BELLE, W.Va. — The Kanawha County Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday evening to close Belle Elementary School as part of recently announced school consolidation plans.
The board voted 5-0 in favor of the consolidation shortly after members of the public pleaded for reconsideration during a hearing at Riverside High School.
Belle Elementary was part of Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Tom Williams’ September proposal that would see four elementary schools in the county consolidate into a new, large elementary school at the site of the former Dupont Middle School.
The proposal includes Malden Elementary, Midland Trail Elementary, Mary Ingles Elementary and Belle Elementary feeding into the new school. Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Tom Williams made it public Tuesday evening that, even if the board votes to close all four elementary schools, the School Building Authority would have to provide funds if plans for the new school were to move forward.
Belle Mayor David Fletcher says he is disappointed by the board’s vote.
“Very disappointed. I really thought that Belle (Elementary) may have a shot to stay open,” Fletcher said Tuesday evening. “I think there were several comments made about different things, not only the age of the school, but what had been done, the community that it supports, the support it gives to the community itself as the school.”
Belle Elementary School has been around since 1922, and Fletcher says it has been a staple for his family across generations.
“There were four kids in my family, we all four went. I’ve had three kids ourselves, my wife and I. All three of them went to Belle Elementary School, so it’s a disappointment,” Fletcher said.
The recent school closures that include East Bank Middle School and McKinley Middle School are due to declining enrollment in the county, which stems from a consistent population decline over the past few years.
President of the PTO at Belle Elementary Amy Landers says, while Kanawha County is clearly losing students, the problem doesn’t reside with the four elementary schools on the chopping block.
“Kanawha County has lost 4,499 students. These four schools have lost about 280 students, so I think they need to tell us where are those other students, why we’re not looking at those schools and what we’re going to do,” Landers said.
Reverend Bill Sigler, a priest in the Episcopal Diocese that serves in the area, was at the hearing for East Bank Middle School last week, and he said he knew the board would likely vote for consolidation shortly after the community made their points.
“Being at the East Bank meeting, I kind of came in knowing exactly how this was going to play out. It’s not my first rodeo with consolidations,” Sigler said.
Sigler spent his childhood years learning at Rand Elementary School before it was closed and half of its students moved to Belle Elementary School while the other half moved to Malden Elementary. Sigler says the decision for Belle to close was already decided before the meeting and it continues the cycle of hurt for residents in Eastern Kanawha County.
“It’s already decided, as much as I hate to say that, it’s already decided,” Sigler said. “My problem is that I’ve got a community that’s struggling, and it just seems like every time that we turn around, the eastern end of the valley, the upper end of the valley, it’s just being repeatedly kicked while it’s down.”
Landers says putting kids in a larger school will not help them learn and develop.
“Statistics show that, the larger the school gets, the students test scores suffer, their mental health and things like that suffer, so we have a great concern,” Landers said.
Landers also says many of the students in question do not have traditional parental figures in their lives, and a change to a much larger school would be doing them a disservice.
“About 20% of kids in these schools are being raised by grandparents, foster parents, or other family members,” Lander said. “When you take that 20% and you compound that with four different schools, we’re really letting those children down.”
Landers, who began co-parenting her granddaughter after a family tragedy, says many of the kids in the area have dealt with trauma, and once they move to a bigger environment, their anxiety would likely worsen.
“These kids, I say, wear a cape and they come with that cape every day. That cape is part of who they are and their whole body, my granddaughter being one of those,” Landers said. “If you put those kids who have all this trauma in a school of 700, that anxiety is going to make them not functional. You’re going to find, I think, more homeschooled and kids pulled out.”
The board expects to receive an answer from the SBA regarding funding for the proposed new elementary school at the former Dupont Middle School by mid-December. If the SBA does not approve the funding, plans for designing and construction of the new elementary school will not go through.
If the SBA approves the funding, the board says the school could be open by the fall of 2028.