Parents, students and teachers urge Berkeley County board to reverse proposed cuts to gifted program, pre-K and campus technology roles

Dozens of parents, students and district staff told the Berkeley County Schools board on April 7 that planned staffing changes would hurt students’ learning and safety.

The meeting’s public-comment period stretched for more than an hour as family members, classroom teachers and current gifted-program students described why they said the district should not reduce school-based gifted positions, pre-K aides and social workers or dissolve school-based technology-integration specialist positions.

Vanessa Stone, who identified herself as a registered voter and the vice president of the West Virginia Association for Gifted and Talented, cited district policy 2419 and state guidance and urged the board to preserve services and professional development for gifted education. “Gifted education requires intensive differentiation,” Stone said. “Best practices seek to find and identify students’ strengths rather than restrict access.”

Multiple students also addressed the board. Jude Stone, a senior at Spring Mills High School, said he was “bored in regular classes” before receiving gifted services and warned that cutting positions would “severely negatively impact all gifted students.” Several younger students said combining large grade spans in one pullout class would make teaching appropriately challenging material much harder.

Teachers and instructional staff raised separate but related concerns. Multiple technology-integration specialists (TIS) said management had told them their positions were dissolved and that they must apply for newly posted positions with no job descriptions and unclear timelines. One TIS described creating dozens of tech-integrated lessons, running professional development sessions and responding to hundreds of tech help requests; she said replacing a full-time, on-site TIS with an itinerant technical support specialist would lose instructional expertise.

Pre-K teachers described classrooms with mixed-age groups and high needs, and warned that removing the third adult from many classrooms would create safety and compliance risks. One pre-K teacher said: “Two adults cannot teach our pre-K curriculum to this range of individual needs. Two adults cannot keep these children safe.”

Superintendent Ryan Sachs responded in the meeting’s later remarks, saying the district had asked the West Virginia Department of Education for technical assistance to ensure staffing and scheduling proposals comply with state policy. He told speakers that the district is not eliminating gifted programming and said district leadership had reduced nine administrative central-office positions to shift dollars toward classrooms.

Speakers called on the board to involve teachers in decision-making and to provide clear timelines and job descriptions before dissolving roles. Many ended by asking the board to slow the process and engage more widely with stakeholders.