Dawnell Leininger, a second grade teacher at Moorefield Elementary School in Hardy County, earned West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Above and Beyond Award for March 2024, which recognizes excellence and creativity of Mountain State teachers.
Dawnell Leininger, a second grade teacher at Moorefield Elementary School in Hardy County, earned West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Above and Beyond Award for March 2024, which recognizes excellence and creativity of Mountain State teachers.
Leininger was presented the award by WVPB’s Education Director Maggie Holley during the students’ lunch and was surprised to also have her husband in attendance. She received a monetary award and a signature Blenko Glass blue apple paperweight. The West Virginia State Treasurers’ Office sponsors the award, presenter of the SMART529 college savings program in the Mountain State.
Leininger has been a teacher for 11 years and was nominated by her daughter Abigail for her compassion, creativity and hard work in the classroom.
“Mrs. Leininger is constantly looking for new ways to help her students grow,” said her daughter. She mentions her mother’s active involvement in the school’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) days, coordinating holiday programs, creating a new class behavior program, volunteering to deliver meals to children and creative strategies for supporting the English Language Learners in her classroom.
In addition to her classroom responsibilities, Leininger also volunteers to be a mentor for teachers in training. These student teachers will observe and teach different lessons. Leininger says she enjoys being able to help others find resources and by sharing some tricks she’s learned that has made classroom management easier over the years. She is also always sure to check in with the newer teachers and long-term substitute teachers in the building.
(left to right) Moorefield Elementary School Assistant Principal Shanda Walker, WVPB’s March 2024 Above and Beyond winner Dawnell Leininger and Moorefield Elementary School Principal Wade Armentrout.
Photo Credit: Autumn Meadows/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The demographics of Leininger’s school is unlike others in West Virginia. They have a large variety of languages represented in their school whether it be their parents work at a local factory, they’re refugees or other circumstances. Leininger and her colleagues go above and beyond to make sure all English Language Learners are supported by adapting lessons, providing labels, and coming up with games and activities to make learning new letters and sounds fun. They also are sure to include the variety of customs during holidays. “It is amazing to watch a student come here without any knowledge of our language and pick up the words so quickly. They have such a zeal to learn as much as they can.”
Leininger also helps organize a Thanksgiving program every year. “The classes work together to perform a short skit. One skit is a traditional telling of the Pilgrims landing in America, the other skit is a cute skit told from the perspective of a turkey begging Congress to pardon him and his family from being the main course at Thanksgiving. We have rewritten the play to include our therapy dog as a character as well.” They have also begun to add a Veteran’s Day portion to the program that showcases photographs of students’ family members that have served or are currently serving as a slideshow while guests are arriving.
When asked what her favorite activity in the classroom would be, Leininger said March Madness Dr. Seuss style. This consists of a bracket of 16 Dr. Seuss books, and when each class reads a book, they vote on their favorites. Leininger’s class then adds up the votes from the entire school. “The students love hearing the results on the announcements.”
In addition to holiday programs, STEM days and mentoring, Leininger also coaches the afterschool book club to encourage readers to be challenged with higher level thinking. “We did escape rooms, compared and contrasted different gingerbread man stories and then they had to create their own gingerbread house. We wrote stories and redesigned covers of books to name a few things.”
Each month, WVPB has an esteemed panel of judges that select one deserving teacher who goes above and beyond for the students in West Virginia. If you know of a deserving teacher who goes “Above and Beyond,” please click here to nominate them.
Voter turnout in West Virginia, and across the country, is low. It’s even worse among young voters who say they are disconnected and not interested.
Just before the May 14 primary election, two journalism students from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism based in Washington, D.C. — Meaghan Downey and Anastasia Mason — came to the Mountain State to report on the state’s low voter turnout and the effect it has on young voters.
They spoke with students at West Virginia University (WVU) and BridgeValley Community and Technical College. This is part of a larger project the journalism students are working on about how young peoples’ disillusionment with political institutions is a threat to democracy.
We are in our early 20s and have both studied politics. We’re following the upcoming election pretty closely. But we realized a lot of our friends aren’t and we wanted to find out if we were unusual.
We discovered that, according to voting data, yes, we are. Young people turn out to vote a lot less than older people. And it’s worse in some states than others.
West Virginia is one of those states. In 2020, only four states had worse young voter turnout. For our research, we traveled to WVU. There, we asked the students whether they’ll participate in the upcoming election.
“Probably not. I just don’t really know a whole lot about it, you know?” said Emily Reed.
“I definitely feel like there’s not as many people who are like, focused on voting because they think that one vote can’t make a difference,” said Sam Carver.
Alanna Berry agreed with Reed and Carver. “Honestly, I don’t know who the candidates are. Are we talking about Biden?”
Most of the young people we met weren’t sure they were going to vote. We learned that 18 to 29-year-olds feel disconnected from politics across America. A poll released recently from Harvard’s Kennedy School showed the lowest levels of confidence in public institutions since the survey began 24 years ago.
According to Amherst College Professor Austin Sarat, it’s a stark contrast to previous generations.
“About 75 percent of people born in the 1930s say it is essential to live in a society governed democratically,” he said. “People born in the 1980s and later, that number is 25 percent.”
Younger generations are not voting, they’re frustrated, and they’re disillusioned with democracy. The question for the researchers was: “How did we get here?”
And more importantly: “Why don’t young West Virginians vote?”
It’s a problem that even long-term political organizers like the West Virginia Citizen Action Group have been struggling with. The organization has worked for nearly 50 years to encourage citizen participation in government.
Julie Archer, the group’s project manager, said the culture in West Virginia plays a role in why people don’t vote.
“Part of it might be like, kind of Appalachian fatalism,” she said. “We have had some examples of politicians that were pretty corrupt, and so anytime you have something like that, I think it just reflects negatively on even the people who are in there who are good and who are responsive to their constituents and want to do the right thing.”
For 80 years, West Virginia was a blue state. In 2000, the state flipped red and has voted increasingly conservative since. But Archer and her fellow activists say West Virginians feel that — whether it’s Democrats or Republicans in charge — the state’s big problems, especially poverty, don’t go away.
At a Sunday night potluck in Morgantown, local organizations gathered in the upstairs gym of a local church across the street from WVU. They’re talking about social, political and environmental justice.
The League of Women Voters was one of many local organizations in attendance at a Sunday night potluck in Morgantown, West Virginia last month.
Photo Credit: Anastasia Mason/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Jessica Nelson is one of the few young people there. She tells us why voting is towards the bottom of many West Virginians’ to-do lists.
“Just taking time off to get to the poll is a huge challenge,” Nelson said. “You know, getting a ride, getting time off, having someone to watch your kids or cover your shift, things like that. And even if you could find all that stuff, it’s a headache to do it. Are you really going to do that every two years for something that feels like it has no effect?”
Nelson is the opinions editor for the local paper. She met up with her mom, Cynthia, and the two of them had lots of opinions. They agree that nonvoting only makes matters worse. And it’s at the local level where the most damage is done.
“Our neighboring county, Preston, the buildings are literally falling down around the students,” Cynthia Nelson said. ”And they can’t pass the levy to save their lives, because it’s a very impoverished county and people say, ‘I can’t afford those additional taxes to build a school.’”
Young West Virginians have grown up in a culture of nonvoting. And some saw the effects of it in their schools.
Young people who are interested in voting often feel shut out of politics or think they don’t know enough to cast their ballots. A 2022 poll from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts found that only 40 percent of young people feel well-qualified to participate in politics.
In South Charleston at BridgeValley Community and Technical College, we met 21-year-old Alexzander Messer. We asked him if he felt young people were encouraged to vote. He is from Madison in Boone County.
“Maybe encouraged, but talked about only specifically usually in one way,” Messer said. “There’s one way to vote usually around here, especially where I’m from. Republican, typically.”
He noted that some areas and states vote traditionally Democrat.
“So I’m not really sure if people know what they vote for,” he said.
That one-sidedness of the political conversation has dissuaded Messer from voting, he said.
“I probably won’t vote because I don’t get into it,” he said. “I don’t have a side. If I did, I’m relatively independent. I see things both ways. But there’s just drama with it. So there’s not really anything for me to vote for.”
On the other hand, he said he felt voting is important.
“I would say it is important to vote but then I did say I don’t vote myself. So it is important, but again, I haven’t done it,” he said.
Amherst professor Sarat said there’s a big problem, not just in West Virginia, but across the country.
“Many of the students that I teach are caught between hope and resignation,” he said. “And that resignation is young people have reason to be resigned and disillusioned. How do you move a group of people, a community, a society, a university from one place to the next? And what’s missing, between resignation and hope, is a commitment to democracy.”
Data shows that nearly a third of youth believe democracy is no longer viable in the U.S., according to a 2023 YouGov study.
The stark contrast between this generation and previous generations’ commitment to democracy is alarming for people like Sarat.
“Why are people my age more attached to democracy?” he said. “In part, because we grew up at a time when democracy was really threatened by fascism and communism. Young people have grown up at a time when they could take democracy for granted with all of its flaws.”
Sarat thinks things can get better. There were record turnouts of young voters last election.
“A conversation about democracy, which was dormant before Donald Trump came down the elevator, is now very much part of the American conversation,” he said. “Maybe that will, overtime, reconnect people to why democracy is important, why participation is important, why it’s important to get out there and get your hands dirty to make political change.”
On this West Virginia Morning, the Mountain Valley Pipeline is under scrutiny from federal regulators after it failed a pressure test in Virginia last month. Curtis Tate spoke with Cynthia Quarterman, the former head of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration from 2009 to 2014, about the federal agency’s role in regulating 3 million miles of pipeline.
On this West Virginia Morning, the Mountain Valley Pipeline is under scrutiny from federal regulators after it failed a pressure test in Virginia last month. Curtis Tate spoke with Cynthia Quarterman, the former head of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration from 2009 to 2014, about the federal agency’s role in regulating 3 million miles of pipeline.
Also, in this show, just before the start of the fall semester last year, the band director at Midland Trail High School left for another job. With no one else to take over, senior Carol Nottingham stepped in. We bring you this story from student reporter Kelsie Carte.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Emily Rice produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
West Virginia was allotted nearly $2 million in rebates from the United States Environmental Protection Agency this week to purchase electric school buses.
More than 25 million children across the United States ride the school bus each day, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. In West Virginia, approximately 220,000 students ride the bus each school day, according to transportation news source School Bus Fleet. But these vehicles emit greenhouse gasses that can harm both the environment and public health.
To address this, federal officials are encouraging schools to switch to electric buses. And new funds from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aims to help four West Virginia school districts do just that.
The EPA this week approved a cumulative $2 million in rebates for West Virginia school districts that plan to purchase electric school buses this year.
The funding comes as part of a national rebate program for school districts making the switch to cleaner buses. In a virtual press briefing Tuesday, EPA Administrator Michael Regan described the program as a national priority.
“We’re advancing environmental justice and helping level the playing field for children who suffer from the higher rates of respiratory issues and other health conditions because of the air they breathe,” Regan said. “When we prioritize the health and well being of our children, we’re not just making a difference in their lives. But we’re also setting the foundation for a safer, healthier and more sustainable planet.”
West Virginia’s slice of the rebate is just a fraction of the $900 million provided by the EPA this year.
Calhoun, McDowell and Summers county school districts will each receive a rebate to purchase one clean school bus, and Randolph County will purchase two.
Efforts to convert West Virginia school districts to lower-emission school buses stretch beyond this latest round of funding.
In January, the EPA granted GreenPower Motor Company more than $18 million to build 47 electric school buses in its South Charleston facility, slated for nine school districts across the state.
During Tuesday’s call, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian said creating new union jobs through the construction of electric vehicles was an added perk for the Biden administration.
“Not only is this funding providing cleaner air, it’s also helping tackle climate change and creating good paying union jobs and electric school bus manufacturing,” she said.
But not all Americans back the transition to electric vehicles, including some West Virginians.
New federal standards that limit carbon emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles drew criticism from Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. and U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., in March.
The lawmakers expressed concern that an abrupt switch to electric vehicles would place undue burden on American consumers, and potentially force them to rely on vehicles produced abroad.
When asked whether federal interventions like the rebate program are necessary to make a full switch to electric vehicles, Regan said that he didn’t want to get into “local politics,” and that the program has been popular nationally.
“Each year our program is oversubscribed. And so we have a lot of demand out there for electric school buses from districts all across the country,” he said.
Since then, Regan said the EPA has helped fund the purchase of approximately 8,500 electric and low-emission school buses by roughly 1,000 school districts across the country.
For school districts in West Virginia and beyond, rebates won’t come immediately. Schools must first buy the vehicles themselves, then send the EPA documentation of the purchase.
EPA officials said there is no singular timeline for when school districts will receive their new buses, but that purchases are likely to be made over the course of the next several months.
In the latest entry of “Now What? A Series on Parenting,” Chris Schulz talks with Kerri Carte, assistant director for WVU Extension’s Family and Community Development unit, about the Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialists (ACDS) and broader issues in the child care industry.
West Virginia is facing a shortage of child care providers. But a program developed by the state, West Virginia University and other partners is training the industry’s workforce.
In the latest entry of “Now What? A Series on Parenting,” Chris Schulz talks with Kerri Carte, assistant director for WVU Extension’s Family and Community Development unit, about the Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialists (ACDS) and broader issues in the child care industry.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Schulz: Can you explain to me what adequate child care is? What is the standard that we’re working towards when you’re training these professionals?
Carte: The standard is to have educated, well-informed child care providers. They need to have a good, basic understanding of child development, of all the domains such as social-emotional development, motor development, cognitive development, all of those. But then they also have to have the tools of how to manage children appropriately, as well as how to manage themselves. It’s not like you’re caring for your own child personally. It’s a professional position, we’re not babysitters. They have to be able to conduct themselves professionally, and do what’s appropriate within a classroom.
The standards that we’re working towards are established by West Virginia. It’s the West Virginia core knowledge and competencies for early childhood. Those are set down by West Virginia’s DHHR, Department of Health and Human Resources. But they also come down from much higher. There’s national standards set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. And then there’s even higher standards of Head Start and preschool that are all national standards, but our program specifically is working towards the West Virginia, core knowledge and competencies.
Schulz:Why is having a professional in the room with these children so important?
Carte: One of the big things that we teach our child care providers is how to look for milestones. Every child should develop in a certain pattern. Not every child reaches every milestone at the same time, but they should develop. For instance, you know a child will start rolling over first, and then they might start pushing up, and then they start to crawl, eventually leading to walking. And there are certain time frames when these things should occur. When they don’t occur in the right time frame, or if a child is not progressing, we call those red flags.
Child care providers are trained to notice those red flags. If they notice that a child is not pushing up, and they definitely have reached that limit of where they should be, they can alert the family and say, “You might want to go speak to your pediatrician and talk to him about this.” It allows us to catch any kind of developmental delays very early. That is critical in early childhood because anytime you can catch an issue really early, you have a much better chance of working with the child, working with the family and correcting those issues. But the other half of that is to know what’s appropriate to handle children: how they should be fed, how they should be put to sleep. What people do in their own homes is their own business, but in child care you put a child to sleep in a crib, there’s not allowed to be any kind of stuffed animals or any kind of suffocation factors in it. They learn all of those safety things, and how to appropriately handle a child so that they can develop appropriately.
Schulz: Where do we stand with child care and the level of professional availability for child care in West Virginia?
Carte: In my opinion, we’re in a crisis. We have child cares that are shutting down, the ones that are open have wait lists that are miles long. I’ll give you an example. Recently in Charleston, we had two well-established restaurants shut down very close together, tons of press on that. It was all over Facebook, I was scrolling. It was on the news and the newspapers. But at that same time, we had a child care center shut down that served 100 children. There was one newspaper article that I saw on that.
I think some of the people in the public think we’re crying wolf, but we’re really not. There are not enough child care providers in this state. And I’m in Charleston, there are more providers here in Charleston than in a lot of other places. We have counties that don’t have licensed child care providers. There’s not a provider in Wirt County. There are other counties that there are maybe one or two, and people don’t realize how impactful that is. People cannot be productive citizens, go to work, earn income, help our whole economy, if you don’t have somewhere safe and good to put your child. You don’t have anywhere to send your child because there’s nobody there. One-hundred families were impacted by that closure, and that’s critical to those people’s livelihoods. I don’t think the public is aware of how critical this is to our growth.
Schulz: What are the barriers to adequate care?
Carte: There is a ton of overhead in early childhood, that is where the challenge is. You go to elementary schools, you can have one person for 20 plus children. When you’re caring for infants, the ratio is much smaller. One person can only care for a handful of children in order for it to be safe and productive. We want that. We don’t want one person caring for 20 infants, they would never see to their needs. But you start adding all of those various staff in, and it becomes extremely expensive. That is the biggest challenge that child care providers are facing.
Some of them are just making minimum wage or just above. You can go to fast food restaurants or some of the big box stores and get paid more, because those people are in a retail business and their goal is to make money. But a lot of our child care providers, a lot of them are nonprofit. There are some that are for-profit, but it is so expensive to hire all the employees. Yet they can’t pay them very much because their sole income is the tuition that the families pay for that child. It is so expensive already for families that families can’t afford to pay any more. So owners of child care centers are always walking this fine line between not raising tuition too much where their families can’t afford it and yet being able to charge enough that they can pay their staff a living wage. And there’s a gap between those two that will probably never be reached.
The other flip side of that is we look at our public education, that’s all subsidized by taxes, county levies, federal funding, state funding, all of that is what is backed, it’s all supported. There is very, very little support going to early childhood. Some of our most neediest families, yes, can get some child care assistance through the resource and referral networks. But it’s peanuts in comparison to what we spend in public education. We need to have the same level of quality coming from that early childhood that we do in our public education system. But yet our society is saying, “Well, you do it on your own, we’re not going to fund it and support it.” And it’s impossible. It will never work.
I hate to keep saying that, because it sounds like all early childhood wants is their handout and money, but if they want quality child care, we’ve got to invest in that. There used to be some employers that would do employee-based child care. At least they had the support of an employer that was backing some of that. There are a few employers like WVU [who] provide some assistance for their employees with child care, trying to help a little bit with some subsidies, like a benefit, if you will, and they’ll help trying to contribute to some of that, but it’s few and far between. Most families are out there on their own, barely scraping by to make it work. And then they’re trying to come up with hundreds of dollars a month to pay tuition. And on the flip side, you have the child care centers that are doing the same thing. They’re trying to make their budgets match without breaking the bank of their families, and the gap is too wide. They cannot bridge it.
Schulz: The Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialists program – how is that addressing these issues that we’ve been discussing?
Carte: The apprenticeship program is just like plumbers, pipe fitters, all of that. We provide classroom education, they do on the job training. Once they go through the apprenticeship program, they become journeymen, all through the U.S. Department of Labor. So it’s just like all the other skilled laborers, if you will, that go through the process. What part that I play in that program is, well, a couple parts. I do a lot of their curriculum development, but I also do manage the program in Kanawha County, and I teach for them as well.
West Virginia is the only state that has an apprenticeship program for child development specialists. There are other states that have looked into it, but nobody’s able to implement it. That is one of the great things that our state has done. DHHR has backed the apprenticeship program. They provide funding for it, which is a great thing. Our goal is to try to educate these child care providers so that they can provide the best absolute quality of early childhood education that we can, that they can. It’s a four-semester program. Once they get done, they graduate, they become journeymen. And then they are more knowledgeable, they’re better trained, and a lot of our students will go on and seek higher education with the credits they earn. We have reciprocity with several colleges and universities across the state, they can turn it into nine or 12 credit hours of college because we cover so many core concepts.
Schulz: They must already be employed, or do you all help them find a position so that they can work on this simultaneously?
Carte: They must be employed, because it is an apprenticeship program. It is technically an employer-sponsored program. So just like plumbers or pipefitters, you must get a job first and then they will train you as you go and do an apprenticeship program. What’s different between the child care program and the other apprenticeship programs is that there’s apprenticeship programs for, like I said, plumbers, pipefitters, carpenters, all of that, [which] have been established for years and years and years. It’s built into that industry, that they provide support, finances to back and pay the education and pay to get through. That comes through employers. The child care program is not set up like that. It is backed and paid for by DHHR. So although it is employer sponsored, the employer doesn’t have to pay money for it. But they do have to be employed because it is through the employer that they get the apprenticeship program, because they have to do the on-the-job training.
And in order to do that for child care providers, that’s back in their classroom. Let’s say we’re talking about literacy and that’s what we’re teaching that week. Their homework is to do a literacy activity in their classroom with their children, with the skills and the things that we have talked about in that class. That’s how they practice the skills that they’ve learned in that class. They put it right back into their classroom, do the activity. Then the next week, say we talk about motor development or fine development, they have to go back into the classroom the following week, and they do that activity with the children. That’s why they have to be employed, they have to be able to practice and get that on-the-job experience and training, but then also it is through the U.S. Department of Labor, and they require it to be employer based, so you must already be employed. Now, if you lose your job mid-semester, for whatever reasons, like, say your child care center closes, we work with that student. They are allowed to finish out that semester. It’s not an automatic drop out. They are allowed to complete that semester, but then they must be employed in another child care setting before they can begin the next semester of the curriculum.
Schulz: So what do you think is the benefit of having this be a statewide program?
Carte: It comes into play when we talk about ethics. Communities are small, you might know a lot about this family or not as much and you know a lot about family ties. So we talk about that. We’re able to target it to those more rural environments. They may not have access to libraries or museums or external things. We adapted to make it appropriate for rural environments, for those areas that need it. The curriculum is very flexible, and we’re able to take advantage of some of those things if, you know, if the community can provide it. And if not, then we look at other options for communities, then we present both options to the child care providers.
Schulz: Is there anything that you would like to highlight or anything that I haven’t given you the opportunity to discuss with me today?
Carte: I guess I want to briefly tell you my own story [so] that you understand where my passion comes from. My children are grown, but 22 years ago, I was working with WVU. I was considered a professional, I had a faculty appointment. But I was a single parent and I struggled to find child care that I could afford, that I knew was quality at the time. I paid my mortgage and my child care providers in that order, and then everybody else got in line and took a number. That’s when I realized that we’ve got an issue. That was 20 to 24 years ago and the needle hasn’t moved much, families are still in that position. We’ve got to do something about that. Like I said, I had a very living salary, a very workable salary. A lot of our families don’t have that, and they’re struggling. And I do think we need to work on that as a state.
The other thing I want to talk about real briefly is that the curriculum that we provide is not one and done. I think one of the things that makes this program wonderful is that we are constantly going back to that curriculum and updating it, making corrections, fine tuning it, and adding new information that’s needed. Right now, the Extension Services [are] working to update the whole entire fourth semester with a lot more about behavior plans and behaviors, because that’s becoming a big issue in early childhood. We’ve got some children that are exhibiting behaviors that are really challenging due to trauma and all kinds of issues. So we are constantly revisiting this curriculum to update it and improve it.
The final thing I would like to say is that WVU doesn’t “own” this program. The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) does it through funding, and it runs through River Valley Child Development Services. So WVU is partnering with the River Valley organization that runs ACDS to help them with curriculum and instruction. So although we are a big factor as far as the curriculum and the education, the ACDS program is run by River Valley. That is an independent organization from WVU. It’s a great partnership. It really has helped, because River Valley does not have the expertise and the technicality within their staff to do all of this curriculum development. And of course as WVU employees we do, so it’s been a wonderful partnership.
The West Virginia Legislature has approved a $50 million appropriation for the construction of a new agriculture lab at WVSU.
In his State of the State Address, Gov. Jim Justice announced his intention to fund a state-of-the-art agricultural laboratory at West Virginia State University (WVSU).
Funding for the lab got cut during the budget process as West Virginia legislators were concerned about a $465 million federal clawback of COVID-19 relief funds.
Ultimately, that did not happen because the state received a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education.
Now, the West Virginia Legislature has approved a $50 million appropriation for the construction of the new facility.
Once completed, it will house laboratory space for both WVSU and the West Virginia Department of Agriculture.
“This is another huge win for the people of West Virginia,” Justice said. “The immense need for a state-of-the-art agricultural lab is a topic I highlighted during my State of the State Address, and I’m glad to see this project finally get across the finish line. Additionally, I cannot think of a better home than West Virginia State University. We all know this is something that will create a huge impact for the agricultural industry and community in the Mountain State for generations to come.”
The new facility will provide laboratory and classroom space for WVSU faculty and students while also playing an important role in the creation of a new School of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the university.
The laboratory will also help build on WVSU’s Agricultural Research portfolio which includes: Aquaculture; Bioenergy and Bioproducts; Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology; Horticulture and Specialty Crop Production; Urban Forestry; Soil, Water, and Natural Resources Management; Vegetable Genomics and Disease Resistant Plant Breeding; Foodborne Pathogens; Value Added Food Products; Sustainable Food Packaging Technologies; Native Pollinators; and Environmental Engineering and Water Systems Modeling.
“We are thankful to Gov. Jim Justice, Senate President Craig Blair and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw for this transformative investment to provide cutting edge research facilities for the state of West Virginia,” WVSU President Ericke S. Cage said. “Agriculture is a tremendous part of our state’s economy and this new facility will play a vital role in educating the workforce of tomorrow while supporting the agricultural research and development that is already underway. I look forward to working with Gov. Jim Justice’s office and State Agriculture Commissioner Kent Leonhardt as we bring this important facility to life.”
