Alert (09/10/2026): Our Parkersburg TV transmitter is undergoing maintenance for a few days and will not be operational. We apologize for any inconvenience.
All our programming is available via our TV livestreams on our website and WVPB Passport. Thank you for your patience!
This October, the Adaptive Climbers Festival will gather in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge for the fifth year. In 2023, Folkways Reporter Emily Chen-Newton covered the event for Inside Appalachia. Since then, the Adaptive Climbers Festival has grown. Organizers say they’re nearly at capacity, with 300 climbers, caregivers and volunteers. Ahead of the festival, the campground has made accessibility improvements. Volunteers with the ACF have also been sprucing up the trails.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting has been hard at work creating a pilot, interactive, web-video series called West Virginia STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). It’s a collection of videos designed to inspire middle school kids, and arm teachers and parents with tools to help students navigate possible career options in the state.
What is STEAM?
At West Virginia Public Broadcasting, we’re taking STEM—an acronym for Science Technology, Engineering, and Math—and adding Arts to build STEAM in our communities and classrooms.
Why Art? So many STEM professionals talk about how important creativity and critical thinking are when it comes to conceiving outside-the-box solutions or innovations in STEM fields. So STEAM is just an amped-up version of STEM, and a more interdisciplinary approach to learning.
The idea for our STEAM initiative was the result of a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the state’s Department of Education. We want to give our educators tools to help inspire kids to be excited about learning science and math, and to teach kids about the variety of jobs in the state where we really need to develop a trained workforce.
We developed a pilot interactive video series around a handful of professionals who are engaged in STEAM careers in West Virginia: a researcher, a nurse, a pipefitter, an artist, and a couple forensic scientists. All the videos are presented in one YouTube Splash Page. Choose your own adventure:
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Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m., a hijacked plane hit one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, ending for this nation a certain innocence, and the belief that such an attack would never happen on American soil. Maria Young caught up an economics professor from WVU who was on site when the planes hit – and gave an exclusive interview to then-West Virginia Public Broadcasting News Director Beth Vorhees.
They love West Virginia. They want to make their future here, but jobs, housing and opportunity can make that choice harder than it sounds. In the first of two Us & Them episodes, Trey Kay talks with young West Virginians trying to decide whether they can put down their own roots in a place they call home.
Economic growth in West Virginia ranks close to the bottom in national rankings. It’s not just losing jobs, it’s also losing young people. In the first of two new Us & Them episodes, host Trey Kay talks with several young adults from the Mountain State asking whether they will stay put or find their future elsewhere.
