Roadblocks on the Way to School Reform in West Virginia

Rethinking the School Closure Research: School Closure as Spatial Injustice

“…B. Howley et al, 2011;Salmon, 1990); these mandates contributed to a district's fiscal distress, and small or poor districts, struggling to afford these requirements, closed schools in an effort to cut costs. School funding court cases, such as 1984's Pauley v. Bailey in West Virginia, have also led to many efficiency-inspired school closures (DeYoung, 1995;Killeen & Sipple, 2000;Meckley & Hazi, 1998;Purdy, 1997;Spence, 1998;Strange, 2013). These decisions have forced officials to offset inequities in state funding and, to do so, they have sometimes created state agencies, including the Ohio Schools Facilities Commission and the School Building Authority in West Virginia.…”

“…These decisions have forced officials to offset inequities in state funding and, to do so, they have sometimes created state agencies, including the Ohio Schools Facilities Commission and the School Building Authority in West Virginia. These agencies have issued facilities and construction regulations that incentivized or necessitated closing and consolidating small schools (DeYoung, 1995;Killeen & Sipple, 2000;Meckley & Hazi, 1998;Null, 2001;Purdy, 1997;Thompson et al, 1990).…”

“…A. Miller, 1990), such as coal mining or timber, or the consolidation and mechanization of farming (Blauwkamp et al, 2011;Casey, 1998); these economic trends reduced jobs, limited state and local revenues, and furthered outmigration, leaving a smaller, older population less willing or able to support local schools (Blauwkamp et al, 2011). Tight state budgets (Dowdall, 2011;Duncombe, Miner, & Ruggiero, 1995;Schwinden, 1993) were also associated with closure, as were climbing tax rates (Billger & Beck, 2012;Lawrence, 2001;Lipman & Haines, 2007;Meckley & Hazi, 1998) and growing education shares of overall tax revenue (Billger & Beck, 2012). Finally, residential segregation and racial tension also shaped which urban and rural schools closed (Lee & Lubienski, 2016;Williams, 2013); White families sometimes successfully resisted closure of their schools, or they moved to Whiter districts or private schools, which can hasten the closure of schools serving the remaining students (Desimone, 1993;Garnett, 2014;Grant et al, 2014;Siegel-Hawley et al, 2017;Williams, 2013).…”

“…L. Green, 2017;Pazey, Cole, & Spikes, 2017;Slater, 2018;Welton & Freelon, 2018). The reasons communities oppose closure are myriad: increased travel time or distance (de la Torre et al, 2015;Meckley & Hazi, 1998;Talen, 2001), damage to student/teacher relationships (Kirshner, 2015;Kirshner et al, 2010;Post & Stambach, 1999), erosion of direct democracy (Fontaine, 1998;Lipman & Haines, 2007), suspicion of racist motivations for closure (Briscoe & Khalifa, 2015;Ewing, 2018; Journey for Justice Alliance; 2014), and disagreements about whether the school was truly "failing" students (Buras, 2015;Deeds & Pattillo, 2015;Ewing, 2018;Pappas, 2016). Residents also fear the loss of an important symbolic and community resource, as schools can sustain local economies (Lyson, 2002), foster racial liberation (Ewing, 2018), and serve as sites for exercising local control and political voice (DeYoung & Howley, 1990;B.…”