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POWER

Appalachian Regional Commission officials earlier this week announced $68.2 million in awards to 65 projects through its Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (anything to come up with a snappy acronym) initiative. Though not all of the commission’s efforts are home runs, POWER appears to be rooted in addressing a real need for our region. “ARC’s POWER initiative supports coal-impacted communities’ preparation for the next phase of Appalachia’s economy, while ensuring that residents have a say in the course of their own futures,” said ARC ...

Boos & Applause

Applause to the Community Conversation on Domestic Violence hosted by Davis & Elkins College Tuesday evening, with panelists from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Centers Against Violence, the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office and more. The event, which was held at the Senate Commons in D&E’s Myles Center for the Arts, saw more than 30 students, faculty and community members in attendance and covered a wide range of topics, such as how to break the cycle of domestic violence, the biggest barriers to victims accessing safety, and the role played by state and federal courts. Applause to ...

Whiplash

Tuesday’s Randolph County Board of Education meeting presented a classic “good news and bad news” situation. The good news, for residents of the Harman and Pickens areas, is that Superintendent of Schools Dr. Shawn Dilly and the BOE announced that the scheduled public hearings and votes on closing the Harman and Pickens schools have been moved back from November into January. Dilly said this decision was made after facing public criticism over the officials moving so quickly on the proposed school closings. A total of seven hearings were scheduled to take place in November at ...

Benefiting from tragedy

The tricks Donald Trump tried to play on the recent hurricane victims were beyond depraved. Here were people suffering major losses, their lives stopped in a hellscape of tattered roofs, ruined possessions and, in some cases, a pile of debris where their home once stood. And there was Trump making their lives more miserable as a tactic to fool them into blaming their distress on his political foes. Could these hurricane survivors see what was being done to them? Trump’s targets this time weren’t foreigners with dark skin. The migrants from Haiti knew they weren’t eating ...

Progress

Most West Virginia public schools are making slow improvement in the categories that put 49 of 55 counties “on watch” last year. Despite that, there are still 41 “on watch” for not meeting one or more in a long list of standards “We’re charged as a state with providing a thorough and efficient education to our West Virginia children,” said Alexandra Criner, director of the Office of Accountability. But meeting that charge has been an excruciatingly slow process in a state dogged by chronic attendance problems, challenges to operational effectiveness, staffing shortages, ...

Williams

During last week’s special session of the West Virginia Legislature, lawmakers carved out time to honor someone important not only to the state, but to the country. They passed a resolution to place a statue of the late Hershel “Woody” Williams inside the U.S. Capitol. Williams, who died in 2022, was the last surviving Congressional Medal of Honor recipient from World War II. Born in Quiet Dell, W.Va., Williams was a Marine Corps veteran who was in combat in the Pacific. He received the Medal of Honor in 1945, after serving in the Battle of Iwo Jima with the 21st Marines, 3rd ...