Charleston’s West Side Middle needs the community’s help to ‘incentivize’ student attendance

By Matthew Young, RealWV

UPDATE: December 12 – This project has been fully funded, as of Wednesday, December 10. Mary Wilkinson posted the following message to the West Side Middle School Facebook page:

“A HUGE thank you to the West Side Middle community for sharing the DonorsChoose project for incentives! It was fully funded this morning! It is greatly appreciated!”

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – “I have a lot of kids with a lot of trauma, and a lot of things going on outside of school they can’t control that affect them.”

That’s what Mary Wilkinson, Student Support Facilitator at Charleston’s West Side Middle School, said while speaking with RealWV on Friday. Now in her third year at West Side, and despite often working with students dealing with the types of difficulties no young person should ever have to, Wilkinson loves both her job, and the kids who make it worth doing.

“I spend a lot of my day with kids that are having behavior issues in the classroom, or need academic support,” Wilkinson explained. “Or they just need somewhere quiet away from everything upstairs going on.”

“It’s a very small group of kids that I work with,” Wilkinson added. “It’s never the same group. I get office-referrals sent down here to me, and a lot of times they (students) just need somewhere to calm down if they’re angry or sad, or with whatever is going on in their day. Then I get them back to class as quickly as I can.”

Depending on the situation, Wilkinson noted, students will typically spend anywhere from one or two class periods, up to half the day with her. But Wilkinson’s responsibilities at West Side go beyond simply calming students and assisting them with their studies. 

“I also work with our attendance director and our social workers on ‘bigger picture’ issues, like chronic absences,” Wilkinson noted. And while Kanawha County as a whole saw a roughly three-percent drop in chronic absenteeism during the 2024/2025 school year – with West Side Middle in particular reporting an 88.66% attendance rate – for certain students, the problem remains persistent. 

These attendance concerns prompted Wilkinson to explore alternative-motivators to encourage the more inconsistent-attendees to come to school. And though such motivators are available, the cost to provide them to students is outside of West Side’s budget.

“The problem is that we do have funding, but we are only allowed to spend that money on certain things,” Wilkinson explained. “We can’t go out and purchase little prizes, and little snacks that the kids like. Really it doesn’t take a lot to incentivize the kids, it’s just that we’re not allowed to buy those things with our funding.”

In an effort to make these incentives a reality for the students at West Side Middle, Wilkinson turned to DonorsChoose, a nationwide nonprofit organization which helps connect public schools to donors willing to help fund projects and classroom supplies that the school couldn’t otherwise afford. 

Wilkinson calls the funding campaign, “Keep Our Students in Class!”

“Many of our students come from incredibly traumatic situations, including homelessness, drug use, domestic violence, and loss of a parent,” Wilkinson explains on the campaign’s web page. “The effects of these situations make it very difficult for our students to be motivated to attend school regularly. For some, it also causes poor behavior, which leads them to being sent out of class so that other students can learn.”

“My hope for this project is that I will be able to sit down with our students, set attendance and behavior goals, and have the ability to offer them these wonderful incentives in exchange for reaching the goals,” Wilkinson further explains.

Wilkinson hopes to set weekly, monthly, and full-year goals with the students, with each goal reached resulting in a larger incentive. If the campaign is fully-funded, weekly incentives will include different snacks and candy, and the incentive for reaching monthly goals will be an insulated drink tumbler. Students who reach their attendance goals over the full school year will receive one of six 10 inch Amazon Fire tablets. 

The total funding goal of Wilkinson’s campaign is $2,131.39, of which $856.39 is still needed. If the campaign is not fully funded by the Dec. 15 deadline however, the donations would potentially be reallocated to other DonorsChoose projects. 

“I’m down to 10 days,” Wilkinson said, although it will be nine days by the time this article is published. “Every little bit helps.”

For more information about West Side Middle School’s “Keep Our Students in Class!” DonorsChoose campaign, or to make a contribution, click HERE, or visit the campaign’s web page at https://www.donorschoose.org/project/keep-our-students-in-class/9595697/