The hallmark of every good suspense film is that you’re never sure what’s going on. Whenever you think you’ve figured it out, some plot twist or deceit unravels what you thought you knew.
We’ve found that understanding the intricacies of West Virginia’s broken system of funding public education and teachers’ salaries had the same effect — except without the fun and enjoyment of a suspense flick. Actually, it’s dreadfully dense and dull, and the people who benefit most from it like it that way. Fewer people pay attention.

West Virginia is facing a crisis rooted in teacher pay. Jefferson and other border counties are having trouble attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers. Sure we have some terrific teachers who have spent their careers teaching in Jefferson County. But most started teaching back when the cost of living here resembled the rest of the Mountain State rather than metropolitan Baltimore-Washington, D.C.

And we do have wonderful young teachers who forego the significantly higher pay offered by neighboring states so they can teach in Jefferson County. But when those young teachers look further into their careers, they see almost no prayer of entering the middle class. Teaching 20 years in Jefferson gets you roughly the same salary as a starting teacher in Washington County, MD. It seems like a fixable problem. Politicians and people in power all say they want to. But the more we dug, the more intrigue we found, just like in those suspense films.

The intrigue begins at the top of West Virginia government. Gov. Joe Manchin says he supports locality pay for teachers, and blames a powerful teachers union for blocking it. But his critics say he is all talk. He has called for changing the funding forumla to favor counties, but he hasn’t offered a plan to do so.

Manchin also has been a study in contradictions. He has demanded mandates on how local monies are spent, while at the same time saying he wants counties to have greater flexibility in how they spend education money. He can’t have it both ways.

Then there’s the West Virginia Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. It says it supports funding proposals to allow counties to keep more of their own property-tax dollars, so they can use them to fund better teacher pay. Yet all the major players agree that WVEA is the largest obstacle standing in the way of just that.

Like all good suspense films there are characters who are the surprising small-town heroes. In this case it’s our local delegation to Charleston. They consistently worked for locality pay in the past; now they’re working toward changing the state-local funding formula. Their plan is called the 70/30 split. It would allow Jefferson to keep more of our local tax dollars in county.

Instead of being penalized for our high cost of living, we could use our money to attract and retain teachers who want to spend their careers here. That would be a happy ending to this tale.