Dan Mumma talks about Ohio Valley Service Center

“We focus on providing educational services to school districts that they might not be able to do by themselves,” said Dan Mumma to the Cambridge Lions Club. Mumma will be the superintendent of the Ohio Valley Educational Service Center beginning in January. The center serves Guernsey and Noble County schools and other school districts from Marietta to Barnesville.

“We can provide the staff for students with special needs,” Mumma said. “One district may have eighteen students with special needs and another may have fifteen. Each district could not afford to hire its own specialist but by serving several districts we can meet the needs of all the students.”

“We get state funding for specialists,” Mumma said. “We can provide speech and hearing services, special education intervention teachers, textbook evaluation, coordination of curriculum and instruction, psychological services, talented and gifted support and preschool intervention.”

“We are required to identify and serve pre-school students (ages 3-5) with developmental disabilities,” Mumma said. “We currently serve two hundred fifty to three hundred pre-school students.”

Services provided to pre-school children include speech and hearing, psychological services, nursing care, physical and occupational therapy and the early learning initiative.

“We see the worth of our students and staff,” Mumma said. “Teachers touch lives in different ways. They can be a positive role model.”

Educational service centers were created by the state legislature in the early 1990’s to address the needs of schools in Ohio’s eighty eight counties. They came about as a result of studies by the state that showed that compliance with state standards was a problem.

Mumma reviewed the history of county school boards. In 1913 there were one thousand five hundred fourteen township school districts. “Some had a strong curriculum, others did not. Some had unsanitary conditions. Too many were exceedingly small.”

“Some schools had teachers who had not graduated from high school. Some had teachers who had only completed elementary school. There were thirty one township districts in Guernsey County.”