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Education emergency measures

Columnists

State Senator Robbie Morris was our special guest for the August First Friday Focus on Education meeting at Kump Education Center. He explained Senate Bill 516 for providing a new formula to increase tax funding for students in remote rural schools. He introduced this bill as a new legislator in the winter session, but it never got beyond the finance committee. On Tuesday, the Randolph County Board of Education had a visit from state efficiency experts to explain why our county has Emergency Status with the West Virginia School Board. Our local B)E has six months to come up with a ...

Overreach not partisan

Columnists

Partisanship, although a persistent feature of American politics, has become increasingly intense and divisive in recent years. Both parties seem convinced that the new millennium is the time for either “golden” ages or social experimentation. During the Joe Biden administration, the use of executive orders aimed to alleviate student indebtedness and other economic ills. Donald Trump has his own brand of executive fiat, challenging birthright citizenship and/or pushing tariffs. The central feature of Biden and Trump’s overreach is that they tried to bypass Congress. Before ...

Boos & Applause

Editorials

Applause to the 10 Randolph County high school students who attended American Legion Mountaineer Boys State at Jacksons Mill this summer. Participants for the 2025 American Legion Mountaineer Boys State included Anthony Bennett, Alexander Broschart, Kaden George, Andrew Harris, Logan Jones, Daniel Lipscomb, Aiden Lowther, Preston Nixon, Dempsey Phares and Mason Phillips. American Legion H.W. Daniels Post 29 in Elkins sent the students to Boys State, an honors, leadership, and citizenship Academy which has existed since 1936 to teach good government through participation to the ...

Future requires dinosaurs

Columnists

Long before man walked the Earth, God in His providence created the animals, then sent a massive asteroid that collided with the Earth, wiped out the dinosaurs and other large animals, piled rubble, heat and pressure on top of them and turned them into fossil fuels. Or something like that. God, generously, provided a source of energy a long, long time before Henry Ford rolled the Model T off his assembly line. Take the creation story however you want, but the bottom line is that the world runs on fossil fuels. They are necessary for more than just the internal combustion engine. They ...

‘Drop the Rock’ to gain serenity and improve relationships

Columnists

“Drop the Rock” is a short talk by the late speaker Sandy Beach. (Yes, his real name!) It is a favorite message of mine. You can click here to listen to it on YouTube, but to summarize, the story describes a person struggling to swim out to a boat where her friends were waiting. She was weighed down by a rock around her neck (her friends could see it, yet she could not). The friends kept yelling, “Drop the rock!” When she finally began to untangle the strings holding the rock around her neck, the load became lighter, and she could swim out to the boat and meet her friends. In ...

Bad Trend

Editorials

As if our county boards of education did not have enough to worry about, a recent report by The Reason Foundation suggests a trend may present big challenges for West Virginia public schools. In a look at public school enrollment across the country, the foundation said West Virginia was one of only four states with public school enrollment that decreased by more than 5% between fiscal years 2020 and 2024. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic had something to do with that, but the Mountain State has not bounced back. At the beginning of FY2020, West Virginia had 263,485 students enrolled ...