Plugging the Brain Drain Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Merging Home, Heart And Opportunity In The Mountains

Editor’s note: This story is the last in our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.

Over this summer, Abie Reed will graduate culinary school, do a stint as a bread and pastry chef at a diner, plan a wedding, get married, and as if all that isn’t enough, build a house with her fiance — a tiny house.

They’re planning to move into the tiny home at the end of the summer, and settle in while she takes a gap year to find mentors in the food industry.

“It gives us an opportunity to create a home and have our first house together and everything,” she said. “But if I can’t necessarily find anything that I genuinely would like to be a part of, nothing would stop us from picking up and leaving.”

Her fiance works in Hurricane, West Virginia and has family in the area. They’re building the tiny home there and Reed said they will stay in West Virginia for at least the next five years.

“But after that, honestly, wherever life takes us, we’re really open to going anywhere,” Reed said. “Especially because my sister is in England right now with her husband and then my parents live in South America. And so the world is open to wherever we want to go. We just have to make that decision.”

The food industry is just one of many industries that might require young West Virginians to move away. And whether youth want to become engineers, software developers, stockbrokers, actors, musicians, or chefs — they look around at the state and see limited opportunities to advance that career, whatever it may be.

This was the situation West Virginia native James Rogers found himself in over a decade ago.

“When I first started my career, I wanted to be a chef,” He said. “And the best way to learn how to be a chef is to travel.”

Rogers spent 14 years working in restaurants, mainly in Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

“I didn’t expect to move back,” he said. “And I’m not saying that I would never have moved back, nor would I have never chosen to move back. I didn’t expect to because I’ve always liked high intensity, high paced jobs.”

After an injury in 2015, he did return. Last spring, he graduated from Pierpont Community and Technical College with a business management degree and planned to go back into the restaurant world.

That was right before the pandemic.

“The service industry really took a big hit,” he said.

Rogers reevaluated and is now going to school for accounting. He said he’d like to remain in West Virginia but will go wherever he can find a job.

“I’ve reached a point in my lifetime, where I would prefer not moving a whole lot,” he said. “I’ve moved 10 times since I graduated high school.”

After spending much of the last two decades living in busy metropolitan cities, he said West Virginia is convenient.

“I believe in West Virginia, we are provided with quick access, because we have a load of traffic on the roads,” he said. “We have a less dense population. So it’s less stressful to go satisfy all your day-off routines…Whereas in a city it may take the entire day.”

He’s also got a large family in the state and the cost of living is pretty low.

Sam Clagg just graduated from the culinary arts program at Pierpont. He’s got a job lined up at a restaurant in Charleston, near where he grew up in Putnam County.

He said he’s always been a family man and would never want to move far away from them.

“My family dynamic is where we always communicate, we never stop talking to each other,” Clagg said. “I think that if I leave that I’ll be leaving a part of myself.”

He plans to stay in the state, not just because his family is here or because he thinks it’s a good place to be a chef but also because he sees potential.

“You see big cities and stuff where they have these restaurants here dedicated for 50 years and stuff, but you don’t see that here,” he said. “You see closed down restaurants, you don’t see a community. They’re trying to get together, but they just need some glue. And I feel like I’m that glue.”

Like many young chefs, he hopes to open up his own restaurant someday.

Clagg tells people who are leaving West Virginia to give it time and wait for the right job. He said some jobs do require leaving but he believes one can build a comfortable life in the state.

“I don’t think I’m ready to live in a big city like Miami, Florida, or New York City, or California,” He said. “I don’t think I was ever born to go there. I think if I stay in West Virginia, I will be working towards my strengths.”

The dozen or so young West Virginians we spoke with for our “Plugging the Brain Drain” series have a lot in common.

They recognize the state has issues, and want to see it get better. They have family here but don’t feel like they’re necessarily bound to stay. They think it would be great to find a good-paying job in West Virginia. But if there’s a job offer in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles they’re probably going to take it.

Their future plans aren’t set in stone, much like Reed and her fiance’s tiny home.

“We can literally just attach it to a truck,” she said. “And leave at any given moment.”

A tiny home that Abie Reed and her fiance are modeling their own after.

Lack Of LGBTQ Protections Has Some Young West Virginians Ready To Leave

Casey Johnson lives in Pittsburgh’s North Shore, a couple of blocks from one of the most colorful buildings in the nation, Randyland, a utopian-esque public art installation with walls, chairs, and trinkets in every possible shade and hue.

When apartment shopping in the Steel City, Johnson, who is pansexual, gender non-binary and uses non-gendered pronouns, searched to find a neighborhood that was the “most accepting.” North Shore, they said, fits the bill.

But if Johnson were ever to move back home to West Virginia, where they grew up, they know that acceptance isn’t certain and often a matter of where someone chooses to live.

Johnson was raised inside the city limits of Martinsburg, one of just over a dozen cities in the state to protect LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in housing and employment.

Their mother now lives outside city limits in Berkeley County, where no protections exist.

“If I were to move in next door to my mother, I can be evicted from an apartment because I’m queer,” said Johnson. “I could be fired from a job because I’m queer. And I’m not protected at the state level.”

Johnson wants to see lawmakers create statewide protections for LGBTQ West Virginians. A bill to do so has been introduced in the statehouse for the last two decades.

The most recent proposal — known as the Fairness Act — died in committee this year without a single vote. At the same time, state Republican lawmakers joined a half dozen other states and passed a transgender athletes ban.

“It hurts to come from a place where we preach how much we love people and how much we care about people, and then we don’t see that in practice,” Johnson said.

This story is part of our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.

After graduating from West Virginia University last year, Johnson moved to Pittsburgh for an entry-level software development job and said they don’t see themselves moving back home with the current lack of protections.

“The thought of living somewhere that I could raise kids who one day would turn out to be queer, and the place wouldn’t accept them, you know, they wouldn’t be able to get health care, they will be turned away from even like schools and things like that, that alone is enough reason to move away from a place for me,” Johnson said.

Advocates started this year’s legislative session with the hope that this would be the year the Fairness Act passed.

During a 2020 gubernatorial debate, Republican Gov. Jim Justice said he supported the legislation. That moment was heralded in October by former Republican Senate President Mitch Carmichael as “a significant turning point in the political landscape of West Virginia as it relates to the LBGT community.”

When the state legislature convened in February, there was a noticeable lack of decisive change on the issue.

The Fairness Act didn’t make it onto the legislative calendar in the Republican-controlled statehouse.

However, the GOP lawmakers joined over 20 other states in considering a ban on transgender girls competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

This proposal passed and became law.

“I’m going to sign it proudly because I really believe that that is the right thing to do,” Justice said just days before signing the ban into law.

This dichotomy of priorities rankled Democrats in the statehouse and sparked protests and outrage among some young West Virginians, a group more progressively-minded on social issues.

“I’m sure to have transgender students,” said David Laub, a WVU graduate student who is studying to be an English teacher. “And it’s really frustrating to me, that I would have to sit by and just watch them not be able to do the things that they care about potentially in school — one of them being sports.”

He’s also a former high school athlete and said he doesn’t see the need to legislate whether or not transgender girls can play sports.

Laub acknowledged that he and his friends are all pretty liberal and among the minority in West Virginia, a state with Republican supermajorities in both the chambers of the legislature.

Political disagreements are a part of life but Laub said some of the legislation proposed this past year by Republican lawmakers went beyond politics.

“When it comes to matters of not being able to discuss systemic racism, and not being able to discuss sexism in the classroom, because they’re divisive concepts, or not being allowed to strike to get a fair wage, or transgender students in my classes not being able to just play sports,” said Laub. “That’s an eye-opener that is so far removed from my personal everyday reality.”

He went to WVU on a full-ride scholarship and said he owes everything in his professional life to the school and by extension the people of West Virginia.

Still, when he thinks about where he wants to live, it comes back to acceptance. David has close friends who are LGBTQ.

“I don’t want to put them in a situation where they feel kind of threatened just for existing or unable to exist in an authentic way without fear of like employment discrimination or other kinds of discrimination,” Laub said.

Almost every Republican — and a few Democrats — in the statehouse voted for the transgender sports ban. However, support is not unanimous.

“I think that anytime lawmakers do something that is a hindrance for young people or hindrance for minorities, it really does turn people away,” said Del. Joshua Higginbotham, R-Putnam, the lead sponsor of the Fairness Act this year and the only Republican delegate to vote against the transgender sports ban.

Joshua Higginbotham, R-Putnam, speaks in the statehouse earlier this year.

In the state Senate, several GOP members voted against the measure. Those who spoke said they agreed with the idea but feared the NCAA’s threat to move revenue-producing regional and national championships to other states without transgender sports bans.

“I don’t think that my colleagues were motivated out of bigotry,” said Higginbotham. “I don’t think they were motivated out of hatred. I think it was a lack of understanding. Most people, especially in the Republican Party, have not met an LGBT person. And I find that to be very disappointing.”

A 2017 national study from The Williams Institute found that West Virginia has the highest percentage of transgender teens with 1.04 percent. The national average is .73 percent.

Higginbotham was first elected to the statehouse in 2016 at the age of 19 and is now just 24. He said many of the people he went to high school with are in college, in jail, or have left the state.

“When I talk to a lot of the people who have left, they remind me that it’s the culture,” Higginbotham said.

He said state lawmakers should do “everything we can” to deregulate and pass tax reforms that will attract businesses.

”But ultimately, if we don’t change the image of our state, if we don’t change the stereotypes…people aren’t going to want to move here,” Higginbotham said. “And more young people will try to leave.”

When Generation Z and millennials become the largest voting bloc, Higginbotham said he expects a cultural shift in West Virginia and the nation.

A study last year from the Center for American Progress found that the 2024 election will likely be the first where these two younger generations outnumber the Baby Boomers.

He points to a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released earlier this year that found — for the first time — half of Republicans support gay marriage.

“Ten years ago, that would have been an impossibility,” Higginbotham said. “And I think that as we replace some of the Baby Boomers, some of the greatest generation, we’re gonna see these cultural changes.”

Two Young West Virginians On The Struggle To Stay

A year from now, Ryan McFarland will don a cap and gown and walk across the stage at the University of Charleston, located along the Kanawha River across from the statehouse’s shiny golden dome.

The Pleasants County native will then be confronted by two decisions: law school or graduate school? Stay in West Virginia or leave?

“I really do want to stay here,” McFarland said. “I’m really motivated to be looking specifically at schools in our state and finding a place to live in our state, whether that be at home or moving to Charleston.”

He wants to stay in West Virginia, but also says there are limited opportunities.

“For instance, if I wanted to go to law school, and I wanted to stay in West Virginia, we only have one singular law school,” he said in explaining his thinking about future plans. “The same way with a lot of specialized programs and graduate schools, you’d have to go out of state to find this thing.”

This story is part of our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.

If he does leave, he would leave his family behind, including some older relatives who are in poor health. He helps take care of them and calls it an “all hands on deck” moment for the family.

McFarland said he chose political science because he wants to be involved, to fix the problems facing West Virginia, to keep people here and to make the state better.

“I love our state,” McFarland said, “I know some things are bad, and some things need work. And I don’t want to pass that off to somebody else and hand the responsibility to other people and say ‘it’s your responsibility to fix it.’”

He’s interested in running for political office or working in state government someday.

“I would just encourage my peers to look long and hard at the trajectory of our state and realize that they do have the ability to choose the path forward for our state — whether that be through becoming a elected official, or just through voting,” he said. “All is not lost. We really have the keys to the future and we need to start working to make sure we fix the things that we don’t like in our state.”

McFarland would like to see lawmakers handle the opioid epidemic as a public health crisis as opposed to a criminal problem and said the state needs better mental health services.

He said he sees legislators stuck debating issues the younger generation had solved a long time ago like whether West Virginia needs state-wide protection for LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in employment and housing. These protections, known locally as the Fairness Act, didn’t pass during this year’s legislative session.

Sarah Christian is another young West Virginian who aspires to shape the state through politics. She lives in Tornado and graduated from West Virginia State in 2019 with a degree in political science.
She said she plans to run for state legislature in the next few years to help balance a “severe underrepresentation” of her generation.

She says she wants to improve West Virginia and sees a lot of potential in the state.

“I think it’s important that young people stay here and want to make a change here,” she said. “Because everybody does want to leave.”

Christian has been out of college for a couple years and said she’s struggled to find a job in her field.

“I feel like I’m in purgatory and I don’t know what to do next,” she said.

Christian said she thought it would be easier to find a job after college and is now debating whether it’s worth hanging around West Virginia for the right opportunity.

“If I found something that was interesting to me and I got it, I’d be out of here in a heartbeat,” she said.

West Virginia is the third-oldest state in the nation, according to 2019 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Christian said state lawmakers are investing in the state’s older generation when they should be investing in the youngest.

“What’s our state going to do when that generation isn’t here anymore, but all of the young people have left?” Christian asks. “When do you start investing in your growing generation, rather than your dying generation? When are they going to invest in us?”

Christian would like to see state lawmakers invest more money in job opportunities, affordable housing, and reliable broadband. Otherwise, she sees herself and many of her peers moving away.

“Why would we stay here when we could move to Charlotte or Pittsburgh, Columbus or Nashville and get a great paying job, a new apartment with partial utilities included and reliable internet access for under $700 a month?”

'There's No Room To Grow': Nursing Student Talks Leaving W.Va.

There are fewer West Virginians than there were a decade ago.

Since 2010, West Virginia’s population has decreased by 3.2% or almost 60,000 people, according to 2020 census data released last month.

To put that in context, it’s the same as if a giant, town-sized pothole swallowed up both Morgantown and Parkersburg.

West Virginia is also one of the oldest states in the nation, has one of the lowest birth rates and the highest death rate.

There’s a growing cohort of college-bound West Virginians who get a degree and get out. They’re moving away to find a future somewhere else while leaving family and friends behind.

But, there are also people staying who see West Virginia as a place to settle down and start a family.

The decision is not easy, but it is one that confronts many soon-to-be and recent graduates in the state.

This article is the first in our series “Plugging the Brain Drain” with stories of how young West Virginians are deciding whether or not to leave the state.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting spoke with NaBryia Palmer, a nursing student in Cabell County and Charleston native.

‘There’s No Room To Grow’: Nursing Student Talks Leaving W.Va.

NaBryia Palmer My take on it is, I love my state, I love my mountain mama, I really do. It’s where all my family is, everyone I know is here. But, I just honestly feel there’s no room to grow. I want to be able to see more and do more. And I feel West Virginia just doesn’t have anything to offer in that sense. I have just the rest of this semester, and then one more year in school left. And I don’t know, I don’t think I’m gonna stay here. I really want to move.

WVPB: Once you have your degree and you’ll have graduated, how are you thinking through that whole decision of where do I move?

Palmer: As soon as it gets close to graduation, I’m going to look at places hiring in potential states that I want to move to, see what they have to offer, look at pay, living conditions, and stuff like that. I like to travel alone sometimes. And so when I go out of state, and I visit different areas, I’m just like, “Oh, this would be nice. Oh, here in West Virginia, we don’t have that.” We don’t have a lot in West Virginia. And it’s always really good to go to states and see what they have to offer.

WVPB: What types of things have you seen traveling that you go, “oh, I’ve never seen this back home.”

Palmer: I’m a big food person. So, when it comes to restaurants and stuff, I get really excited when there’s a new restaurant I’ve never seen, I’ve never tried because there’s not one near my area. And so that gets pretty exciting. I also like to do a lot of shopping. So I’m really impatient, too. With living in West Virginia, we don’t have a lot of stores and as we speak, a lot of stores and stuff in the mall are closing. So we have less and less options. I’m constantly having to shop online and wait for it to come in. When, in other areas and other states, they have a broad variety of shopping malls and stores. And I just feel we’re just missing out on a lot of things.

WVPB: How do you balance, both you’re thinking about leaving and all your family is here in the state?

Palmer: Well, I’ve always been a pretty independent person. And my family knows that. So, of course, I love being around my family, I love seeing them. But they know that I do also like to be able to do things on my own. Because you know, I’m an adult, I like to be able to have my own. So with that, say I do move. I plan to always come back for holidays. I’m really big on holidays and spending time with family. And then to certain vacations, just be able to come back and see them whenever I really just want to.

WVPB: Does finding job opportunities play into that decision at all?

Palmer: Kind of yes and no. Since nurses are in demand, I feel like it won’t really be that hard, especially with COVID. I don’t think it’d be extremely difficult to find a nursing job that I would like.

WVPB: What do you think you’ll be thinking about when you get to that moment where you’re deciding whether or not to go someplace else or to look for a job in West Virginia?

Palmer: I don’t know. I’m real set on moving – like I’m real set on moving. I have, just I’ve honestly been looking at places even though I still have a while to graduate. I’ve been looking at places out of state and seeing affordability and neighborhoods and stuff like that.

WVPB: How detailed has it gotten, looking at neighborhoods?

Palmer: I’ve actually gotten to the process of looking at places that are for rent and where they’re located, how close they are to certain hospitals, commute, grocery stores, all that. I’ve gotten really into it, I’m real set on moving. I haven’t done that for a lot of states. I’ve only mostly done that for Texas. And I say that and I think it’s so funny because I’ve only been to Texas once, but I just enjoyed it so much.

WVPB: Does your family care or not want you to leave or want you to leave?

Palmer: They don’t want me to leave in the sense of, I’m going to be away. We’re a really close family. We are always used to being with each other. I think it’s funny. My mom, my cousin, my brother and my granny, they all live on the same hill, on the same block. So it’s like we’ve always been really close, always been. ‘Oh I’m about to walk up to Granny’s house or about to go see my brother,’ because it’s just literally a two-second walk up the hill. And so me being even here in Huntington away from Charleston is still really different because we’re always used to being there. So when I do move out of state, it’s going to be pretty drastic for our family since we’re not able to just take a quick little drive and see each other. It’s going to be some planning. So that’s going to take some getting used to for sure.

This story is the first in our series “Plugging the Brain Drain” with stories of how young West Virginians are deciding whether or not to leave the state.