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Last week my column about city water problems ended hurriedly with these two sentences:
“As frustrating as these problems may be, they cannot all be blamed on government. Every generation must work together and learn from history to solve problems using kindness (civility) and intelligence.”
This week after watching school children get on a yellow bus for their first day of school, I plan to start with the above suggestions for solving our public-school problems. When I see new leaders being loudly blamed for problems they did not create, I realize that George Washington was right that civility is the most essential characteristic for good American citizenship. It is not just what we do, but how we do it.
Civility is one of the best ideas that shapes historic American democracy. We must work together to define our problems and decide what can be done about them now and how to avoid future problems. This week we have had even more problems with water than we did last week. Buffalo Creek flooded homes and created a hole in the blacktop on John St. Calls to city operations helped to get the hole filled with gravel, but the underlying problem will take more basic changes.
We can patch such short-term holes, but we need to address long-term systemic street water problems more intelligently. We need to look for the patterns of pipes and natural creeks that run under the city of Elkins and address underlying causes of flooding and water damage. These same principles apply for solving problems in the school system and making education attainable for young families.
West Virginia ranks 48th of 50 states, and Randolph County has the lowest achievement test scores in WV. Now Randolph County has a new superintendent, and changes are being made to reduce the cost of having expensive remote schools. Teachers in early grades will have aids to help third graders pass the state test, and fifth graders will go to the middle schools. These changes will patch some of the holes, but they will not change the systemic conditions for local families.
One underlying human problem in Randolph County is parental poverty. Parents are unable to earn a living wage because of low pay, drug abuse, and a lack of education for workforce training. The Inter-Mountain is full of stories about child abuse because ill-equipped parents are frustrated that they cannot support their children. Foster families are not the solution for the long term, when foster children are pushed back and forth as parents are in or out of jail. Putting parents in jail does not develop good parenting skills.
Our declining population has been unwilling to pass a school levy for the last 15 years. Randolph County has the largest land area in West Virginia, and our population is dwindling which makes each taxpayer need to pay more to serve students in rural areas. Busing more children to centralized schools means youngsters spend more hours riding a bus, and fewer adults want to become bus drivers.
We will not find easy answers. We cannot really blame these demographic and geographic issues on the school board or superintendent, but these issues are systemic realities that citizens need to address together with intelligence and civility. We need to unite to make public education our priority.