Once again Monday, the West Virginia School Building Authority board refused to support Fayette County's controversial school consolidation plan.
On a voice vote to stop considering the Fayette proposal for funding, only state schools Superintendent Michael Martirano and state school board member Tina Combs could be heard voting no among the SBA board members. Peter Markham, the SBA board's chairman and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin's designee, votes only in case of a tie.
Later, in another voice vote with no nays heard, the SBA board approved funding for Kanawha, Jackson, Logan, Monongalia, Raleigh and 10 other counties.
Fayette's plan was to consolidate four high schools into a new one with about 1,550 students. The new school would be built next to New River Elementary, the current Oak Hill High and the Fayette Institute of Technology. Among the county's existing high schools, only Valley High, in Smithers, would have stayed open.
Under the plan, Fayetteville, Meadow Bridge and Midland Trail high school facilities would be reconfigured to accept students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, and Oak Hill High would become a fifth-through-eighth-grade school. The dilapidated Collins Middle, which more than 400 students were forced to leave, would close. The county also would close Ansted Middle School and Ansted, Divide, Gatewood and Fayetteville elementary schools.
Fayette requested $39.6 million over the next three years from the SBA, which distributes general revenue and lottery money for school construction and renovation projects, to supplement $17 million in local funding.
SBA Executive Director David Sneed said his agency had about $57 million to distribute in this year's annual "needs" grant funding cycle. Finance Director Garry Stewart told SBA board members Monday that they could approve no more than $15.6 million in multi-year funding for future years.
That put Fayette's proposal, which was ranked eighth by SBA staff and needed more than $13 million in next year's cycle and the year after, in direct competition with Raleigh County. Raleigh, the top-ranked proposal, was asking for $10 million this year and $10 million the next, so both projects couldn't be funded.
Sneed said the governor's budget office told SBA staff last week that, because the state budget is expected to be cut, the SBA should not assume being able to get approval to sell bonds. Those bonds, which would be paid back with lottery funds, would provide $25 million for the next year's cycle.
"There are no funds available right now, so it's another year of the conditions getting worse," Martirano said after the meeting.
He asked for the SBA to develop a plan to move forward by its next meeting, and said the condition of Fayette's schools is the worst he's seen in the state.
Twenty counties requested about $141 million in total funds this cycle. That figure includes the full requested amount from some counties that suggested they could accept the money over multiple years.
The sum was previously $148 million, but Sneed said several counties, including Kanawha, offered to reduce their requests and put more local funds toward their projects after their school superintendents' presentations to the SBA board last month.
The West Virginia Board of Education took away control of Fayette schools from the locally elected school board in 2010. That was after a failed bond election and a state Office of Education Performance Audits report that said the local board was "unwilling to deal with the very small high schools and support a plan to combine some and improve severe facility deficiencies, limited curriculum and poorly achieving schools."
Martirano's abrupt closure of Collins Middle's seventh- and-eighth-grade building in January of this year - after the school also saw its band building and gym shuttered because of structural issues - fueled an effort to pass the county's first school building and renovation bond in more than 40 years.
If voters had approved the bond's 15 years of higher property taxes and the SBA had pitched in about $25 million of its own funds that Fayette wanted at the time, the effort would have, among other projects, built a new Collins Middle and renovated Midland Trail High to transfer the ninth- through 12th-graders from Fayetteville and Meadow Bridge high schools there. Meadow Bridge High supporters opposed the bond.
Of the more than 7,500 ballots cast across Fayette County during the June 13 special bond election, 62 percent were opposed. Turnout more than doubled the amount in the failed bond elections in 2009 and 2001. Still, only about a quarter of the county's voters took part.
A few days later, Martirano named Randolph County Schools Superintendent Terry George as Fayette's new superintendent. He replaced Serena Starcher, a longtime Fayette associate superintendent who now works in Raleigh County.
In September, the state school board voted 6-3 to approve Fayette's new consolidation plan, which was backed by George and Martirano. Tom Campbell, Beverly Kingery and Bill White voted against the plan after Campbell made a failed motion to amend it to remove Meadow Bridge High's closure, and White seconded the motion to bring it to a vote.
Later that same month, the SBA board - which had Campbell among its 11 members and has since added White - shot down the plan, a move that meant the SBA board wouldn't even consider it for funding this month. At the meeting, SBA board members raised objections to forcing Fayette schools to consolidate despite county voters rejecting the June bond, and at least two members suggested the board should vote against the plan so as not to give Fayette "false hope" of the idea receiving funding.
In a letter sent to the news media by the West Virginia Department of Education's spokeswoman, state school board President Mike Green called the SBA board's move "unprecedented" and unlawful. White criticized Green's letter, citing it and other Fayette-related issues in an ethics complaint he recently filed against Green.
The Fayette County Commission, members of which support the consolidation plan, sued the SBA over its vote, and the SBA reversed course and approved the plan, allowing it to be considered for funding. Fayette County Commissioner Matt Wender said it was too early to say if the commission would launch another lawsuit.
One woman in the audience, angry over the Fayette decision, raised her vote after the decision to fund other counties, calling the SBA board members pathetic.
"We have children that are in danger and you do not see that; you do not," she said. "I don't understand."
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.