On this West Virginia Morning, Pride Month is underway, and the West Virginia Black Pride Foundation is carving out a space specifically for Black LGBTQ community members. Jack Walker spoke with founder and Executive Director Kasha Snyder-McDonald to discuss her organization’s vision for a better West Virginia for Black LGBTQ residents.
On this West Virginia Morning, Pride Month is underway, and the West Virginia Black Pride Foundation is carving out a space specifically for Black LGBTQ community members. Jack Walker spoke with founder and Executive Director Kasha Snyder-McDonald to discuss her organization’s vision for a better West Virginia for Black LGBTQ residents.
Also, in this show, 14-year-old Kyneddi Miller was found dead in her Boone County home in April. A police report said she was found in a near skeletal state, her grandparents and mother have been charged with abuse and neglect. Recently, there have been conflicting reports about the actions of state agencies involved in the case and calls for accountability. Briana Heaney has an update on the story.
And, our Mountain Stage Song of the Week comes to us from Stephane Wrembel. We listen to her performance of “Bistro Fada.” He’s joined by Josh Kaye, Ari Folman-Cohen and Nick Anderson. This Django-influenced tune is heard on his fifth album Origins, which became the theme song for Woody Allen’s 2011 Oscar-winning film, Midnight in Paris.
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.
Our Appalachia Health News project is made possible with support from Marshall Health.
West Virginia Morning is produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Jack Walker, Liz McCormick and Maria Young.
Eric Douglas is our news director. Teresa Wills is our host. Chris Schulz 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
Kyneddi Miller was found dead in her Boone County home in April. A police report said the 14-year-old girl was found in a near skeletal state. Her grandparents and mother have been charged with abuse and neglect.
Kyneddi Miller was found dead in her Boone County home in April. A police report said the 14-year-old girl was found in a near skeletal state. Her grandparents and mother have been charged with abuse and neglect.
Recently, there have been conflicting reports about the actions of state agencies involved in the case and calls for accountability.
Police officers claimed they saw the now deceased Miller nearly a year before her death. They say they were concerned about the girl’s well being, so they went to Boone County’s Child Protective Services office to file a referral. However, CPS, which is a division of the Department of Human Services, says they have no record of that.
GPS data, police reports, and audio obtained from the police officer who visited Kyneddi in 2023, all corroborate the police officer’s claim that they went to CPS to make a referral after completing a welfare check on the child.
Brian Abraham, the governor’s chief of staff, said he interviewed the police officers and has come to the conclusion that they did visit CPS, but that the officers may have not followed the proper protocol.
“I believe the evidence established through both GPS and the testimony of those two troopers to me, that they did in fact go to the Department of Health or Human Services,” Abraham said. “(When) they went there, there was informal contact with the caseworkers. They relayed the information to those caseworkers not intending to make any sort of formal referral of any accusation of abuse or neglect.”
He says the officers wanted to notify CPS workers that the child had an exaggerated fear of COVID-19 that was preventing her from leaving the home.
Department of Human Services Secretary Cynthia Persily said the police should have called a 1-800 number to officially make a report, instead of going to CPS and speaking with staff directly. She says moving forward the agency will assist those wanting to make a child abuse or neglect referral.
“So consequently, we won’t get into the situation where we have someone who says that they made a report or a referral, or whatever we want to call it, of abuse and neglect without that actually happening,” Persily said.
Some lawmakers and child safety advocates say classrooms are often where child abuse is discovered and have attributed Miller’s homeschooling status a factor in her death. West Virginia State Superintendent of Schools Michele Blatt says she would like to strengthen homeschool requirements.
“The West Virginia Department of Education is eager to work with the legislature to really see how we can strengthen the guardrails around our homeschool reporting requirements,” Blatt said. “While we know that we have a great deal of homeschool parents that do things the right way and take care of their kids and it’s the best choice for those families, I think that our 7,000 foster kids in the system is proof that not all parents do what’s best for their children.”
Abraham said it’s up to policy makers to craft laws to keep these things from happening while protecting West Virginians’ right to home school their children.
“The governor wholeheartedly supports school choice and the parents’ right to choose homeschool. But, you know, we can see it has potential ramifications,” Abraham said. “It’s a tradeoff, we have to find the sweet spot.”
Multiple members from the House of Delegates attended the press conference. They asked questions and took notes. Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, said in an emailed statement he is eager to work with the House to pass legislation to prevent this from happening again.
“As legislators, we have an obligation to protect our most vulnerable citizens, especially our children,” Blair said in the statement. “This case has highlighted that our current system of checks and balances has cracks. To that end, we will work with the Governor’s Office, the Department of Education, the Department of Human Services, and the State Police to discuss ways that we, legislatively, can improve our regulations related to homeschooled children to ensure that no children suffer this same outcome.”
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, we talk with National Park Ranger Eve West to learn about ways to enjoy the nation’s newest National Park at the New River Gorge this summer. Also, we explore the state’s low voter turnout and the impact it has on young voters.
On this West Virginia Morning, summer has nearly arrived here in West Virginia. The mountains have filled in and rounded out with lush green trees. The air is getting warmer and the days are longer. Briana Heaney sat down with National Park Ranger Eve West to talk about ways to enjoy the nation’s newest National Park at the New River Gorge.
Also, in this show, we have a special report from graduate students Meaghan Downey and Anastasia Mason of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism based in Washington, DC. 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, Downey and Mason came to West Virginia to report on the state’s low voter turnout and the impact it has on young voters. They spoke with students at West Virginia University and BridgeValley Community and Technical College.
This story is part of a larger project they are working on about how young peoples’ disillusionment with political institutions is a threat to democracy.
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.
Eric Douglas 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
Japan-based SOMAR is expected to invest $2.5 million and create about 25 jobs in Wood County, manufacturing an epoxy resin product used in the automotive sector.
Japan-based SOMAR is expected to invest $2.5 million and create about 25 jobs in Wood County, manufacturing an epoxy resin product used in the automotive sector.
The new facility will be located within the Polymer Alliance Zone (PAZ) Industrial Park, using an existing building for operations.
Gov. Jim Justice and officials from SOMAR announced the new manufacturing facility Monday. Since the building is already there, the company expects to be in production soon.
“I cannot wait to see the positive changes SOMAR will bring to Wood County and the new opportunities for our hard-working citizens,” Justice said. “Small businesses are the backbone of the Mountain State, and we’ll continue to support them in every way possible.”
SOMAR will make supplies materials for companies such as Toyota and Ford.
“We evaluated several options for our U.S. manufacturing facility, and West Virginia’s proposals and services were the best among them,” SOMAR Corp.’s President Futoshi Sotani said. “We’re so happy with our decision to invest in West Virginia. We look forward to growing our North America business from this new location. By leasing an existing building in the PAZ park, we can start production and begin serving our U.S. customers promptly.”
There are more than a dozen Japanese companies operating in West Virginia that have created more than 4,000 jobs, according to the West Virginia Development Office.
On this West Virginia Week, longtime Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin has officially changed political affiliations, registering as an independent on Friday. We’ll look into his decision, plus the sudden departure of the watchdog for West Virginia’s foster care system and a lawsuit filed against a state hospital over allegations of physical abuse.
On this West Virginia Week, longtime Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin has officially changed political affiliations, registering as an independent on Friday.
We’ll look into his decision, plus the sudden departure of the watchdog for West Virginia’s foster care system and a lawsuit filed against a state hospital over allegations of physical abuse.
We’ll also discuss efforts to preserve historic Black churches from Harpers Ferry to Charleston, and the rise of solar energy across the Mountain State.
Jack Walker 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, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Jack Walker and Liz McCormick.
