On July 1, 2022, Alleghany County Public Schools and Covington City Public Schools merged to form Alleghany Highlands Public Schools. We want to be absolutely clear. We are in complete support of this. 

As the parents, students, teachers, administrators, and community members, we want to express our deepest and strongest desire to merge under the best possible terms with providing the highest quality of education to our students as the cornerstone of this endeavor. This principle has permeated into many parts of this consolidation and for that we are grateful. However, at this point, we stand positioned to fail in one crucial area: the facility currently set to house our middle school students.

The current Clifton Middle School facility (constructed in 2001) will be closed as a middle school, with no current, concrete plans for its utilization, and the combined school system will use the current Covington High School facility (constructed 1939) as a combined middle school for all grades 6, 7, and 8. The reasons this is a bad decision are far too numerous to lay out here and have been provided to members of our local government.

It is our belief that Covington City vs. Alleghany County politics have once again made an appearance, and in this, they have once again failed us. We believe this has played the largest role in this decision. The result of this is not providing a high-quality education for our middle school students in a suitable, safe, modern building but instead sending hundreds of students to a building that is arguably unsuitable, unsafe, and antiquated. This was a decision as a result of bad compromises and one that would never stand on its own. No reasonable person could argue this is in the best interest of the students.

Elected officials have attempted to justify this decision with local history lessons and their own personal anecdotes, but have yet to offer any sincere reason why this move is better for our students. The reason for this is simple: it is not and we all know it.

Therefore, we ask the Alleghany Highlands School Board to resolve to keep the current Clifton Middle School Facility in operation as the combined school system’s sole middle school. It is time to put the local “us vs. them” politics behind us, and put the safety and education of our children once again at the top of our priority list.