak, we'd better know what medicine we took."

To contact staff writer Tara Tuckwiller, call 348-5189.