Assistant News Director

Tiny House Village To Provide Homes For Foster And At-Risk Youth

Foster kids often don’t have anywhere to go when they turn 18. New Vision Village in Barbour County aims to fill that void through housing and work opportunities for disconnected young adults and at-risk youth.

A $750,000 grant in 2023 Affordable Housing Program funding will support construction of the village’s first five tiny houses for 12 young men aging out of the foster care system.

CEO and President of New Vision Ruston Seaman said the money will fund basic infrastructure like plumbing and electricity as work begins to develop the village.

“Our blueprint plan calls for a village of 24 units,” Seaman said. “It’s about a $2.5 million development and this grant will pay for the first 5 units to be built and installed and then one fifth of the infrastructure, road, the septic system, those elements, so it’s a great gift.”

The goal is to turn the village into a thriving community, supporting transitioning youth entering the world of work and responsibility. The young men who live there will be gainfully employed at an onsite tiny house factory that will continue to produce tiny homes for this and future villages.

When completed, 12 of the village’s 24 500-square-feet, fully furnished units will accommodate adults who will serve as mentors to the youth. The goal is to establish healthy multi-generational relationships as key ingredients for the village to thrive, according to Seaman. As part of a supportive community these adults will care for and help the young men at a critical stage of their development learn to become contributing members of society.

Seaman said they will include retired school teachers, veterans, widows or single people with strong life experience.

“Everyone would live in the village, the 12 young people in job training learning life skills would then have neighbors that become friends,” Seaman said. “They’d have family, that’s the number one thing about kids aging out of foster care. Most of them have their life almost totally disrupted. Some of them don’t have anyone in their life right now called family.”

The proposed tiny house village is a sustainable effort which Seaman believes offers a high probability of positive outcomes for many people. The village will have two full-time employees, including a property manager and a relational coordinator.

The journey to New Vision Village began back in 1979 when Seaman was an 18-year-old hitchhiker seeking direction and purpose. He became a pastor and credits God with guiding him on an adventure of a lifetime. “It takes a village” becomes a real life metaphor for New Visions’ commitment to providing a safe, healthy environment where youth can develop and flourish.

Twenty-three-year-old Anthony Hinkle has been in the foster care system twice. Both of his parents were drug users and are now deceased. His memories are laced with trauma.

“The first time it wasn’t my choice, I was a kid and don’t remember too much about it,” Hinkle said. “The second time, my mom met two people in the hospital, and she let them move in. They ended up stealing my dad’s drugs, his medicine. It got to the point where my dad threatened to take a bowie knife and gut me like a fish. My mother, in sheer panic, did not know what to do and gave up her parental rights to protect me and my brother.”

Early on, Hinkle learned what it’s like to have no one to turn to.

“When you’re alone you don’t have much of a support system and you crave other people,” Hinkle said. “You know, we’re made to be social, to be getting out of our comfort zone and talking to others, whether we want to or not. We’re supposed to be in this together; society has changed everything to the point where we’re against each other and it’s ‘me, me, me’ – ‘not we, we, we.’”

Hinkle briefly attended college with plans to become a caseworker. That didn’t work out, but he now has an opportunity to use his life trauma as a springboard to help other young people. He said he hopes to develop his leadership abilities to help guide the village’s new residents with a clear foundation of what to expect as they learn new life skills alongside their new family.

“In order to give these kids a support system, they need someone that knows what it’s like to go without,” Hinkle said. “They need someone who knows at the end of the day you may feel alone but you’re not actually alone because you’ve got people that are encouraging you to go to work, to be time efficient, preparing you for the real world.”

New Vision’s inspiration for the tiny homes is based on a national model called Eden Village, which builds villages for chronically homeless people. The organization helped New Vision build a business plan while Seaman’s son Ruston Ray, a recent WVU Landscape Architecture graduate, helped with the design of the village while Starlight Construction helped with the engineering side of the design plans.

“The first five homes have to be done within a year but we believe by Earth Day, we’ll have our first big celebration and by that time we hope to have the first unit on the ground and ready for being reviewed,” Seaman said.

Seaman said design plans call for the building of a manufacturing hub or factory and a heated warehouse that will house early production of the tiny homes. He said New Visions job training program will be incorporated into the process.

“A lot of it is focused on young people transitioning or aging out of foster care, or who are in life transition and our factory will utilize their skills,” Seaman said. “We’ll have to hire a few more people for our staff to be able to build: we’ll need an electrician, we’ll need some people with skills to lead the jobs.”

By the time it’s up and running, New Vision Village hopes to produce 70 tiny house units a year. The need for housing for transitioning foster youth has never been higher and Seaman said fundraising efforts for the village will continue over the summer.

“West Virginia has the highest population of children placed in foster care by percentage,” Seaman said. “We had received a one-year grant to do a national report on the state of affairs for kids when they are aging out of foster care. That led us to this whole initiative because so often, young people on their 18th birthday then become homeless, 38 percent which is a national tragedy, and 58 percent of the men end up in trouble with the law within the first 18 months after aging out of foster care.”

New Vision is now using those statistics to optimize opportunities for a better lifestyle for young men transitioning out of foster care. Seaman said most funds for housing or job development are not provided for the same location. The design of New Vision Village will provide both a place to live and work in the same location while offering young adults a stable environment.

Groundbreaking for New Vision Village is expected in the spring.

“We’ll get some shovels out and we’ll have some people from the bank, and we’ll invite some officials,“ Seaman said. “We’re looking at Martin Luther King Day as a possible date when we’ll at least officially launch the project. It’ll go fairly slow while the weather is cold and the ground is messed up, but once the good weather of spring comes, fairly soon the roads will start to develop, and it will be an exciting year for us.”

W.Va.’s Christmas Train, Improving Air Traffic Security And Blessing Same Sex Couples, This West Virginia Week

On this West Virginia Week, we learned about the latest U.S. Census and what it means for West Virginia’s population. We also heard about a big shift coming in how the country gets its electricity, and we learned about the Pope’s decision to formally give his approval for priests to bless same-sex couples.

On this West Virginia Week, we learned about the latest U.S. Census and what it means for West Virginia’s population. We also heard about a big shift coming in how the country gets its electricity, and we learned about the Pope’s decision to formally give his approval for priests to bless same-sex couples.

We also discovered how students can benefit from mental and physical activities over the holidays, and we explored new research that aims to help air traffic control become safer and more reliable.

Finally, we got to experience a ride on the West Virginia Christmas Train at Cass State Park.

Caroline MacGregor is our host this week. Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert.

West Virginia Week is a web-only podcast that explores the week’s biggest news in the Mountain State. It’s produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Caroline MacGregor, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe.

Learn more about West Virginia Week.

Busy Holiday Travel Season Anticipated For W.Va. Turnpike

“Given that Christmas Day falls on a Monday, we’ll see more travel throughout the weekend,” Miller said.

The West Virginia Parkways Authority is gearing up for a busy Christmas holiday travel season.

Officials say the West Virginia Turnpike will see 1.33 million transactions over the 13-day holiday travel period from Thursday, Dec. 21, through Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024.

Parkways Authority Executive Director Jeff Miller said forecasted rainy weather and above average temperatures over Christmas will likely mean more travelers will use the turnpike.

“Given that Christmas Day falls on a Monday, we’ll see more travel throughout the weekend,” Miller said. “That may allow more people to get out and get to their destinations over the course of Saturday and Sunday and then return mid week.”

Miller said peak travel times are expected most days from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.

“So we do expect a slight increase over last year’s traffic and we expect it will be in line with 2017 when both Christmas and New Year’s fell on a Monday.”

Turnpike traffic volume is expected to be about the same as 2022 travel figures, or slightly higher at just below 1.3 million.

Drivers are reminded to be respectful and pay attention to flaggers who will be positioned at the turnpike to direct people to the right lane of the toll plaza and encourage smooth traffic flow.

The West Virginia Parkways Authority said it is anticipating more mid-week travel than usual from Tuesday to Thursday after Christmas. This is credited to a football bowl game between the West Virginia University Mountaineers and the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. The game will be held in Charlotte, N.C. on Wednesday, Dec 27, at 5:30 p.m.

Making Air Traffic Reliable And More Secure Subject Of Shepherd University Research

At Shepherd University we’ve built our own traffic control system, and we are using that to see how we can apply artificial intelligence to make the airspace more manageable by the air traffic controllers. We help with things like we help with traffic congestion prediction, traffic optimization, and also handling a lot of drone traffic, or unmanned aerial vehicles.

A Shepherd University professor is overseeing research to make aircraft communication more secure.

The research was presented at the 63rd Annual Conference of the International Association for Computer Information Systems. It has also been published in several publications subsequently attracting the attention of the country’s national defense contractors.

Assistant News Director Caroline MacGregor sat down with Assistant Professor of Business Administration George Ray to talk about his cutting-edge research.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

MacGregor: Professor Ray – thank you for joining me. Your research is focused on making the skies more secure, not only in the interest of the general public but also from a national security standpoint. Tell me what motivated this area of study.

Ray: I started the most recent round of this research around five years ago and I’ve just had a continuing interest in it. I was a computer and communications officer in the United States Air Force for eight years and that’s where I first started but we were using different equipment. I was in the Air Force 40 years ago. Prior to that I was in the United States Marine Corps. Quite a lot has changed. The ability to use PCs to collect data real time and process it in real time kind of got my interest five years ago and that’s when I started working on it.

MacGregor: You talk about the National Airspace System – a network of controlled and uncontrolled airspace, both domestic and international. The NAS essentially has an enormous responsibility of managing air traffic. What role does cybersecurity play in the national airspace?

Ray: Shepherd University has a national airspace cyber security laboratory. We consider the national airspace to be part of the national cyber infrastructure because the avionics that are used in air traffic management transplant digitally encoded messages over a data link service, similar to how we are communicating now over a data link. So, we’re focusing on collecting the communications in the airspace transmitted by surveillance radars, transmitted by aircraft, by GPS (Global Positioning System) satellites and we build at Shepherd custom instruments so we have a data driven approach to analyzing the national airspace.

MacGregor: You commented that most people do not consider the airspace as a cyber system that is vulnerable to hacking attacks. What do you mean?

Ray: I think it’s more that they realize the national airspace is vulnerable to these attacks but it’s not considered part of the cyberinfrastructure. We look at this as being part of the cyber infrastructure, again digitally encoded messages over a data link service and those are the ones most of the investment dollars from the National Science Foundation are going into – protecting things like power stations and the data communication networks we use for finance and so on. But we think this is just as important an infrastructure and it is a cyberinfrastructure.

MacGregor: What are some of the different techniques used by hackers to attack the network – for example, the “replay” attack. What is this and what are some mitigation measures for countering these attacks?

Ray: The replay attack is where an attacker will record messages at one time and then replay them at a later time. The purpose is to create confusion in that particular system. So in the National Airspace System they might record avionic traffic ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast), and that’s where the aircraft gives its state information: its position, its velocity. It might record those and at a later time replay that. The purpose is to create confusion in the air traffic control management. So you might have an aircraft that looks like it’s heading into a collision with another aircraft. It’s a form of spoofing attack, where the hacker is pretending to be a legitimate node in the network and in fact they’re there to cause confusion.

MacGregor: What interest are you finding on the national level for your research?

Ray: We’ve had interest from defense contractors that work on the national level. So we are in communication with several organizations that are part of the Department of Defense community, and we are working with them. There was a headline in the New York Post just a few weeks ago about GPS hacking, another one of the avionic systems like ADS-B and the headline was “Hackers are attacking the GPS and experts don’t know what to do about it.” So we’re looking at things like that as well. Some of the research we’re doing is looking at taking radio frequency signals and decomposing them into their phase and quadrature components and then analyzing patterns in those to detect if we have GPS spoofing or maybe even ADB-S spoofing going on.

MacGregor: Tell me more about other specific cyber attacks or hacking incidents.

Ray: There’s a couple of them, eavesdropping is one. That’s where you’re listening to broadcast messages and you’re not authorized to do so. Another is jamming and that’s where you have a denial-of-service attack where you at a particular frequency, for example, ADS-B transmits at 1090 megahertz, you broadcast a powerful transmission at that frequency and it jams the communications, nothing gets through. And then spoofing, again, is another form of hacker attacks where you pretend to be a legitimate node and decentralized identity solution for websites and applications on the network, but you’re not, and the attack is where you create a false position or other spatial information.

MacGregor: How difficult is it for the Air Force as well as commercial pilots to respond to these incidents?

Ray: The Air Force has a very good training in this area but you are dealing with sentient opponents, people who are able to see what you are doing and then counter that. And that’s just the nature of the competition. We’re seeing a lot of this in the Ukrainian war, systems are effective for a while, but then counter measures come into play and they lose their effectiveness. So it’s definitely an ongoing competition that is between sentient actors.

MacGregor: This includes attacks on satellite systems and capabilities which we’ve seen are vulnerable to attack during wartime as you just alluded to. What other areas are prone to attack?

Ray: Yes, that’s correct. And there’s other satellite systems as well, GPS is a satellite system, it’s part of the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) where several other countries have put up similar systems to GPSA. All of these systems are vital for transmitting information so they’re all vulnerable to hacking attacks of various kinds. All of them transmit on certain frequencies that can be jammed.

MacGregor: With the addition of drones using the country’s airspace, what are the risks for air traffic controllers already under intense pressure to provide key information and communication support for pilots?

Ray: There’s another side of the National Airspace System and it’s the commercial side where we are not necessarily concerned about hackers attacking it but just the stable and effective operation of the system itself. Putting a lot of drones into the National Airspace System is going to have a couple of problems. The main one is the air traffic control systems we have aren’t able to handle that, the air traffic controllers are overwhelmed.

MacGregor: So as air traffic control becomes more critical, it sounds like your research is going to be instrumental in lessening the occupational stress of this job in the future.

Ray: That has always been an extremely stressful job and it’s only become more stressful as air traffic has increased, but I think the key thing is it’s getting the point where a person is no longer able to handle the air traffic that’s going to be coming in in the near future, much less the drone traffic you add onto that. I think we definitely need to do things to help the air traffic controller do their job a lot more effectively.

MacGregor: How big is your team at Shepherd University and where do you see this research heading?

Ray: Right now we’re a fairly small crew but we’re also connecting with these defense contractors so we could expand that dramatically because they have a great deal of funding. The other thing is, right now at Shepherd University we’re building a Science DMZ (secure computer subnetwork) through a grant from the NSF. This will enable us to share our datasets and coding with other researchers and then also access large government databases at NASA or the Department of Defense. A Science DMZ is a specially configured network that provides for the transfer of large quantities of data very quickly.

We’re making the steps we need to make sure we can get into this next level so we’ll really increase the contributions we can make, and therefore the staff we’ll have working.

W.Va. Healthcare Services To Benefit From Federal Dollars

The money will be used to make improvements to public health infrastructure, improve maternal and child health services statewide, and support local health centers in Monroe County.

Nearly $4 million in federal funding has been awarded to West Virginia healthcare services.

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, D-WV, announced $3.9 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to strengthen healthcare services throughout the state.

The money will be used to make improvements to public health infrastructure, improve maternal and child health services statewide, and support local health centers in Monroe County.

Individual awards to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources include:

$1.5 million to bolster public health infrastructure. This includes workforce development and support facilities.

$1.3 million to support maternal and child health services statewide.

Another $1 million was set aside for the Monroe County Health Department to support the county’s local health centers.

W.Va. National Guard Projects Sizeable Economic Impact From State Operations

West Virginia is currently aligned with Peru and Qatar. The state’s partnership with Peru was one of the earliest SPP programs in the country. This year 50 airmen participated in C-17 training, marking the first time since 2014 that an aircraft was deployed to that country in support of the program.

The West Virginia National Guard said the state is seeing a large return on investment in its West Virginia operations which is a part of the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety.

Lt. Scott Applegate, deputy staff judge advocate with the West Virginia National Guard updated the Select Committee on Veterans Affairs Tuesday on how the guard’s role in helping to sustain the local economy.

The guard’s state budget stands at nearly $21 million. Applegate said for every state dollar invested, there’s a return of $16 to $20 in federal funds.

That equals a direct economic impact of $370 million with an indirect impact of $500 million. Applegate said that includes everything from construction to pay costs.

“Since about 1995, we’ve completed about $463 million worth of construction upgrades and facilities to our armories for about 1.7 million square feet in what we’ve improved, and we continue to modernize these facilities,” he said.

Applegate said improvements include maintaining the guard’s aircraft fleet, which he said is key to their ability to respond to emergencies.

“As we stay on the cutting edge, we move from a C-130 older model to a C-130J model and that is a conversion operation that is really important for us,” he said. “So that keeps our aircraft modernized, it keeps our C-130s flying, and it keeps these forces in the maintenance structure needed to support these air frames in West Virginia.”

Applegate pointed out to the committee that the state’s 20-1 investment is very small for such a large economic impact. The National Guard’s most recent annual report will be released in late December or early January in time for the 2024 legislative session.

Applegate said their next major mission is to further develop participation in the State Partnership Program. The initiative includes 88 partnerships with 100 nations around the globe and is considered a key U.S. security cooperation tool. The resulting partnerships facilitate cooperation across all aspects of international civil-military affairs and friendships that strengthen state and national security goals.

West Virginia is currently aligned with Peru and Qatar. The state’s partnership with Peru was one of the earliest SPP programs in the country. Applegate said this year, 50 airmen participated in C-17 training, marking the first time since 2014 that an aircraft was deployed in Peru in support of the program.

“The federal resources and federal units will use us to help build a better relationship with them because we do have those enduring relationships with those partner nations,” Applegate said. “Through our SPP, we will conduct military to military engagements in support of defense security goals and we’ll train and work with these partners to build their capacity and strengthen national security with our partnerships.”

As the National Guard adapts to change, Applegate said remaining viable for the federal government as a tool to be used during war time, or for other federal missions, is of paramount importance. He said 20 years of deployments, training and modernization has equipped the guard to respond quickly to state or federal emergencies.

“Over the last few years, the guard has supported the state in its COVID-19 response, it’s supported the state through a department of corrections mission, it’s supported the state with a gas outage that occurred in Charleston, West Virginia,” Applegate said. “And it supported the state both federally and through a state active duty mission to the border.”

Applegate said he believes the state’s National Guard is among the best in the country.

“I am biased, but I tell you, I believe West Virginia is, if not the best National Guard, it’s right there on the cutting edge,” Applegate said. “And that’s because our service members get in there, they learn the mission, they volunteer for the mission and they bring those skills back to West Virginia.”