ABSTRACT
Advocates for larger schools today typically argue from a "better instructional possibilities and facilities" perspective. Poor facilities and instructional limitations due to small student enrolments and antiquated buildings are the enemy of school consolidators, whose view of community in this sense is a national community rather than a local one. Wise to much of the national pro and con argument over school consolidation, the principal of Little Kanawha remained an advocate for his community's middle school up until its consolidation. There are various formal indicators and documents that also suggest the changing economic fortunes of Burnsville and its surrounding communities; Little Kanawha’s own deteriorating facilities; and the changing academic emphasis of the school from the late 1920s into the era. The modern era of school accountability in West Virginia was initiated as an outcome of a state court case over inequality of educational funding between counties, inefficiency, and alleged patronage politics in the Pauley vs. Bailey case in 1982.
