Among reports on school safety and security, and the results of a teacher survey, the state BOE heard an update on Lincoln County Schools.
The West Virginia Board of Education (BOE) met Wednesday morning for its monthly meeting, and training is planned for a county with substandard performance.
Among reports on school safety and security, and the results of a teacher survey, the state BOE heard an update on Lincoln County Schools.
The state board issued a state of emergency for the county’s school system in November 2020, and has extended it three times, most recently in July of this year. An initial review found students were below average in math and reading.
West Virginia Department of Education Director of Accountability Matthew Hicks told the state board that things in Lincoln County are moving routinely.
“Training is being planned for the end of November, and overall the last month has been pretty quiet,” he said.
Hicks also presented the annual county board of education accountability report, which identifies counties that may need improvement or state help. Each county is scored on 11 efficiency indicators.
“These areas will be used to determine approval status for county school systems in the report,” Hicks said.
Earlier in the meeting, School Operations Officer Samuel Pauley presented the board with a school safety and security update. Most notably, Pauley reported that appropriation requests for the security needs of county school boards increased by 147 percent.
“The total request, as reported to us by the county boards, was $247 million,” Pauley said. “Last year, that request was $100 million, roughly.”
The price tag primarily includes requests for safe school entryways, weapon detection systems and resource officers.
“It’s a significant increase, that we feel that, that’s likely due to the shooting that occurred earlier in the year in Uvalde, Texas,” Pauley said.
The board also approved an extension of a statewide waiver of Policy 4336 that was initially approved last December. The policy pertains to West Virginia School Bus Transportation Regulations, and allows certified bus drivers from other states to substitute experience in lieu of the required 40 hours of classroom training and 12 hours of behind the wheel training.
Director of Transportation David Baber said over the past year, 16 drivers have come into the state via the waiver.
“It’s a small number, but it’s very practical,” he said. “It’s 16 more we didn’t have prior to that.”
Baber said that a revision of the policy is in the works.
In Lincoln County, creating the access points along the Guyandotte River turned out to be much more than a way to get on the river, it was also a way to unite the community.
This story is the third of a series called West Virginia Water Trails. Hear stories from people coming together across southern West Virginia, to create new economies and communities- with waterways. It’s made possible in part by the National Coal Heritage Area Authority.
Finding a Way Onto the Guyandotte
Just behind the West Hamlin fire station is a path to a river. A quick walk down a grassy hill takes boaters to a concrete pad by the Guyandotte. In this region, accessing the river wasn’t always this simple. In fact, the concrete on this access point was poured in 2019.
Fire Chief Ron Porter remembers the challenges of getting boats on the Guyandotte before the access point.
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Slide at Branchland Park after repair work.
“That was tough,” Porter said. “You were fighting briars and brambles and slipping and sliding over the riverbank. And to get that back out was doubly difficult. So you had to drag it up over a riverbank and through all the brush and mud.”
Porter and the department often pitch in to help maintain the access point. He says it’s important for water rescue emergencies. He’s also noticed more people floating and enjoying the water.
“We have a lot of people enjoying kayaking, especially. In the summertime, it’s not unusual to see a dozen or 15 kayaks in our parking lot out here where they’ve taken out on the river,” Porter said. “They’ll park their cars here, go further upstream and put their kayak or canoe or whatever craft they’re using, and paddle, down the river and take out here. [The river] has been utilized a whole lot more now than it ever was.”
Another access point on the guide is at Branchland Park. It was barely noticeable just a few years ago.
“I lived here for years and did not even know that there was a boat dock [at Branchland] because it was just weeds and trees,” Branchland resident Wanda Cremeans said. “You couldn’t see the boat dock.”
Wanda lives along the Guyandotte River not far from the park and entry point. She remembers when the work on the Branchland access point began.
“We started cleaning it up and burning the brush,” Cremeans said. “[We] wanted to get kayaking, going again. We had a lot of people, friends, family, a lot of Cremeans’s jump in there and help with everything. So some of those people have already passed on, just like Tony has.”
Tony Cremeans was her husband. He passed away in 2020. He ran an auto repair shop and was an advocate for recreation on the river.
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Wanda and Tony Cremeans at Branchland Park in 2014. Tony Cremeans passed away in 2020.
“He was very community oriented and liked to bring things to Branchland for people to have fun,” she said. “He loved to live life and have fun.”
Wanda, her family and many other volunteers did a lot of work to clean up Branchland Park. Ralph Triplet grew up at Branchland and worked closely with Tony and other volunteers to clean up the park and entry point.
“Everybody’s close in the neighborhood but we kind of partnered up and we said we were kind of tired of the ‘Guyan River’ and the Branchland community having a black eye that it had,” Triplett said. “We thought we would try to clean up the riverbank up there at Branchland a little bit.”
Ralph and other volunteers wanted to bring back the Guyandotte River Regatta that he says was big deal in the 1970’s.
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Jerry and Randy Lawson at the finish line at the former bridge at West Hamlin of the River Regatta in the 1970’s.
Guyandotte River Regatta Returns
Work on a river access point is never really done. Triplet says volunteers pitch in annually to pick up litter. The community also put up artwork painted by Wanda Cremeans that celebrates the river. They also worked with the Coal Heritage Area Authority to put up signs that clearly marked the access points.
Word got out and people from the region started showing up. There was even a kayak rental and shuttle business that opened. With the revived access point, residents worked to host the Guyandotte River Regatta in 2014. Wanda Cremeans remembers cookouts and a car show to go with it.
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Guyandotte River Regatta put in at Branchland Park in Lincoln County, W.Va. in 2014.
“It was a fellowship,” she said. “It’s just like a party, like a community party.”
The community party lasted about all weekend. The event was gaining momentum and helping to bring a few smiles back to the Branchland community.
“Branchland didn’t and doesn’t get a lot of events,” she said. “So, it was like, ‘Hey, this is so cool.’ Branchland is doing something.”
Organizations and volunteers who wanted to maintain the Guyandotte Water Trail formed the Guyandotte Water Trail Alliance in 2014. With help from volunteers and the Alliance, the Regatta expanded from Branchland in Lincoln County to four other entry points and counties along the Guyandotte River including Wyoming, Mingo, Logan, and Cabell. With the ongoing clean up efforts and clearly marked access points, the Guyandotte River remains a West Virginia Water Trail.
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Guyandotte River Regatta, 2014
“This section of the river parallels Route 10,” Ralph Triplett. “You can see the river, the entire course. And there’s various pull offs, people can see it and watch or dance and I think we have a lot of potential for growth on what we have here.”
Because of the COVID 19 pandemic, the Regatta has been canceled the past two years. Plans are underway to bring it back this year. Chief Ron Porter hopes another regatta reignites the momentum and community pride he saw in his hometown before the pandemic.
“We really need jobs and we need the businesses and the opportunity to have more services available,” Porter said. “If tourism, if it can in some way play a role in that, that will be fun. That would be great.”
There’s a lot of work ahead of the community, lots of organizing, fundraising, and even more cleanup along the river. Ralph Triplet says finding a new generation to help will be critical to the success.
“We’re definitely looking for new blood,” Triplet said “A lot of us are, further down the highway, any kind of support that we could get. I hope this works out well for the whole river. So yeah it’s a good undertaking.”
Triplet says work is underway to register the Guyandotte Water Trail Alliance as a 501 c3. There’s another access point on the Guyandotte just outside of West Hamlin called Salt Rock. This site has been closed for a few years.
Other organizers met in 2020 with state officials with plans to create a new access point in Ranger.
Student enrollment in West Virginia’s K-12 public schools has decreased this year.
West Virginia Superintendent of Schools Clayton Burch told West Virginia Board of Education members this week that enrollment in West Virginia public schools has dropped by more than 1,400 students compared to last year.
The drop, according to Burch, is due to continued population loss in the state and the impacts of the pandemic.
For the 2021-2022 school year, there are 250,899 students enrolled in public schools in the state.
Additionally, the state board of education agreed to permanently close and consolidate schools in Hampshire and Lincoln counties.
Hampshire County will close John J. Cornwell Elementary School ahead of schedule due to enrollment decreases, safety concerns and required educational needs. It’s one of five elementary schools earmarked to close after the county passed a school construction bond in 2020.
The board also approved the closure and consolidation of Duval pre-K-8 and Midway Elementary in Lincoln County due to structural concerns. The facility closed in July.
Students at all three schools have been reassigned temporarily to nearby schools until consolidation can begin.
The board also placed the following policies on public comment until Dec. 13, 2021:
Policy 2315, Comprehensive School Counseling Program will be repealed and replaced to update content to align with current terminology in the West Virginia School Counseling Model and W.Va. Code §18 5 18b.
Policy 2322, West Virginia System of Support and Accountability has been revised to clarify accountability requirements for all public schools. It will also embed requirements for county board of education member-training currently outlined in Policy 3235, Definition of Good Cause Failure to Receive School Board Training, which will be repealed. Additionally, it will embed West Virginia Report Card requirements currently outlined in Policy 7300, Better Schools Accountability: School, School Districts, and Statewide School Report Cards, which will also be repealed.
Policy 5100, Approval of Educator Preparation Programs has been revised for the purpose of adding clarifying language.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 rocket airplane dropped from the belly of a B-29 bomber. Seconds later, Yeager entered the history books as the first pilot to break the sound barrier.
By this time, the 24-year-old Lincoln County native was already an aviation legend. During World War II, he had flown 64 combat missions over Europe and, in a single dogfight, had killed 13 Germans. In his eighth mission, he had been shot down over German-occupied France.
After the war, he served in California as a test pilot for high-speed planes. A year after breaking the sound barrier, he visited Charleston and gave the people a show they would never forget. During a boat race on the Kanawha River, he flew his Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star jet beneath Charleston’s South Side Bridge.
Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975 as a brigadier general. Thirty years later, President George W. Bush promoted Yeager to the rank of major general. In 2012, on the 65th anniversary of his record-setting flight, he again broke the sound barrier—this time, at age 89.
A health care system serving six southern West Virginia counties received more than $900,000 to enhance its telehealth services.
Southern West Virginia Health System, also known as Lincoln Primary Care Center Inc., was awarded $967,304 from the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday through a newly created COVID-19 telehealth program.
The FCC received $200 million through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act in March to help providers across the country enhance their remote services. It reports that this last round of allocations was the FCC’s seventh. On May 13, the agency also awarded Wirt County Health Services Association Inc. with $274,432.
Based in Lincoln County, Southern West Virginia Health System also serves parts of Boone, Cabell, Kanawha, Logan and Mingo counties.
Like other providers throughout the state, CEO Lisa Leach said the organization has moved many of its services to video conferencing and telephone, to allow for social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It really gives us an opportunity to try to continue to meet the needs of our patients,” Leach said. “You know, the frail, the elderly… and obviously during these pandemic times it helps with emergencies, so that we can continue to provide care.”
Leach said the money will allow Southern West Virginia Health System to purchase 23 mobile telehealth carts, which will hold video conferencing equipment and supplies for checking vitals, and the necessary software.
There’s only so much patients can do from the comfort of their own homes, when it comes to checking their own vitals, like blood pressure.
With the video conferencing carts, which Leach called “virtual exam rooms,” patients will have access to supplies allowing them to perform these functions themselves. Patients will be able to use the carts from designated rooms at a clinic, or outside the clinic, under a tent, allowing for a face-to-face appointment with a physician, minus the physical contact.
Before now, getting paid for virtual appointments was difficult. But the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have started reimbursing health care providers for telehealth options during this public health crisis.
Leach said this could help beyond the pandemic as well, as long as insurers continue to reimburse her organization for telehealth services.
“We have those at-risk patients,” Leach said Wednesday. “Whether it’s a 90-year-old woman who needs help getting into a car coming here, or maybe it’s a 65-year-old woman who just had a heart attack and has other multiple issues, it’s difficult for her to come to us. So, we want to continue to use telehealth.”
But throughout the state and much of the state’s southern counties, many West Virginians still struggle with reliable broadband access. According to Leach, the FCC money doesn’t help much with that.
“For those folks, they’re going to have to go to a different location,” she said. “I wish this could fix that. But we can’t change broadband.”
Leach said it might be about a month and a half before they’re able to purchase the necessary supplies and begin offering the expanded telehealth services.
For the past few months, West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia Folkways Project has cultivated a connection between two groups of people thousands of miles away — high schools in Lincoln County, West Virginia and in Merthyr Tydfill, Wales.
Appalachia and Wales have a unique, historical connection through energy extraction, with many Welsh immigrating to the United States to find coal mining jobs beginning in the 19th century. Through this migration many stories, recipes, music and more were swapped, intertwining the cultures of both regions.
Often young people have a unique way of understanding culture and folkways, and sometimes they can help us understand ourselves a bit more. So, we had the students in Wales and West Virginia swap audio diaries. They shared everything from how the declining coal industry has affected their families, to their favorite foods. That included birthday cake, Doritos with salsa, West Virginia-based Tudor’s Biscuit World and “plain pizza.”
The Inside Appalachia team is planning a reporting trip to Wales later this year, although given travel restrictions due to the coronavirus it will likely be postponed. However, we are going to continue this collaboration remotely, much like everything else right now, with the hope to meet some of the students from Wales in the future.
This story is part of our Folklife Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
This story is part of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Southern Coalfields Reporting Project which is supported by a grant from the National Coal Heritage Area Authority.
