Watch ‘Rosemary’, a new documentary from WVPB that follows the campaign of Rosemary Ketchum, the first openly transgender person elected to public office in West Virginia.
With the pandemic as the backdrop, the film follows Rosemary Ketchum’s campaign and election to Wheeling’s City Council in June, 2020.
Rosemary Premieres Monday, October 26, 2020 at 9 PM on WVPB TV.
Encore Presentations: Wednesday, October 28, 08:00 pm on The West Virginia Channel, and Thursday, October 29, 10:30 pm on WVPB.
Corey Knollinger
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WVPB
Rosemary Ketchum on the hill in Wheeling, West Virginia
Ketchum, elected June 9 to Wheeling City Council, defines herself simply as a determined community activist and human rights advocate.
“Realizing that I could be defined solely by my gender identity was uncomfortable when this campaign started,” Ketchum said.
“For years I’ve been working throughout the state of West Virginia, advocating for issues like racial justice, criminal justice, poverty, mental health and LGBTQ equality, all issues that matter greatly to me as well as the people of Wheeling.”
West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s cameras follow Ketchum pre-COVID 19, on a series of community projects and events, capturing her energy and optimism for making things better in her adopted city.
Rosemary is a film produced by Corey Knollinger and Chuck Kleine. Both are residents of Wheeling and found Ketchum’s long-demonstrated drive to better the lives of the city’s most vulnerable to be inspiring.
“If every community had 10 Rosemarys, the world would be a much better place,” Kleine said, who with Knollinger captured Ketchum’s work as a community activist and her journey on the campaign trail, including the exuberance and elation of an election win, and the emotion of taking the oath of office.
In 2018, when Mirta Martin became president of Fairmont State University, she never imagined leading a school that was already in a dire financial state because of a pandemic. But because of measures she took upon taking the job, she doesn’t have to raise tuition in the face of the coronavirus.
“I can tell you that as a first-generation student, as the first in my family to go to college, I am all too sensitive about the plight of our students. And, you know, while $50 some may think it’s not a lot, for others, it’s the difference between putting food on their table and not putting food on their table,” Martin said.
Fairmont State University, like many of the colleges across the state, faced the question of whether or not to recoup lost revenue from housing and board refunds from last semester and increased cost of necessary cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment by raising tuition.
At West Virginia University, where there’s a slight budget deficit for the fiscal year, officials decided against raising tuition for the first time in over 20 years.
At both West Virginia University and Fairmont University, officials have made up for their deficit by tightening spending and limiting non-essential employee travel.
Marshall University, Concord University and the University of Charleston have also announced that they will not be raising tuition and fees.
Glenville State College, and West Liberty University plan to raise tuition and fees by a small margin this semester.
West Liberty University, which is seeing a $200 increase in tuition for full time students taking 12 or more credit hours, is starting an initiative through its foundation office called Helping Hilltoppers to help students offset the added cost.
As President Stephen Greiner explains, this will cover the same ground as the CARES Act funding distributed by the federal government.
“The reason behind this is to assure or to help them return to West Liberty and have funds available if they need them for the kinds of expenses that students [have]. Whether it’s medical or whether its food, whether it’s housing, whether it’s child care, those kinds of things that will help a student stay enrolled at West Liberty,” Greiner said.
This fund is in no way tied to federal CARES Act money, or any other state or federal funding, he said.
While colleges across the state have opted for either a small increase, or no increase at all to cost of attendance over last year, the question of sustainability comes to mind.
West Virginia University Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Rob Alsop thinks the college will be able to maintain its current operating budget without a significant cost increase to students in the coming years.
“If there are tuition increases, they’ll be much more moderate, as in the 1, 2, 2 and half-percent increases as opposed to the 4 or 5 percent we’ve done in the past. I think it’s just a different environment, and we’re really trying to be thoughtful about the burden we put on our students,” Alsop said.
As of now, most colleges in the state plan to resume in-person classes in the fall.
History was made in Wheeling last Tuesday with the election of West Virginia’s first openly trans public official.
Rosemary Ketchum is now the City Council Member-Elect for the city of Wheeling’s third ward, an area that includes South Wheeling, Center Wheeling, East Wheeling, and Mozart.
Ketchum, a 26 year old community organizer and mental health advocate, won the seat by 15 votes to become the state’s first openly trans person to be elected to public office.
In a video shared to her Twitter, Ketchum said she’s grateful for the support she’s been getting since being elected, and is excited to get to work.
“We don’t run for office to make history, we run for office to make a difference, and I guess if history is made in the process, so be it,” she said.
Ketchum will be sworn into Wheeling City Council on July 1st.
Organizations in Ohio County have come together to address community needs during this pandemic. In a bid to lift each other up, local restaurants and farmers are teaming up to help feed kids.
At an elementary school in Wheeling, Americorps serving with the nonprofit Grow Ohio Valley are handing out free dinners to students.
While counties across the state have started feeding programs for breakfast and lunch, what makes this dinner program unique is the partnership between farmers, restaurants and schools to make this meal.
Quick Thinking to Quick Action
This version of the USDA At Risk Supper program is the brainchild of Grow Ohio Valley. The organization tapped West Virginia Northern Community College and Ohio County Schools. Together these partners have come together to address three community needs: keeping locally owned restaurants in business, helping farmers deal with surplus, and, above all, feeding students.
As Grow Ohio Valley Executive Director Danny Swan explained, his organization is working with the county to adapt the existing at-risk feeding program in a way to take care of all three of those needs.
“Basically getting restaurants to prepare food for kids and then Grow Ohio Valley’s mobile farmers market trucks would stop by the restaurants, pick up the meals and take them to these schools in high-need neighborhoods, and distribute them to kids,” Swan said.
The United States Department of Agriculture has a program in place called Child and Adult Care Food Program which provides reimbursements for free and reduced meals served by schools. The current rate for suppers served by the school is $3.41. Grow Ohio Valley has also secured some grant funding to make that amount closer to $5 per meal for the restaurants preparing it.
The team from Sarah’s On Main in West Virginia Northern Community College’s kitchen posing with the meals they had made.
Credit Photo Provided / Grow Ohio Valley
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Grow Ohio Valley
The team from Sarah’s On Main in West Virginia Northern Community College’s kitchen posing with the meals they had made.
Sarah Lydick, the owner of Sarah’s On Main which is one of the restaurants preparing meals, says that she’s grateful to be involved.
“Not only are we able to pay our employees to come in and make these meals, it’s a feel good thing, you know?” Lydick said. “It feels really great to be able to help people that need it right now. We’re not giving them prepackaged Doritos. These are like real wholesome meals that we feel really proud to be making and serving.”
The meals are either prepared in the restaurant’s kitchen, or the industrial kitchen space at West Virginia Northern Community College — depending on kitchen capacity.
The program started in late April, and came together quickly after the planning phases, as West Virginia Northern Community College associate professor Chef Chris Keyfauver explains.
“I got a phone call on a Friday morning from Chef Gene [Evans] who said ‘Hey, Danny called me about this, what do you think? What should we do next?’ Within a week of when I was informed, we were pulling in product to start that process, and that Monday we produced our first meals,” Keyfauver said.
While the program itself was set up rather quickly, the rollout process was slow, starting with only two days of meal distribution at one school. Swan said this was on purpose to gauge interest.
“You only get reimbursed for the amount of kids that actually show up to pick up a meal. So we just have kind of quietly been spreading the word through, through the principals at the schools who then call the specific families and try to have some way to devise how many kids will show up and that’s how many meals we could prepare,” Swan explained. “You know, we don’t want to prepare 1000 meals and only 100 kids show up and even worse, we don’t want to prepare 100 meals and 1000 kids show up.”
The program has now expanded to meals being disbursed Monday through Thursday at three locations in the county.
Create to Replicate
One of the major goals of the program is to create a model that can be replicated across the state. Grow Ohio Valley has been keeping track of all of the financial and logistical needs for the program, so in the future it can easily be replicated.
Ohio County Schools Child Nutrition Director Renee Griffin says as a whole, the county is impressed with how the program has panned out so far.
“So, we now have a model in place that the state department is very proud of, as are we, and we’re just glad we’re able to partner with our local community to help our kids because ultimately, that’s what we’re doing. We’re not only helping feed our families that are struggling right now, but we’re helping local businesses and we’re helping local farmers and all those things, I think, are a win for everybody’s situation,” Griffin said.
The only caveat is the program in its current form can only go for as long as the school year, which is the end of May.
While the current funding mechanism is expiring soon, Danny Swan believes the idea will continue in one form or another.
“It’s hard to devise what the landscape will look like post coronavirus, that said, yes, I think these ideas will persist in one form or another, like this restaurant to schools program has an ability to become something that’s part of the fabric of our community.”
As of now, Grow Ohio Valley is exploring other funding options that will allow the program to seamlessly continue into the summer.
The stay-at-home order currently in place because of the coronavirus pandemic has changed how a lot of us go about our day. But for those without housing, basic hygiene tasks such as washing their hands, showering and doing laundry have become even more difficult. In Wheeling, one group helped put together a hygiene station under a city underpass to provide for those basic needs. Corey Knollinger recently spoke to Kate Marshall, the head of the HoH Share, about the hygiene station and how to keep those without housing from feeling hopeless during the pandemic.
***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Corey Knollinger:Can you tell me a little bit about how the idea of the sanitation station came about and how you saw that through?
Kate Marshall: As soon as the COVID crisis was really starting to show itself in our community, which was social services having to close their doors, and only providing to-go services at soup kitchens, it very quickly became apparent that our homeless population was going to have absolutely no access to restrooms, hand washing stations, showers, and basic cleanliness. So we came together as homeless outreach workers and advocates to try to come up with a creative solution about how we were going to provide these essential facilities for our folks who were looking at living outdoors exclusively and indefinitely yet needed the services.
Knollinger: This entire operation is volunteer run. Can you tell me the response that you’ve gotten on that side of things?
Marshall: We honestly didn’t know what kind of response we were going to get. Because, you know, we’re asking folks to take a front line community approach to addressing a pretty significant problem we had, which was we were totally unprepared of what to do with the homeless community during a pandemic or crisis. So we put it out there via word of mouth, Facebook, and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of response that we received and we’ve been able to maintain the hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a volunteer staff because of the response. Now for our volunteer staff, we did provide training and we have ongoing assessments of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We have gloves and masks. We have protocols in place of how to sanitize portable toilets after every use, how to sanitize the shower stalls between every use, as well as laundry procedures and personal protective equipment for our volunteers.
Knollinger: On the other side of things, tell me the response that this has gotten with those without housing.
Marshall: The [response] from our unhoused friends who are using the hygiene station and facilities has been overwhelming. The amount of thank yous and the sincerity in which they give them is almost heartbreaking because in the thank you you also hear their understanding of how close they feel to being forgotten. And the hygiene station acts as more than a place to provide those necessary amenities to keep safe from the coronavirus, but it’s also, for some of our folks, a visible sign that someone is remembering them and that they’re not left out there alone.
Knollinger: How do we make sure that the homeless community doesn’t think that we have forgotten them for next time?
Marshall: That’s one of our main goals on the other side of this pandemic is to put together a plan of action [for] if this ever happens again. Right away, we’ll know that we need restrooms, we know that we’ll need hand washing stations, we know that we need shower trailers, we know we need access to clothes. We know we need to make sure that food is getting to folks who not only access the soup kitchens on any other day but like God forbid if someone has to quarantine into their tent because they’re feeling ill. How does that food get from the soup kitchen to the tent? So to develop a basic protocol in a team of implementation, that we won’t be caught off guard as much as we were this time in scrambling and while we got it together pretty quickly, to next time, be able to do it quicker.
Since the recording of this interview, 18th Street Hygiene Station’s hours have changed to Monday through Saturda from 9 am to 5 pm. You can find more information here.
A free mobile app will soon allow those in recovery to connect with treatment providers.
The Connections app is designed to provide support and prevent relapse for those seeking treatment for substance use disorder who may not be able to see a provider due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to state Department of Health and Human Resources.
The app will allow those in recovery to engage in group discussions and one-on-one messaging with their care provider and peers. It includes eTherapy programs to help those in the recovery.
Only West Virginia residents will be on the app, and those using the app will remain anonymous.
Connections is free and will be offered to those in recovery whether or not they are currently affiliated with a treatment provider.
The app was developed by CHESS Health, a New York based company that specializes in telehealth and online recovery treatments solutions.
You can find the app by searching Connections by CHESS on the App Store on iPhone, and the Google Play Store on Android.
