A West Virginia student has been named a semifinalist for a national academic scholarship.
A West Virginia student has been named a semifinalist for a national academic scholarship.
As a semifinalist Mariam Kisto, a senior at George Washington High School in Charleston, will receive a $3,200 scholarship from the National Honor Society (NHS).
Chosen from nearly 17,000 applicants, the NHS is awarding $2 million in scholarships to 600 NHS students. The scholarships recognize students who exemplify the four pillars of NHS membership: scholarship, service, leadership and character.
Kisto is the only recipient in West Virginia of an NHS scholarship this year. She was surprised to discover she was the only recipient in the state.
“There’s so many people around me that I know for a fact also deserve it,” Kisto said. “But yeah, it’s really an honor.”
Kisto has not made a final decision of what university she will be attending in the fall, but she said the award now allows her to consider more colleges as an option.
“I want a good computer science program,” Kisto said. “I am considering different schools, and this scholarship will definitely, definitely help pay for it.”
Kisto said she appreciates the opportunities NHS has allowed her to help make her community and school a better place and hoped that the same can be true for future members.
“It really is a good opportunity and it’s never a loss to try joining NHS or any other club,” she said. “I hope that people will be encouraged.”
School discipline was identified as a key issue coming into this year’s legislative session. But with the session’s end just days away, a key school discipline bill is in question after a contentious committee meeting Monday afternoon.
School discipline was identified as a key issue coming into this year’s legislative session. But with the session’s end just days away, a key school discipline bill is in question after a contentious committee meeting Monday afternoon.
Senate Bill 614 aims to expand teachers’ ability to remove disruptive students to the elementary level from grades kindergarten through six. But the bill also has further requirements including suspension of the unruly student and placement in alternative education.
Lindsey McIntosh, general counsel for Kanawha County Schools, brought up several concerns when the Senate Education Committee discussed the bill in February. She was on hand again Monday afternoon in the House Education Committee, and told lawmakers that the bill will create more work for schools and school districts. According to McIntosh, the bill requires a student that has been removed to undergo a risk assessment, a step above what Kanawha County Schools already does.
“What we typically do, unless we’re talking about an expulsion, is we do a Threat Report, which is based on the Virginia model of threat reports,” she said. “It is a scientifically proven model that we evaluate whether or not that threat is transient, meaning it was just language used or if it was something that was substantive, meaning they have an intent to actually do what they stated that they were going to do. Once that threat report comes back as substantive, then we do the risk assessment.”
McIntosh said the county does far more threat reports than risk assessments.
She further warned legislators that as written, the bill’s required assessment could spell federal legal trouble for schools. McIntosh said the requirement triggers special education protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also known as IDEA. Those federal protections are incongruous with the bill’s requirement to remove students from their classroom.
“It’s going to create an ambiguity that is going to lead to litigation, there is no way above that or beyond that,” McIntosh said. “If we have teachers that are asking for these students to be removed, and the law says technically they are protected students under the IDEA, which all of these kids would be because they’re all now triggering ChildFind under this language, then we as a school system have to figure out how to litigate – are we under the IDEA? Or are we complying with the law?”
SB 614’s lead sponsor and Senate Education Chair Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, was on hand to defend the bill. She said the bill’s requirements raise the standard for all counties.
“The whole purpose is to remove that child immediately, one to three days, and there have been school systems who say we can’t do a risk assessment, or we can’t do analysis in three days,” Grady said. “Well, you can, you’re just not doing it right now because there’s nobody forcing your hand to get it done right away. And this is kind of what we want to do is make sure we get that done quickly, rather than them dragging their feet for two weeks at a time and saying we don’t have that ready.”
Grady, a teacher, has consistently said that discipline is the number one issue for teachers, driving them away from the profession and robbing other students of their right to learn. She said SB 614 isn’t perfect, but something needs to be done to help the situation.
“You need more people to help with risk assessments, then so be it. That’s what you do,” Grady said. “You rearrange things. That’s what we do in education, we make do with what we have. And so I think that, that’s the best way we would do it now. And if it seems like there are a lot of referrals and specific counties or specific areas, then we have to revisit that and see what needs to be done.”
Grady said the law can be reassessed moving forward as needed, acknowledging it will not fit every situation.
“We don’t have an answer for everything. I wish we did,” she said. “And I wish that this bill solved every problem we have, it would be so great. I worked so hard to try to make this perfect. And I realized that it’s not perfect, and it’s never going to be perfect. Because let’s face it, every kid is different. Every county is different. Every school is different, every teacher is different. And so it’s not a one size fits all.”
After more than an hour of discussion over the bill’s language and potential changes to ensure compliance with federal requirements, the committee adjourned without taking further action on SB 614. With only four days left in the regular session, the bill’s future is unclear.
Language similar to, but less stringent than, SB 614 is included in House Bill 5262, also known as the Teacher’s Bill of Rights, which has cleared both education committees and is now pending in Senate Finance.
On Wednesday, the company delivered smaller Nano Beast buses to Kanawha, Clay, Cabell and Monongalia counties.
GreenPower delivered its first four school buses to West Virginia school districts on Wednesday.
Fraser Atkinson, CEO of GreenPower, notes that the school bus we’re boarding got 170 miles out of a single charge, exceeding its advertised range of 140 miles.
GreenPower will begin building more of these buses, called the BEAST (Battery Electric Automotive School Transportation), in South Charleston in January.
On Wednesday, the company delivered smaller Nano BEAST buses to Kanawha, Clay, Cabell and Monongalia counties.
Taking a ride, the first thing you notice about the Nano BEAST is how quiet it is. No roaring diesel engine, transmission or exhaust.
The bus is so quiet, company officials say, that the classroom behavior of special needs students has improved because of it.
Instead, the fuel comes from a lithium iron phosphate battery, the same kind now used in Teslas.
The biggest power consumption other than running the bus? The heater.
“The traction motor, the drive motor is number one, of course, and the heaters are number two,” Atkinson said. “The AC draws very little in the summer.”
What about those mountains in West Virginia? Atkinson explains that with the right kind of driver training, the downhill portion of the trip can actually put power back into the battery.
“The other thing is that you use the brakes a whole lot less than a traditional vehicle,” he said. “And with really good drivers it can be literally a third of the usage of brakes compared to the equivalent.”
Right now, the battery is a big-ticket item. A battery pack for the bus can cost $20,000 and last for about 10 years. Atkinson says the cost will come down.
“So if that trend continues, in five years, the batteries will cost a whole lot less,” he said. “Then in 10 years, they’ll be a fraction of what they are now.”
The charging infrastructure has a way to go. Kanawha County took delivery of its first bus Wednesday, but it doesn’t have a charger yet. It’s been ordered, Superintendent Tom Williams says.
The Mega BEAST could solve that. GreenPower will begin manufacturing it in South Charleston and California next year. Its battery will be capable of 300 miles on a single charge. The company calls it the longest range on the market.
With that kind of range, a field trip from say, Wheeling to Charleston might not be that remote.
On this West Virginia Morning, Caroline MacGregor reports on one of the largest equine events to showcase rescue and at-risk horses taking place in Winfield, West Virginia. And as classes resume at WVU students react to the university’s proposed program cuts.
On this West Virginia Morning, Caroline MacGregor reports on one of the largest equine events to showcase rescue and at-risk horses taking place in Winfield, West Virginia.
Also, as classes resume at WVU, students react to the university’s proposed program cuts, a vocational aviation facility coming to Marion County is expected to stimulate high-tech job growth, and proposed changes to solar energy in the state.
In this show, our Mountain Stage Song of the Week comes to us from an encore broadcast of Mountain Stage featuring the powerful soul-rock of The War And Treaty, 2022 Americana Music Association’s Duo/Group of the Year. We hear their song “Lover’s Game,” a soulful rocker with a retro style that brings to mind the glory days of Ike & Tina Turner.
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 Concord University and Shepherd University.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.
West Virginia Morning is produced with help from Bill Lynch, Caroline MacGregor, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Briana Heaney, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe.
Eric Douglas is our news director. Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and producer.
Teresa Wills is our host. 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
On this West Virginia Morning, the pepperoni roll is probably West Virginia’s most well-known food. You can find them at most grocery stores and convenience marts, but Folkways Reporter Zack Harold says their path to popularity came from getting on the school lunch menu.
On this West Virginia Morning, the pepperoni roll is probably West Virginia’s most well-known food. You can find them at most grocery stores and convenience marts, but Folkways Reporter Zack Harold says their path to popularity came from getting on the school lunch menu.
Also, in this show, the doors recently opened at the University of Kentucky’s James B. Beam Institute. As Shepherd Snyder reports, a school initiative there aims to get students trained to work in Kentucky’s spirits industry.
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 Concord University and Shepherd University.
Eric Douglas produced this episode.
Teresa Wills is our host.
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
It starts — as all pepperoni rolls do — with the dough. But not just any dough. That’s one of the secrets of Kanawha schools’ pepperoni rolls. They are made using the same recipe as the delicious, soft and sweet hot rolls that accompany every school Thanksgiving dinner and Salisbury steak.
This story originally aired in the Aug. 13, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.
It’s 7:30 a.m. in the kitchen at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, West Virginia. Breakfast just wrapped up, but lunch is already heavy on everyone’s minds. There’s a lot of cooking to do between then and now.
Food Services Coordinator Lori Lanier shows me how to make Kanawha County Schools’ famous pepperoni rolls.
It starts — as all pepperoni rolls do — with the dough. But not just any dough. That’s one of the secrets of Kanawha schools’ pepperoni rolls. They are made using the same recipe as the delicious, soft and sweet hot rolls that accompany every school Thanksgiving dinner and Salisbury steak.
“I don’t care how many times you make them, sometimes you may have a pinch more flour or a pinch less flour. You just have to watch the consistency, because it’s all on how the flour is sifted,” Lanier explains over the rumble of a jumbo-sized stand mixer.
It will take several batches of dough to make enough pepperoni rolls for the school. Each batch then has to raise for half an hour before the process can continue.
After the dough has risen, cooks still have to individually stuff and shape the rolls, filling giant sheet pans that go into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes. Once the tops are golden brown, the rolls come out of the oven and are brushed with a coating of melted butter.
Lori Lanier, Kanawha County Schools food services coordinator, mixes up a batch of pepperoni roll dough at Horace Mann Middle School. Lanier previously worked at the school as a cook.
Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Cooks will tell you — this is one of the most time consuming lunches to prepare. A lot of schools shift pepperoni roll day to the end of the week so they can work on the rolls a few days in advance. Horace Mann made half of their rolls the day before I visited, storing them in the walk-in cooler until it was time to pop them in the oven.
But there is a good reason to go to all this trouble. These pepperoni rolls are beloved by generations of school kids.
“On pepperoni roll days, the teachers would let you out five or ten minutes early so you could get to the cafeteria, because there was always such a long line,” said Whitney Humphrey, a friend and former co-worker who graduated from Riverside High School in 2007. “Because even kids who typically didn’t eat school lunch would eat lunch on pepperoni roll day.”
It was a similar story at Capital High School, where Brittany Carowick graduated in 2006.
“We’d always try to talk our teachers into letting us, in class, at the door so we could run all the way across the courtyard and be first in line for pepperoni rolls. Because they’re so good,” she said.
And Carowick really shouldn’t have been eating the pepperoni rolls.
“I’m actually allergic to pepperoni. But I still loved the pepperoni rolls. So I would unroll them, take the line of pepperoni out, hand it to all my friends, roll it back up and eat it,” she said.
Tom Bragg is also a former coworker of mine. He graduated from Nitro High School, where his love of pepperoni rolls turned him into something of a scam artist.
“Twenty years ago, you were assigned a lunch number. It wasn’t like a scan card or a barcode,” he said. “They told you, ‘Here’s your three-digit or four-digit number — don’t forget it.’”
At some point, Bragg realized these numbers had been assigned alphabetically and in numerical order. So his best friend, who just happened to share the same last name, had a lunch number just one digit away from his own.
“My best friend always brought his lunch or would skip school and go get lunch somewhere else,” Bragg said. “So I was like, man, he’s not taking advantage of pepperoni roll day. And his number is one before mine. So I’m just going to go back through line and get a second pepperoni roll.”
The plan went off without a hitch — until his friend’s mom received a lunch bill.
“We were at his house and the lunch bill came. His mom was like, ‘I thought you didn’t eat lunch at school,’” Bragg said. “And I started giggling. She was like, ‘Tommy you owe me $10 for the pepperoni rolls you ate last month.’”
This probably comes as no surprise. At this point, pepperoni rolls are an iconic West Virginia food: invented in the north-central part of the state by Italian immigrants who wanted a portable lunch to take into the coal mines. The story is as well-known as John Henry or Mothman.
But if you’re a West Virginian who didn’t grow up within an hour’s drive from Clarksburg, cast your mind back about 20 or 30 years. How prevalent were pepperoni rolls back then?
I went to school one county away from Kanawha, in Boone County. We never had pepperoni rolls on our school menu. I’ve polled folks around my age who grew up in neighboring counties — Putnam, Lincoln, Jackson, Logan, Clay, Nicholas — and none of them had pepperoni rolls at school, either.
Even my Kanawha County friends who enjoyed pepperoni rolls at school didn’t have many memories of them outside the lunchroom.
“Kanawha County Schools is where we learned about pepperoni rolls,” Bragg said. “You started seeing them pop up in gas stations after that.”
Trays of pepperoni rolls, ready for the lunch rush at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, West Virginia.
Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
So here’s what I decided to figure out — when did pepperoni rolls first appear in Kanawha County Schools, and how did the dish come to appear on the menu?
“It became kind of a quest,” said Diane Miller, Kanawha County Schools’ director of Child Nutrition.
Once Miller heard about my research project, she started fishing around, too. There’s apparently no paper record of the pepperoni rolls’ first appearance. There’s no archive of school menus that we could dig into. So she had to rely on school employees’ memories.
“They believe it started between 1992 and 1994. But we in Kanawha County can get it back to ‘97, ‘98.”
She talked with the Kanawha superintendent and folks from the West Virginia Department of Education. She even found some retired school cooks and picked their brains.
That’s how she discovered a possible origin story.
”They were making their own pizza breads and they ran out, and didn’t know what else to do. So they decided — they had roll dough for the next day, so they put them together. They’d had pepperoni rolls with their families that were working in the mines,” Miller said.
I asked Miller to connect me with a cook who might know some of the history — and she directed me to Nancy Romeo.
“I have made more pepperoni rolls than you can shake a stick at,” she said.
Romeo retired in 2010 after 20 years with the county. She says pepperoni rolls were already on the menu when she arrived in 1990. She even called a former coworker to make sure.
“We were hired about the same time. Both of us agree that they were making them before we both were hired,” Romeo said.
That was as much information as she could give me. But I had one more lead.
I called in a favor at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. There was a time when the paper printed the Kanawha schools’ menu for each week. Using that, I thought maybe we could pinpoint the first reference of pepperoni rolls.
My connection checked the newspaper archive and it turns out school menus didn’t run in the paper in the 1980s and early 1990s. But I did get the name of another retired school cook — Ellen Carter.
I found Carter in the kitchen of the Rand Community Center. She told me she didn’t really have time for an interview. But she agreed to let me hang out while she made hot rolls.
“This is going to make 120, and I feed about 112 or 115 people,” she said. “The pepperoni rolls are made out of the same dough.”
Carter has worked in this same kitchen for most of the last 50 years. She went to work for Rand Elementary in 1970 and stayed until 1999. The school shut down a few years later and became a community center. When that happened, Carter came back to cook for the center’s senior nutrition program.
“I’m 89, and in October, I’ll be 90,” she said.
Ellen Carter makes hot rolls in the kitchen at the Rand Community Center. Carter has worked in this same kitchen for much of the last 50 years.
Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
I figured if anyone would remember when the pepperoni rolls made their school lunch debut, it would be Ellen Carter.
“I think it was the early ‘80s that they started making pepperoni rolls,” she said.
Carter couldn’t give a more exact time frame. She had no idea how the rolls came to be on school menus in the first place. But she said the recipe probably was disseminated in one of the school cooks’ regular meetings.
“We used to have monthly meetings. And we’d go to a different school, we’d take a covered dish, we’d take a menu to the dish we made, and they’d make a copy of them. I have gobs of them,” Carter said.
One thing Carter does know — the way she was taught to make the rolls is not the way cooks are making them now.
Instead of shaping them individually, she’d get a big lump of dough rolled out flat.
“Then you go back and roll it with a rolling pin,” Carter said.
She would top it with cheese and pepperoni, then roll the whole thing into a log.
“And then you cut it and roll your pepperoni rolls,” Carter said. “I don’t know anybody that rolls them out like we do.”
Carter still makes a lot of pepperoni rolls. She recently got a call to make 1,000 for a local high school, which was selling them as a fundraiser. She doesn’t usually make them for her senior citizens, though. They’re not huge fans.
“They like a hot meal. Like today, we’re going to do a baked potato and a salad,” Carter said.
Carter’s senior citizens might not care much for pepperoni rolls, but I know some folks who do.
The pepperoni rolls were going fast the day I visited Horace Mann Middle, but I managed to snag a few and tuck them away in my bag. That way, once I got my friends to open up about their pepperoni roll memories, I could surprise them with a taste of the past.
“This is exactly what I remember. Look at all that pepperoni. You can see the cheese has a little bit of that pepperoni grease on it,” Whitney Humphrey said as she tore into hers. “It’s divine.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s a trip down memory lane. That is so good,” Tom Bragg said between bites. “The meat-to-cheese ratio is great. The cheese is melted but not like lava — cooked long enough that the grease from the pepperoni has soaked into the bread but hasn’t burned it or overtaken it. This is great.”
Brittany Carowick — whose skin still gets a little itchy when she eats cured meats — quickly fell into her old habits.
“I’m pulling apart the outer layer of bread, and then you hit the spiral and you can pull that apart with your fingers,” she explained as she expertly dissected her pepperoni roll — years of muscle memory coming back into play.
With the pepperoni safely removed, she took a bite of the cheesy bread that was left.
“It’s so delicious,” she said. “That is solid cheese.”
Memory is a funny thing.
The Kanawha County Schools’ pepperoni roll is beloved by generations of school kids. And between me and the folks at the Kanawha County Board of Education, we probably talked to dozens of people trying to track down its origins.
And the best we could come up with was a hazy timeline that puts us somewhere in the early to late 80s, and a plausible — but not exactly conclusive — story about a school that ran out of pizza subs one day.
This whole story unfolded within recent living memory, and this is the best we can do.
And yet, Humphrey and Bragg and Carowick have these vivid memories that all came flooding back with a single bite.
“I’m 34 years old and I’m sitting here talking to you about pepperoni rolls, because it’s had such a presence in my life,” Humphrey said. “I don’t have very fond memories of school, but I do have fond memories of school pepperoni rolls. That seems kind of silly, but it’s true.”
——
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
