Breaking News

Editorials

Strength of Community

The Randolph County Board of Education surprised many in the community — quite a few of them pleasantly — by voting 4-1 Tuesday night against closing the Harman K-12 School. The decision has already had wide-ranging repercussions. The next morning, Randolph County Schools Superintendent Dr. Shawn Dilly announced that the proposal to close the Pickens School had been withdrawn. Closing the two K-12 schools was just the first step in Dilly’s proposed Reorganization Plan, which was to include closing a total of five elementary schools and creating two consolidated elementary ...

Prevention

Whether it be willful ignorance for the sake of scoring political points or a genuine misunderstanding of the broad range of strategies necessary to tackle a dual public health crisis in Appalachia, elected officials and policymakers are handicapping efforts against one of the major dangers spawned by our region’s substance abuse epidemic. A KFF Health News report followed up on federal health officials’ effort a few years back to assess an outbreak of HIV in central Appalachia. The outbreak has been fueled by shared use of needles among those who inject opioids or ...

Precautions

As the holidays brought many of us closer to friends and family — perhaps in large gatherings where there was lots of hugging, laughing and eating together — the inevitable early-winter surge of illnesses is now upon us. A healthcare system in Southeast Ohio announced it was experiencing a high surge in patients with respiratory illnesses. For them, it meant it was time to implement visitor restrictions during what it called “respiratory illness season.” For hospitals, that means limiting the number of visitors per patient, asking that visitors be over age 18 and showing no ...

Updates

It’s been about a decade since the last time the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia worked on updates to the state Code of Judicial Conduct. Think about how much the world has changed since the last revision to that code, in November 2015. For that matter think about how much we’ve learned by watching ethics questions play out on a state and national level. Chief Justice Tim Armstead was right to set the process in motion. “In order to promote and maintain the public’s trust in a fair, transparent, independent and impartial judiciary, it is important that we hold ...

Disrespectful

On Friday, a Randolph County Board of Education representative told The Inter-Mountain that the public hearings and BOE vote on closing the Harman K-12 School will be held tonight, even if classes in all the county schools have been canceled for the day due to the weather. Randolph County Schools sporting events and other extra-curricular activities are postponed on evenings when “snow day” school cancellations have taken place. This is done with the safety of the students and their families in mind. Safety concerns were apparently ignored in making the decision to have ...

Questionable

At a time when both public and private colleges and universities in West Virginia are struggling financially, does it make any sense to gift $5 million in taxpayer dollars to a private vocational college based in Steubenville, Ohio — essentially to move into West Virginia and offer the same services as the state’s community and technical colleges? Of course not. But that’s where we stand today, as the West Virginia Water Development Authority in October improperly approved a $5 million grant for the College of St. Joseph the Worker to expand into West Virginia. The college’s ...