WVPS’s Scott Baker and Elizabeth Shahan will meet with each grade during their visit and students will have a chance to learn from a giant inflatable “Mega Brain” that will be set up in the gymnasium. 

Both Baker and Shahan have ties to the county. Baker is a graduate from Davis & Elkins College, while Shahan graduated from both Tygarts Valley High School and West Virginia Wesleyan College.

“Most of us with Prevention Solutions have lived and worked in West Virginia for the majority of our careers or lifetime,” said Shahan, who is the organization’s director. “When I get to come back to the county and work in it, that’s what my whole goal was. There’s a lot here in West Virginia and we can help ourselves, we have the professional capacity, we have the people here that care about the community. So I stuck around to try and fix what is broken and get people as healthy as we can.”

Baker, who has been with the WVPS for 3 1/2 years, works in 13 different West Virginia counties and does two to three presentations at schools each month throughout the year.

A group of students — at a previous presentation by West Virginia Prevention Solutions — line up in a gymnasium to walk through a giant inflatable brain.

“We take the giant inflatable brain around to the schools and use it to teach about brain development and the effects of substance abuse on it,” Baker said. “It is received really well by the schools and the students. We do pre and post testing with the middle and high school students so we can gauge the data on how much information they retained.”

Baker said that the inflatable brain is about 20-feet long, 12-feet high, and 16-feet wide.

“It’s like a big tunnel that the kids walk through and the inside has a bunch of different lit up displays that demonstrate how neurons communicate under different substances,” said Baker. “It is really neat and the kids are able to learn a lot from it. We also do some activities and show them how different parts of the brain function.”

West Virginia Prevention Solutions is a non-profit agency funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau for Children & Families, and Bureau for Behavioral Health. 

For more information about the WVPS can be found at wvpreventionsolutions.org or the organization’s Facebook page.