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Rescuing schools without ruining system

Randolph County is at the epicenter of the public education earthquake in West Virginia. The shock waves of this cataclysmic situation ripple throughout this state, and similar seismic conditions exist wherever small populations try to operate schools with limited funding in the computer “Information Age” when adults are moving to urban areas and having fewer children. Recognizing demographic reality is essential for the survival of local communities. The current conditions that exacerbate the Randolph County problems are the national political pressure for “School Choice,” ...

Schumer’s surprise

Democrats were stunned by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s sudden decision to support Donald Trump’s budget. The decision threw the party into disarray and seemed a betrayal of Hakeem Jeffries in the House of Representatives, where all but one Democrat voted against the GOP budget. What made it worse was Schumer’s explanation of why he capitulated. He called it a “Hobson’s Choice.” Either way you figured it out, it was all bad. If you voted against the budget, Elon Musk and company would get a green light to ride roughshod over the government. There was no symbolic ...

Take action for WV’s future

In the wake of the recent flooding that did much damage to several communities in our state, we have seen firsthand the resilience and solidarity of West Virginia’s people. These floods reminded us of the need to better prepare and support our communities for the challenges ahead. From infrastructure to workforce readiness, we saw gaps in parts of our state. But beyond the visible damage, there’s an underlying truth: this crisis has underscored the pressing need to address some of the foundational issues facing our state. From economic development to education and childcare — ...

Legislative potpourri

Today is the deadline for bills to be introduced in the West Virginia Senate. As of Sunday, we are now two-thirds of the way through the 60-day legislative session with less than three full weeks left. We’re also just over a week until Crossover Day, when bills must be passed by the body they started in and be sent to the opposite body in order to have any chance of completing the legislative process before the clock strikes midnight on Saturday, April 12, when the Legislature adjourns sine die. While things have been slow up to this point, expect things to start speeding up. The ...

Ignoring the canary in the coal mine

Tens of thousands of pages related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy were released this week. Not to spoil it, but he dies in the end. In the process of reviewing the documents, it is apparent that the government kept a lot private because the names of CIA agents in the field, their sources and methods of collecting data, etc. were all in the documents. An unredacted release when those agents were alive could have jeopardized them. Perhaps not surprisingly, some commentators were convinced the documents were a coverup protecting supposed Jewish assassins. Last ...

Epidemic of distrust

Now they tell us. “We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.” So reads the headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci’s March 16 article in The New York Times. The event was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bad misleading came from scientists who purposefully discredited the now widely accepted theory that the virus originated from a leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Times article appeared one day short of five years from the publication in Nature Medicine of an article by five scientists, led by ...