The seventh annual event, Juneteenth 2023, happens this Saturday, June 17th, from 5 to 9 p.m. on the front steps of the State Capitol.
The seventh annual event, Juneteenth 2023, happens this Saturday, June 17 from 5 to 9 p.m. on the front steps of the State Capitol. The history-fulfilling fest is complete with games, prizes, crafts, vendors, food and more. This event is free of charge and open to the public, and everyone is encouraged to bring a blanket or lawn chair.
Jill Upson, the Executive Director of the Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs (HHOMA), said Juneteenth is a day of positive vibes and unity.
“This is an important day in our nation’s history, and we are proud to come together to celebrate the end of slavery and the beginning of true freedom for all Americans,” Upson said. “We look forward to welcoming families and community members to this wonderful event.”
Upson said the entertainment line up features diverse West Virginia minority talent that would otherwise go unrecognized.
“We have a wonderful comedian who’s absolutely hilarious, his name is Kevin Jackson,” Upson said. “We’ve got some spoken word artists, and a child drummer. We also have a couple of rappers included in that lineup. I think it’s a good representation of the different styles and genres of art that’s out there.”
The celebration headliner is Grammy nominated R&B group Dru Hill. Upson said this is a reunited, classic soul group.
“They’ve done a lot of changes, specific for their 25th Anniversary,” she said. “The entire group is back together, including Cisco, who went off and had a very successful solo career. He will be alongside founding members SisQo, Nokio, Jazz, and the latest additions Smoke and Black from the R&B group ‘Playa,’ former members Scola and Tao rejoin the dynamic lineup.”
HHOMA is hosting the Juneteenth Celebration in partnership with FestivALL Charleston. For more information and the entire Juneteenth 2023 entertainment lineup, click here.
The executive director of an office charged with reviewing research on policies that disproportionately affect minority populations says she doesn’t plan to step down after a coalition of about 30 members of progressive and racial justice groups held a press conference calling for her removal.
Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs Executive Director Jill Upson tells the Register-Herald she would agree to a sit-down meeting with those concerned.
Credit Jill Upson / Twitter
/
Twitter
NAACP representatives and others held signs Tuesday outside the office in the West Virginia Capitol. Governor Jim Justice recently appointed Upson to lead the office that’s also charged with applying for and awarding grants, and making recommendations to the governor and Legislature.
Some said they didn’t support the appointment for reasons, including a voter ID law she supported. The Henderson Family has also requested that Justice rescind the appointment.
A pair of West Virginia Republican lawmakers who lost reelection bids in November will fill two open cabinet positions.
Gov. Jim Justice appointed outgoing House of Delegates member Jill Upson to fill the position of executive director of the Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs. That office was previously headed by Bill White, who said the governor fired him after he was accused of sexual harassment this fall.
Upson is from Jefferson County. She was the first Republican African-American woman to be elected to the House and was the Vice Chair of the House Banking committee. She also served on the Joint Select Committee on the Prevention and Treatment of Substance Abuse.
Justice also appointed outgoing state Senate member Ed Gaunch of Kanawha County to fill the position of state Secretary of Commerce. That office has had an interim leader since Woody Thrasher stepped down in June amid controversy about the RISE flood recovery program.
Gaunch chaired the Senate Government Organization committee and was Vice Chair on the Finance, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Pensions committees.
Both Upson and Gaunch were defeated in the November midterm election by Democrats. They will assume their new roles in January.
**Editor’s Note: The headline and story were edited to clarify Gaunch and Upson as “outgoing” state lawmakers. The story incorrectly stated they were “former” state lawmakers.
Both the House and Senate are considering bills this year to change the state’s education standards once again. It’s a reoccurring theme at the statehouse since Republican lawmakers took control of the chamber in 2015.
In the Senate, lawmakers have approved a bill that does not replace the current college and career ready standards taught in schools, but calls for a cyclical review of those standards with the input of West Virginia teachers.
In the House, however, the discussion over potential changes is just beginning.
The bill taken up by a House Education subcommittee Wednesday would replace the state’s current standards with Math standards first used in California in 1997 and English standards from Massachusetts in 2001. Members of the subcommittee didn’t make changes to those provisions, but are recommending lawmakers give counties the flexibility to adjust state standards as they see fit.
House Bill 2443 would repeal Common Core standards in West Virginia and replace them with standards from that are almost 20 years old. Common Core, however, was repealed by the West Virginia Board of Education in 2015 and replaced with a new set of standards that were the result of statewide public hearings on the issue.
The five delegates on the K-12 subcommittee had previously discussed allowing counties to take the state’s current standards and make changes to them — which could potentially result in 55 different sets of education standards in West Virginia. All five members voiced a need for counties to have flexibility in the classroom, but there was some question over how much.
Republican Delegate Steve Westfall of Jackson County questioned Sarah Stuart from the State Department of Education, about the impact of allowing counties to change just 5 or 10 percent of the state standards to address local education needs.
“I do have a little concern, and I’ll express why,” Stuart said, “We are required to adhere to ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act, and under ESSA, it requires that all states to have challenging, academic standards…and they have to be the same for all public schools in the state. So while, I think we could add 10 percent to the barebones standards that we’ve established at the state level…I do have some concerns with changing the standards for different counties just based on the language of ESSA.”
“Okay, so you’re saying… [we] would have a set of standards for all 55 counties, but if Wayne County wants to add a program for whatever; miner training or something, or Jackson County wants to have something for the Toyota plant, something that fills a need, then you could add to it?” Westfall asked.
“Absolutely,” Stuart answered.
Later during discussion, Westfall encouraged his fellow members to recommend to the full committee the importance of having a statewide set of standards, but to allow counties the flexibility to add additional programs where there’s need.
Delegates recommended adding permissive language in the bill to reflect that.
While all five members of the subcommittee voted to move the bill forward to the full committee on Education, some Democrats still expressed concerns about the implementation of the older California and Massachusetts education standards included in the bill, including Delegate Stephen Baldwin of Greenbrier County.
“The standards that we have in place were developed with the input of our teachers and of education stakeholders here, and the real issue? For me is continuity,” Baldwin said, “High school seniors right now have been through four sets of standards. If we were to change again, that’s just gonna cause problems in the classroom, and that discontinuity would really affect a student’s ability to learn, much less a teacher’s ability to teach.”
Baldwin, who is a former member of the Greenbrier County School Board, also says he feels the fight over standards is more about curriculum.
“Curriculum is where counties and teachers have the flexibility to make decisions about how they teach what they teach, and standards just set a standard for what students ought to learn,” Baldwin noted, “So I think those standards for what students ought to learn should be statewide standards, and then teachers and counties should have flexibility through their curriculum to figure out what’s best for them about how to learn that.”
Delegate Upson, who’s a sponsor of House Bill 2443, says teachers in her county want more flexibility when it comes to standards.
“Anytime that you give the state more control and you push that down to the local level, and you give counties the option to kind of decide what standards and assessments best meet the students that they serve,” Upson explained, “Now, I know that because of the Every Student Succeeds Act, we have to have a uniform assessment, but I have gotten feedback from teachers in the Eastern Panhandle that we just mandate too much from in Charleston, and so they would like to see a lot more flexibility and control at the local level.”
House Bill 2443 has also been second referenced to House Finance, and Delegate Upson says the House will likely consider the Senate’s version of the bill which has already been approved by the chamber.
Members of the House are considering a bill that changes the way lawmakers report political donations during the legislative session.
House Bill 2319 would require candidates running for legislative offices, or their candidate committees, to disclose any fundraising they do during the legislative session to the Secretary of State’s Office within 5 days of the fundraising event.
Delegate Jill Upson, a Republican from Jefferson County, is the lead sponsor of the bill.
“Constituents, they want to know what we’re doing,” Upson explained, “they want to know who’s influencing us, so even though receiving contributions during the session isn’t illegal, people just ought to know who we’re receiving money from.”
Upson says it’s not an issue she’s seen among her legislative colleagues, but it’s a law she feels ought to be on the books.
“I just think transparency is important,” she said, “I mean, we do have an issue with people saying they just don’t trust their representatives, and so this is just one way to rebuild that trust.”
House Bill 2319 will be on second reading Friday and eligible for amendments.
On Election Day last week, Republican Jill Upson defeated Democrat Tiffany Lawrence for the House of Delegates in the 65th District.
Jill Upson was born in California. After marrying her husband who works in the military, they had to relocate every two years. Eleven years ago, she and her husband moved to Charles Town in Jefferson County. Upson decided then she didn’t want to live anywhere else.
“When we got to this area, I just fell in love with it, and I just decided I’m done, that’s it, I’m going to stay here,” Upson said, “And so he continued to receive orders, and move every two years, and I still stayed put. He’s been all over the place, but I stayed and raised my children in Jefferson County.”
Around 2009, after identifying as A-political for most of her life, Upson became interested in politics and specifically, Republican ideology. She started working with other candidates by volunteering and going door-to-door to interact with potential voters on their behalf. When the House of Delegates seat in the 65th District became available in 2012, Upson almost didn’t run.
“I initially said, no, that I wasn’t interested, and just through an entire series of events that occurred in my life, I decided that this was probably a good time to go ahead and give it a try.”
Upson lost in the 2012 election to Tiffany Lawrence, but this year the outcome was different. Her win surprised her.
“What happened was the day of the election, I was online looking at the different projections, and they said that I probably wouldn’t win, they said that the incumbent had a lot more money, and obviously incumbency is a benefit, and they just said that, you know, with the larger turnout that they were seeing, that they were thinking that I wasn’t going to win. So I was very surprised when I ended up winning by the margin with which I won, I mean that was really a pleasant surprise.”
Upson upset Lawrence with 56 percent of the total vote. She says she’ll stand for more conservative values in Charleston.
“Well I stand for fiscal conservative policies. I ran on enhancing education, restructuring our tax policy, on regulatory policies, and my tagline was ‘freedom and opportunity,’ so obviously individual freedom and economic opportunity.”
Upson says she has a list of things she wants to work on once she’s in office.
“The first thing I want to look at is, the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce came out with several policies that they put forth during the last legislative session that they felt would help spur economic growth, so I’d like to work with my colleagues in the legislature to really look at ways that we can start to implement some of those policies.”
Her ultimate goal is to always remember the voters who put her in office. She says she wants to be open and listen to the people, keeping their needs in mind and the lines of communication open between the Eastern Panhandle and Charleston.
