Middle school enrollments in W.Va.

We plan to have an editorial in The Herald-Dispatch on Monday regarding the future of Enslow Middle School in Huntington and, by extension, the future of Beverly Hills Middle School.

There may be a preference in the Highlawn neighborhood for a new K-8 school replacing both Enslow Middle and Highlawn Elementary. The new school could be built on on the present Enslow site if some adjoining properties are purchased.

People at a meeting this past Monday said they don’t like the idea of consolidating Enslow with Beverly Hills.

While researching Monday’s editorial, I came up with these figures:

This year, West Virginia has 37 K-8 schools. The closest are in Logan, Mingo and Kanawha counties. They range in size from 1,256 at Keyser Primary/Middle School in Mineral County to 63 at Hacker Valley Elementary School in Webster County.

West Virginia has 78 middle schools housing students in grades 6 through 9 only. Their sizes range from 1,094 at Musselman Middle School in Berkeley County to 15 at the Cabell County Alternative Education Middle School. The next smallest is Tyler Middle School in Kanawha County, with 66 students. A consolidated Enslow-Beverly Hills would have 838 students, making it the sixth-largest in the state.

Such a large school does not sit well with many people in either the Enslow or Beverly Hills neighborhoods. People are not comfortable with such a large school. That can be expected in a region with some of the smallest middle schools in the state. Among them, Cabell, Wayne and Putnam counties have eight of the 14 smallest middle schools in West Virginia.

For those who want to know, those are:
Cabell Alternative Education, 15 (78th);
Crum, 150 (76th);
West, 219 (72nd);
Fort Gay, 262 (69th);
Vinson, 267 (68th);
George Washington (Putnam) 273 (67th);
Ceredo-Kenova, 277 (66th);
Enslow, 283 (65th).

Enrollment numbers come from the annual headcount taken on October.