MORGANTOWN — West Virginia college students are on the fringe of a disaster.

In 2010, there have been round 4,000 Okay-12 college students in West Virginia’s faculty system in foster care and about 9,000 college students designated as homeless. Over the past decade, these numbers have jumped drastically, to 7,000 in foster care and practically 11,000 homeless college students.

This yr, the variety of college students enrolling in larger schooling dropped to among the lowest numbers ever, with underneath 48 p.c of scholars attending post-secondary schooling.

To deal with these points and the way West Virginia’s schooling programs are combating these tendencies, a panel of 4 of the highest figures within the state’s schooling system participated in an “armchair dialogue” as a part of the West Virginia Public Training Collaborative’s, six-hour “Focus Ahead Symposium” Wednesday in Morgantown on the Waterfront Marriott.

Panelists Clayton Burch, state superintendent of faculties; Sarah Tucker, chancellor of the West Virginia Larger Training Coverage Fee; Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia College; and Brad Smith, president of Marshall College mentioned the way forward for schooling within the Mountain State.

Burch opened the dialogue with the statistics in regards to the fast improve in pupil homelessness and foster care, which arrange the remainder of the panel to speak about how they appear to fight these challenges.

“If the pandemic has taught us something, it’s that our college students are resilient, and our colleges are resilient,” Burch stated. “We have now to set excessive expectations it doesn’t matter what these stats say and irrespective of how exhausting it might sound.”

The difficulty is deeper that simply college students in want. As analyzed by the panel’s moderator, Illah Nourbakhsh, college students in these conditions are extra frightened about the place their subsequent meal will come from than fairly than the solutions to their chemistry take a look at.

These worries translate to the realm of upper schooling. Tucker picked up after Burch and dropped the statistics that faculty enrollment is declining quickly. Whereas that is partly on account of rising tuition prices, the scholars Tucker expressed probably the most fear over weren’t what she known as “rising stars,” however the struggling college students that will not get the chance in larger ed.

This shift in the best way college students prioritize faculty has stumped many within the area. The standard strategy to getting children into faculty was to undergo the dad and mom. However in recent times, an issue has arisen with this mannequin.

“After I go across the state and speak to college students, I’m seeing only a few dad and mom,” Tucker stated. “What I’m seeing are a whole lot of aunts and uncles and grandparents and I’m seeing a whole lot of actually tough household dynamics and a whole lot of affect from the opioid disaster.”

Gee and Smith exchanged playful banter on the stage, however the two presidents exemplified the robust bond between West Virginia’s two largest larger schooling establishments.

They spoke at size in regards to the challenges within the workforce and the way the workforce is altering, however finally introduced the dialog again to the way forward for West Virginia and its schooling system.

“I feel we now have to return to look ahead. I feel that in all of the quick ahead motion, we’ve forgotten sure value-centric approaches,” Gee stated. “Civic schooling, for instance, I feel we have to rethink that in our universities and positively in our public colleges.”

Smith spent a whole lot of time discussing the significance of the addition of the “A” into the standard science, expertise, engineering and arithmetic STEM acronym, by including “artwork.”

As STEAM packages acquire traction in West Virginia, he believes the state is producing a workforce that’s in excessive demand on this planet of tech.

Smith’s beginnings had been in Silicon Valley within the tech world as CEO of Intuit, and he sees the trade taking an enormous flip away from the exhausting sciences of programming and coding and into the creative aspect of design and circulation.

“We’d like the ‘A’ in STEAM for an entire host of causes, but in addition for very pragmatic causes — employers want it,” Smith stated. “If we now have college students whose most important focus is, ‘How am I going to feed my household?’ Nicely, these are the extra in-demand jobs we have to put together them for.”

The ultimate level on which the panel landed was that West Virginia is in a singular place to not solely experiment however innovate and lead the nation within the area of schooling.

With packages like Ascend West Virginia that goals to draw distant staff and younger households looking for a special sort of atmosphere from the vertical cities, the Mountain State is poised to alter in an enormous manner over the subsequent decade.

“We don’t must say we’re going to catch up, we have to say we’re going to steer,” Gee stated.

“Rural has turn into the brand new city,” Smith stated. “Popping out of COVID… [families] need to have the chance to return and create a dream in a spot the place they will stay. That’s all taking place in West Virginia as we converse.”