Challenge West Virginia

by Ry Rivard
Daily Mail Capitol Reporter
Charleston Daily Mail

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Until a U.S. Senate vacancy opened up, this week was supposed to be all about Gov. Joe Manchin’s education reform agenda.
Yet in between the frantic rush to hold an election, lawmakers have been quietly scaling back the governor’s already pared down education reform plans.

Over the weekend, Manchin sent seven education bills to the Legislature.

Four appear on track for passage, two appear dead in the House and one has been heavily amended. But that’s after the bills were vetted by a 10-member House and Senate task force. That’s the group Manchin assembled when a legislative special session on education grinded to a halt in May following a week of failed attempts to agree on the governor’s plans.

In the past weeks, the committee has met and scaled back Manchin’s plan.

But the deepest cut to the governor’s reform plans was apparently self-inflicted. After more than a year of debate over allowing charter schools in West Virginia, Manchin didn’t put a charter school bill before the Legislature.

That decision was seemingly part political calculation, part practical matter.

Manchin met late last week in his office with Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin and House Speaker Rick Thompson.

Coming into the meeting, Manchin appeared ready to submit the charter school bill to lawmkers, Tomblin said.

But, by the meeting’s end, the bill was off the table.

“We counted the votes and didn’t think we had enough to move it,” Manchin said.

Charter school proponents say the bill was already watered down.

Charter school critic Judy Hale, the president of the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said she wasn’t sure either the House or the Senate wanted to deal with the controversial bill, which teachers unions don’t like.

“I don’t think either house wanted to deal with it in a special session,” Hale said.

Part of the reason may be the strong backlash from unions that the three men might face just as each is planning a run for office. Manchin is expected to seek the open U.S. Senate seat and Tomblin and Thompson have both set their sights on the governor’s office. Thompson is also running for reelection in the House.

Manchin said union’s campaign was never brought up.

“I’m fighting for everything I can,” he said.

Ahead of this year’s May primary, unions funded a negative campaign against Sen. Erik Wells, D-Kanawha, a top proponent of charter schools and critic of the teachers unions.

Tomblin said he and the governor were inclined to go ahead with the bill.

“Obviously the Senate preferred to have the charter bill,” Tomblin said.

He said he thought it was “probable” that Manchin also wanted it to be taken up now by the Legislature.

But they did not push the bill.

“No sense in putting something on if it was doomed for failure,” Tomblin said.

He said he was not going “stand up then and beat my chest” to get the controversial bill on the governor’s legislative agenda. House lawmakers have not been receptive to charter schools.

It is not clear House leader Thompson’s role in the meeting. Thompson declined through a spokeswoman to talk about the meeting, saying he considers discussions with the governor and the president to be confidential.

Manchin’s legislative director, Jim Pitrolo, said “there was no consensus” for the charter school bill.

“It wasn’t just one or two people,” he said.

Other bills the work group also considered were held back by Manchin, although it is not clear at whose request.

After the meeting with the speaker and president, members of the Senate went to have Manchin pull a bill that would have guaranteed teachers a planning period, Tomblin said. Unions complain teachers are having the period taken from them by school administrators.

“I guess it was one of those touchy issues,” Tomblin said. “It was touchy on the Senate side, whereas charter schools were touchy on the House.”

Manchin said the charter school bill and the planning period bill would be moved together in the future.

Besides the planning period bill, the governor also did not introduce legislation to reduce class size and to give teachers a pay raise, though each idea was discussed by the task force.

The governor’s decision to pull the planning period bill appears to have significantly weakened union support for the other items on his agenda, which include a bill to improve low-performing schools and a bill that allows would-be teachers to get certified in different ways.

Union support is seen as a key factor in getting bills through the House Education Committee, which a number of educators serve on.

On Monday, the committee killed the bill that was meant to improve low performing schools.

Hale said she was leaving it up to others to fight for Manchin’s agenda because the planning period bill was canned.

“They came out against our planning period bill,” Hale said. “It’s the state department’s job to fight for its own legislation.”

The Senate is well on its way to passing all of Manchin’s agenda.

The House is also moving part of the governor’s agenda, including legislation meant to make sure schoolchildren have health screenings; a bill that creates a pilot program to keep troubled elementary- and middle-school students from disrupting class but also keep them in school; and a bill that would begin the process of more extensively evaluating teachers.

But members of the task force, including House Education Committee Chairwoman Mary Poling, are likely to face criticism for recommending to the governor legislation they have now amended or have helped killed or bog down.

Poling said it was never the deal that recommendations from the task force guaranteed passage.

She said people should not have had the impression that the task force’s work meant that the recommendations “would pass or even that work group members would vote for it.” In a work group meeting in early June she voted against the charter school bill. Poling said she was voting against it on principle because members of her committee had not been given time to consider the issue.

Unions, too, could face criticism. Following the busted May education reform session they asked for a seat at the table. They had one, literally sitting at the same table with lawmakers during the work group’s meetings. They were able to suggest amendments, though they had to find a lawmaker who agreed with them to actually amend the bill. But that wasn’t enough, they said.

“We were sitting at the table but we didn’t have a vote,” Hale said.

Dale Lee, the president of the West Virginia Education Association, had a similar response.

“We had a seat at the table but we didn’t have a vote,” Lee said.

Manchin, who announced recently he would devote his term as chairman of the National Governors Association to education, said he would never stop fighting for education reform.

“We’re never giving up on any of those things,” Manchin said.

Contact writer Ry Rivard at ry.riv…@dailymail.com or 304-348-1796.