In a public hearing on House Bill 4011, more than two dozen people spoke against what’s known as the “anti-stereotyping act.” Two people voiced support.
The bill requires schools to publicly post training and instruction materials related to issues like nondiscrimination, race and sex. The bill also forbids schools from embracing stereotypes, and specifies that individuals should not be blamed, “for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, sex, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.”
Among those against the measure, historian Kaylen Barker said the bill whitewashes history.
“History is supposed to make us feel uncomfortable, supposed to elicit critical thinking and better understand the world we live in,” Barker said.
Kathy Ferguson fears the bill sends the state spiraling backwards.
“Our lack of diversity in business, economy and now education (are a) threat to the critical fabric of West Virginia,” she said.
5th grader Sage Blymer worried about her teacher getting in trouble or fired for teaching the history she loves to learn.
“Like how we treated people of color, women, LGBTQ people,” Blymer said, “I can feel sad about it but that doesn’t make me feel bad about who I am.”
Barry Holstein supports the bill. He said some West Virginia teachers’ lesson plans include radical recommendations from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Some materials teach students that people are divided into two groups, the oppressors and the oppressed, and that division occurs because of the color of one’s skin. ” he said.
The bill’s sponsor, Del. Chris Pritt, R-Kanawha, says HB 4011 allows the free teaching of history, but negates the radical ideas coming out of our universities.
“The idea that certain individuals are superior and certain individuals are inferior. We shouldn’t be teaching that in our schools, we need to be teaching equality,” he said.
The bill now goes to the House Judiciary committee.
Debra Corbett always loved education. Coming from a family of educators, it was something she said she always wanted to do. Her mother, aunts and uncles were all teachers.
“I heard a lot about, when the family got together, about school, about kids,” Corbett said. “It made me want to be in education … to somehow support parents and make a difference in student lives.”
Corbett retired this year after 31 years as principal of Ranson Elementary School in Ranson, Jefferson County. Prior to that, she was an elementary school teacher. She said her biggest takeaways in her career are the importance of compassion, to be gentle, to show support to teachers and students and help them see they can succeed.
As Corbett leaves her long career in education, teachers, parents, staff and students across West Virginia begin a new school year in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic.
Nine West Virginia counties started the new school year off virtually this week. The other 46 counties are offering in-person, virtual and hybrid schooling for, at least, the first week of school. That could change next weekend.
Every Saturday night, state officials will update a color-coded map found on the West Virginia Department of Education’s website. The map indicates what schooling options will exist in each county week-by-week. This is how West Virginia is tackling school this year in the face of the coronavirus – taking it one week at a time.
Corbett’s advice to teachers during this turbulent time is to offer comfort to students and be kind to themselves.
“Just take a deep breath,” she said. “We can’t get everything accomplished in one day. It’s just going to take some time to go through this pandemic time and do the best that we can.”
But another global event has rattled the world this year – a reckoning in racial justice in the United States. People across the country and the world have taken to the streets to protest the treatment of Black people by police. Marches and rallies have been held in recent months demanding change following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police.
Corbett, who is Black, completed kindergarten through sixth grade when schools were racially segregated.
Ranson Elementary School, Corbett said, is a culturally diverse school with a diverse demographic of students. She said many of her students are Black or English Language Learners (ELL). She said she has tried hard to create a safe environment for students at school.
“Well, being a Black administrator, it has just opened up my eyes even more,” she said. “With everything going on at this time, I do think of the kids and what they’re seeing on TV, and even what they’re hearing and what they’re experiencing in their family and in their homes, too … [I want] to make sure that they can come to [school] and that they know that they’re in a safe environment, and that they know that someone is there to just listen to them.”
She said it’s more important than ever for teachers to use education to help bridge the gap created by systemic racism.
“Systemic racism – those inherited biases and prejudices of different policies and practices, you know, that have just been handed down, generation to generation – it just doesn’t go away overnight,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important for the teachers to expose the students [to] all types of cultures in their lessons and their reading and in class. And I think that’s one way that we can come together.”
Credit Jefferson County Schools
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Debra Corbett helps students get their breakfast during a summer program in July 2018 called Rising Rockets at Ranson Elementary School.
Corbett grew up in Jefferson County and attended Jefferson County Schools, graduating with the last class from Charles Town High School in 1972. Corbett earned her bachelor’s degree from Fairmont State University and began her teaching career at South Jefferson Elementary School in 1976 before teaching overseas for several years.
Corbett earned her master’s degree from the University of Toledo before returning to West Virginia and teaching at Wright Denny Intermediate School. In 1989, Corbett left Wright Denny and was named principal of Ranson Elementary School.
“This experience has truly made me a better person,” she said. “And I will miss it after 39 years with Jefferson County Schools.”
By now it’s become a familiar scene: Marchers fill the streets with placards proclaiming “Black Lives Matter,” and chants fill the air as the demonstrators recite the names of those lost.
But there’s something different about some of these protests around the Ohio Valley in the past week. They’re not just happening in the larger cities such as Louisville, Lexington, Columbus and Cincinnati. Smaller college towns such asAthens, Ohio, andMorgantown, West Virginia, have seen marches. Communities in Kentucky farmland and the heart of Appalachian coal country, such as Hazard and Harlan, Kentucky, have seen people protesting against racial injustice and police violence.
“Because prejudice here is as old as our dialect here for some people, and it’s inherited,” Bree Carr said. The 18-year-old from Harlan, Kentucky, said she protested to be an ally for people of color so they will know they have support. “There are so many other people behind them that support you, and hear you, and want to see you.”
Bowling Green, Kentucky, has seenconsecutive days of protest, drawing up to a thousand people at one event. Civil Rights activist Charles Neblett sang with theFreedom Singers in the 1960s to fight segregation. Neblett said he was thirteen when Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. He told protesters at the Warren County Justice Center that prejudice and injustice have persisted for too long.
“When is it gonna stop? I’m tired. And more people got to step up and do this thing,” he said.
The protests in smaller cities and towns have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But they have not been without confrontation. A protestplanned for Charleston, West Virginia, was postponed after organizers said they received threats, although a smaller group went ahead with a demonstration. Carr said she received threats over the demonstrations in Harlan, and in western Kentucky marchers have faced assaults.
A video from a march on June 2 in Murray, Kentucky, showed a white motorist using pepper spray on marchers as he drove by. The man, who was from Paducah, Kentucky, was arrested. Another white man was later arrested for pointing a weapon at demonstrators in Murray.
Credit Courtesy Audrey Elizabeth Kellett
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A Facebook video shows a man assaulting marchers in Murray, KY, with chemical spray.
The marchers in Murray invoked the names of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, both killed by police. But another issue is animating the protests here as well. Demonstrators are calling for the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee next to the Calloway County courthouse, spurred by anopen letter issued by a football coach at the local university.
As in other places, the protests here are reviving older debates about statues and memorials dedicated to the Confederacy. Louisville officials on Mondayremoved the controversial equestrian statue of John B. Castleman, a Confederate officer, something city leaders had proposed years ago.
It remains to be seen if the same will happen in small towns like Murray. On Monday, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshearcalled for Murray’s statue to come down after being asked a question about it during a press conference.
The calls to remove Confederate memorials in rural communities are also part of a larger theme of confronting a history and stigma of racism in some smaller towns.
In Marshall County, Kentucky, where the population is nearly 98 percent white, more than a hundred people marched on Friday around the courthouse square. Only a few months earlier the county’s judge-executive had allowed a confederate battle flag to fly at the courthouse before a backlashforced its removal.
Credit Liam Niemeyer / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
A protest in Marshall Co., KY, where a confederate flag recently flew over the county courthouse.
Malique Humphries, a 23-year-old black man from neighboring county, says he was afraid to protest in Marshall County after being in other protests because of the county’s perceived racist reputation.
“I have a six-year-old daughter,” he said, “and I felt uncomfortable to come here, you understand that?”
Yet he came anyway to join other Marshall County residents to start a larger conversion about racial injustice, police accountability, and loving one another.
“We should feel comfortable anywhere we want to go, we should be allowed to go anywhere we want to go, it shouldn’t matter if the majority is white or not, we should feel comfortable anywhere on this earth.”
Humphries said he hopes protests like these will start to bring change where it is needed, at the local level.
Credit Claudia Cisneros / WOUB
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WOUB
Demonstrators in Athens, Ohio.
ReSource reporters Sydney Boles, Brittany Patterson, Aaron Payne, and Becca Schimmel contributed material for this story.
Between 400-500 people attended a Black Lives Matter rally Sunday at the State Capitol in Charleston. The event was peaceful, with no violence reported.
The rally was organized by several groups, including Call to Action for Racial Equality. It was spearheaded by two young women of color who grew up in Kanawha County, Gabrielle Chapman, executive director for the Call to Action for Racial Equality, or CARE, and by Takeiya Smith, the student president of Black Lives Matter at West Virginia State University.
“To the black women who have been fighting, are fighting, and continue the fight for justice, we share so much love to each other,” Smith said at the rally. “We know there is no black knight in shining armor coming to save us. We must uplift our place and position in feminism by ourselves.”
Credit Kara Lofton/ WVPB
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Organizers of the event, Gabrielle Chapman, executive director for the Call to Action for Racial Equality, or CARE, and by Takeiya Smith, the student president of Black Lives Matter at West Virginia State University.
All of the speeches at the rally were given by women, including by Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer, a resident of Alderson.
“So for those of you who don’t understand what Black Lives Matters means, it means we are equal and our lives mean just as much as everybody else’s,” said Beisemeyer, the daughter of Harry Belafonte, the singer and Civil Rights Activist from the 1960s. She and the other speakers urged the crowd not to become complacent, and to fight for racial justice.
