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Cabell County to Develop Incubator School for Expeditionary Learning

Cabell County School officials are excited about a new school they hope will set an example for schools around the state. Cabell will develop the incubator school through a waiver they attained with an innovation zone grant.

The school will open in the fall of 2015 in Huntington and Cabell County School Board officials hope it is the next step in education. It will be a consolidation of Peyton Elementary and Geneva Kent Elementary in the east end of Huntington. They’ll use the former Beverly Hills Middle School facility that was vacated in December for a brand new Huntington East Middle School.

Cabell Superintendent William Smith is excited about the possibilities.

“What you should see in a classroom like this is more student engagement, a high level of student engagement,” Smith said.

Cabell officials say it’ll be the first expeditionary learning school in the state. Known as EL for short, students will learn about completing projects that will stretch across different subject areas and can sometimes take the entire school year.

The Cabell Board has made trips to EL schools in Chicago, Denver and Asheville, North Carolina.

They describe the school as an incubator school because of the experimental learning environment. They hope what they learn from their experiment leads to others around the state doing their own experiments and developing expeditionary learning environments of their own.

Cabell County Schools will team with the Harless Center at Marshall University to study how educational concepts are working and what the next step might be to continue the growth that will take place in the classroom.

Ryan McKenzie is Principal of Peyton Elementary. He’ll be the new principal of the developed school. He says the work students do here will be beneficial to the community.

"The kids will be engaged in learning that is real out in their communities," McKenzie said.

“The kids will be engaged in learning that is real out in their communities, out in the real world,” McKenzie said. They’ll be doing water analysis projects in the community and sending that report off to the Mayor’s office or the commission

The board will depend on the teachers to relay and adjust how the learning environment is working

Renovation will begin soon on Beverly Hills Middle to turn it into the new incubator school.

Northfork Water Woes: A Failing System

Northfork has been on a boil water advisory since July 2013, even longer than the folks in neighboring Wyoming County in Bud/Alpoca. It’s the seventh boil water advisory since 2009. Some residents in higher elevations have gone more than five weeks without water in their homes. But like in Alpoca, once again, part of the problem is an outdated water treatment system.

The latest boil water advisory for about 180 customers on the town’s water system was issued after the filter basically stopped working.

The water system is located inside a cinder-block building in Northfork along the Elkhorn Creek River.

To cope, worker Larry Porterfield (far right) says they flush the system about every other day which causes pressure to drop.

“That’s what they recommend but now we have to do it every other day because the filtration material has got to its limit where it’s not working any more,” Porterfield said. “So we need to replace that and that will filter the water better.”

The rust runs deep inside the two story cinder block building. Upstairs is access to two water filters.

The gauge read a high reading on this day.

The workers say that the water comes from a deep well under the building. The water is fed to a tank on a hill and then flows back to the pump-house to be filtered, put in a clear well and finally pumped to customers.

Downstairs Porterfield shows me the pressure reading. On this day, it was high.

“Everybody should be having good pressure,” Porterfield said, “but like when the pressure goes down to 60 sometimes 40 and folks on the higher elevations don’t have any water.”

Flushing combined with a bitter cold winter, several private busted pipes, and almost constantly running water to keep pipes from freezing creates very low pressure at times.

The access port for the filter discharge to the finished water clear well.

Northfork worker Joe Gadberry says finding and fixing underground leaks is another challenge.

"We basically create miracles with what we got," Gadberry said. "What we got is we maintain to make we got water. It would be nice to have a backhoe but most of the times we dig it by hand."

To top it off, the main meter that measures the amount of water leaving the pumphouse, is broken.

Inside the building to the right of the metal stairs, a large pipe runs parallel to the ground. The pipe eventually curves through the floor. At the bend, sits a meter covered in what appears to be a mixture of moisture, rust and corrosion. I ask Porterfield about it.

At city hall, I find city Councilman Curtis Spencer, who also serves as chairman of the water board.

“It’s an old system,” Spencer said. “We’re just trying to make it last until the PSD come down but there’s not definite date when they going to be here.”

Northfork will eventually be a part of the Elkhorn Water Project. The project is broken down into four phases with plans to pick up old coal camp towns along route 52 starting just past the Mercer/McDowell line where a new water plant will be located. The initial waterline will be installed from there through Maybeury, and eventually ending up in Northfork Hollow.

Bids for Phase one go out this month and construction is expected to be complete after one year. Phase two, which is still at least two years away, is expected to bring a dependable clean water supply to Northfork. The McDowell County Public Service District has been working to coordinate the project as quickly as possible. Executive Director Mavis Brewster says it just takes time.

“A lot of times with the residents they don’t understand the process,” she said. “They just have a need for the water and they don’t understand all the hoops that you have to jump through.”

“But it’s so rewarding once you see those residents actually having good safe quality water that they’ve never had before.”

Brewster says the biggest challenge is securing funding. She hopes Small Cities Block grants will pay for phase two.

The water board was created late December 2013 to make improvements to the system and collect on delinquent accounts. Board president Curtis Spencer says about 40 percent of the customers have stopped paying their bills.

“Some of them can’t,” he said. “The town has been real lenient with them. We’re getting to the place where we just going to have to get tough on them.”

Phase two is dependent upon an election in neighboring Keystone. The town has to tie into the PSD in order to move the project along.

Charles Town Casino to Add 1,200-Seat Concert Hall

West Virginia’s largest casino has announced plans to add a 1,200-seat concert venue as it seeks to fend off increased competition from casinos in Maryland.

Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races said Monday that it will begin construction this month on the venue, which will be located on the casino floor and feature a box office and VIP area. Hollywood hopes to open the venue by the end of September. A name for the venue has not yet been selected.

Hollywood draws heavily from the D.C. market, but has faced tough competition the last few years from Maryland casinos, especially the Maryland Live! casino at Arundel Mills, which has a 500-seat concert venue on its casino floor.

Living Without Consistent Water Service: A Northfork Way of Life

Governor Earl Ray Tomblin lifted the state of emergency for nine counties on Friday. It’s been about seven weeks since 300,000 customers lost access to clean water after a chemical leaked into the Elk; a river upstream from the intake to West Virginia American Water’s treatment plant.

But for several towns in rural West Virginia, going without clean water is a way of life.

We’ve followed the story about the folks in Bud/Alpoca, an area of Wyoming County that remains on a boil water advisory that’s been in effect since September. There the water runs different shades of brown that stains clothes.

Across the border in McDowell County you’ll find several more communities coping with limited access to clean water.

Northfork has been on a boil water advisory since July 2013 yet, the situation hasn’t merited much attention or a state of emergency.

Including the active advisory, the town of about 180 customers has been on seven boil water advisories since 2009, some lasting for months. It’s been an ongoing issue for years.

“I know this is not how it’s supposed to be,” Northfork resident Micole Bright said. “This is like a third world country or something.”

Bright welcomes me into her home and explains that the white plastic buckets stacked at the door are for holding water. The family has to be prepared for the next time they go without water.

Another stack of plastic containers are piled in the hallway just outside the bathroom. This stack is to flush the toilets.

You see- here the biggest challenge is having water at all.

“The water goes off pretty often and it stays off for about last time was 27 days,” Bright said. “It’s real hard with the kids going to school and cleaning and washing clothes and cooking and doing dishes it’s just real hard.”

Micole Bright lives in a Northfork home at the end of the service lines. She loses water service when while other residents don’t. Still the dated water system creates outages for the entire town.

Bright says this time she lost water on January 13 and it remained off for more than five weeks. Bright says she tries not to bother the folks at city hall too much. Bright only calls after the water service has been out for three or four days. Some residents don’t call at all.

The water system operated by the town of Northfork, is outdated, and the filter needs to be replaced. So employees have to flush the system about every other day, causing the pressure to drop especially for customers like Bright who live at higher elevations.

“It just seems like sometimes when you live in a place like this you’re not heard as well as you would be if you were somewhere else in a different town or something like that,” Bright said. “Here it’s like, OK you’re in Northfork, so what? You’re in McDowell County what do you expect.That kind of attitude.”

Water for Northfork will eventually come from the McDowell County Public Service District but that’s not expected to happen for years. The PSD is phasing in an expansion of service and Northfork is part of the second phase. Bids for phase one go out this month.

In the meantime, Northfork residents remain without access to clean water and on a boil water advisory.

Artist Ian Bode – The Passenger

After music, I love the graphic arts, photography, film and almost any variation thereof.

Graphic artists, like Ian Bode, fascinate me. I am not filled with envy, but with wonder at their ability to transform a blank canvas or an ordinary sheet of paper into something living, thought-provoking or transformative. How on earth do they do it?

Painting or drawing is about seeing, so I’m going to let Mr. Bode’s work speak for itself. Click through the slideshow above while listening to the interview. You’ll see “the passenger” and a four-paneled sketch followed by the final result.

Meet a W.Va. Water Hero

Water donations from across the country have poured into Wyoming County since our original report. The folks in Bud and Alpoca were dealing with unpotable water, running a dark brown at times, months before the chemical spill in Charleston. Another donation arrived at Herndon Consolidated School Tuesday, but this time it from another elementary school in northern W.Va.

January 9 a chemical spill contaminated the water source for more than 300,000 customers in West Virginia’s capitol city and the surrounding area. A state of emergency was declared, the National Guard was called in to assist with water distribution, and donations arrived from groups across the country.

Around that same time, Sarah Haymond was teaching a lesson to her 3^rd grade class at Blackshere Elementary in Marion County. Haymond decided the best way to teach about community service, was to coordinate a water drive for the folks affected by the chemical spill.

The state of emergency is still in effect for nine counties but Haymond didn’t feel the need was as great. So she began looking for other places in W.Va. with a water need and that’s when she found the town of Bud.

About 500 people have been on a boil water advisory since September and it’s not a state of emergency. The Alpoca Water Works system is dated and without an operator. The owner is working to turn the utility over to the Eastern Wyoming County PSD but it’s not a simple sale.

While it’s worked out, residents seem to be caught in the middle; purchasing water for things like drinking, laundry, and cooking for about six months.

“I showed the students in my class the pictures that I found on the internet from the sinks and the waters and they couldn’t believe it,” she said. “For little kids it’s just something they don’t think about not having water.”

The third graders collected about 65 to 70 gallons of water. The shipment arrived at Herndon Consolidated School on Tuesday. The school has served as central drop off place for donations and residents to find relief.

MacKenci Fluharty is one of several Blackshere Elementary third grade students that contributed to the Bud water drive. Listen below as she shares what she learned from the project.

FluhartyWaterHero.MP3

Listen to Mackenzie Fluharty, a W.Va. third grader, read her lessons from the water drive.