Rural Communities Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. Will Distribute $40 Million In Grants To Rural Hospitals

$40 million appropriated by the legislature during the most recent special session is now available as grant funding for rural hospitals.

Gov. Jim Justice’s office announced the launch of the Rural Hospitals Grant Program in a press release Thursday, with a link to the application.

“Our rural hospitals are cornerstones of our communities in West Virginia,” Justice said in the release. “They support our families and neighbors in their toughest moments. Every West Virginian deserves access to quality healthcare, no matter where they live. This funding will help us make that a reality for everyone.”

The grant program has $40 million of appropriated funds to disburse. During the most recent special session of the legislature, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 2010, appropriating the surplus balance to the Governor’s Civil Contingent Fund to support rural hospitals.

Neither the application form, nor the press release make clear what constitutes a rural hospital, but the policies and procedures document for the grant program reads, “All rural hospitals in this state are eligible to apply.”

According to the application, grants must be used for capital improvement projects expected to be completed within 18 months of the date of the award.

Applications are due by November 15 and the governor’s office will disburse funds upon verification of eligibility.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Marshall Health.

WVU Professor Discusses Mental Health Resources For Rural Communities

Youth in rural communities are just as likely to exhibit risky behaviors as their urban and suburban peers, but may have less access to help.

Youth in rural communities are just as likely to exhibit risky behaviors as their urban and suburban peers but may have less access to help.

Kristine Ramsay-Seaner, West Virginia University assistant professor of counseling, spoke with reporter Chris Schulz about a coalition developing resources to change that nationwide.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Schulz: What constitutes risky behavior?

Ramsay-Seaner: Risky behavior can be such a broad term. When we typically think of risky behaviors, I do think our minds go to substance use. But what we are talking about, we’re trying to expand risky behaviors to behaviors that really do just put youth at risk. Whether that’s using pornography at a really early age or engaging in what’s known in the counseling field as non-suicidal self-injury, but we often refer to as self-harm. We even plan to talk about mental health. Mental health, in and of itself, is not a risky behavior. But there are risky behaviors that can go along with mental health, you know, whether that’s, again, the self-harm you may see going along with something like anxiety and depression, or even self-medicating.

Schulz: Can you tell me about the particular or unique need for addressing this issue in rural communities?

Ramsay-Seaner: Rural communities often struggle with being underserved. In a rural community, they may be sharing their 4-H agent with another county. They might even be sharing their school counselor with another school. And what that means is youth development professionals who work in rural communities, they see a lot, and they’re often asked to respond to a lot, but often due to the rurality, they may not be able to go to the same conferences, the same workshops. They may not be getting the same level of support, they may not even have the same amount of peers to consult with. So when we see these risky behaviors happening in rural communities, they often can just carry higher risk, in the sense of maybe this individual does need to be hospitalized, or needs to at least be evaluated for hospitalization, but the closest hospital could be a significant distance away. And I’m a youth development professional who wasn’t even trained in identifying suicidal behavior, or while I was trained to identify it, it’s very different to be trained and now to practice it.

So when we think about youth living in rural communities, they’re going to spend often, potentially more time online, because right, that’s where we can connect with people, that’s where we can reach out with people. But we may also just feel more isolated in our problems, because we may not feel like we have the same outlets to go to, that our urban peers have. And just for reference, nationally, we have just a significant mental health shortage. But in particular, we have a youth mental health provider shortage. All over the country, youth are existing on these wait lists just trying to get providers to see them. And there’s that’s no more relevant than in rural communities.

Schulz: Can you tell me a little bit about the collaboration between WVU and I believe it was Georgia and the Dakotas?

Ramsay-Seaner: Transparently, I moved to West Virginia University from South Dakota State University about a year ago. In terms of the University of Georgia, my colleague down there, whose name is Dr. Amanda Giordano, she’s also a counselor educator. And Dr. Giordano has done, actually, a lot of work in what we call process addictions or behavioral addictions. As opposed to substances, these are behaviors, think about like gambling. Dr. Giordano and I will bring the more mental health provider knowledge as two people who have been trained to be clinicians. And then in terms of South Dakota State University and North Dakota State University, they’re really bringing that adolescent piece, that extension piece, and that youth development professional piece. We’re putting together this knowledge of, I know what it means to train counselors, and you know what it means to either be a youth development professional or train a youth development professional. How can we all work together to make sure that this training meets the needs of a wide variety of providers who exist in these rural communities?

Schulz: Why is it so important to focus these resources on younger people?

Ramsay-Seaner: I think about what research shows is that early intervention prevention is really beneficial to long term prognosis. The earlier we can respond, the earlier we can provide services. Again, maybe we can even prevent some of these behaviors, or we can prevent them before they maybe increase in severity and concern. So if I can step in and sort of help you at 16, maybe I’m providing you with some of the skills and knowledge and some of the foundational pieces to help you so that when you’re 18 and you go away to college, maybe you are just more aware of binge drinking. Again. It’s not to say that an individual is not going to binge drink, but maybe now they understand even safer ways, if you are going to engage in some of these behaviors, how can I engage in them as safely as possible? That’s why we call it safety first, we really think about safety skills.

Schulz: What kind of resources are you developing? I know that you’ve discussed training, but what exactly are the resources that you’re developing?

Ramsay-Seaner: One of the things that we’re developing is a podcast, and Dr. Amanda Giordano is actually going to take the lead on that. The podcasts are going to be about 30-minute episodes, and they will focus on how to respond to some of these behaviors, with expert feedback included. So Dr. Giordano plans to interview a wide variety of individuals related to some of the things that we’re going to talk about in our training. One of the places she’s identified is she really hopes to talk to someone from the FBI related to sextortion.

And then the training that we will actually develop will involve sort of a foundational overview of everything. It’s two hours. Maybe it’s the only one that you get to go to, but it provides you maybe just a wide variety of foundational information. And then we’ll have a training that’s focused specifically more on what we’re calling health risks, and then one that we are focused more on digital risks. And then the final piece that we’re really excited about is developing a training that provides just more skills. So like, yes, now you’ve learned about this. How do you actually respond to this? What’s the right way to ask some of these questions? What are things that we want to avoid? How do we get more comfortable as the individuals who often are being asked to respond to things that we maybe even weren’t trained in?

Think about the responsibilities placed on youth development professionals are just increasing as society changes, right? I’m of the “Truth” generation. I really remember those anti-smoking campaigns. But we were talking about vaping, and now we’re talking about Zyns (nicotine pouches). So these things are changing so rapidly. How do we prepare you to respond to some of these things that you’ve maybe even never thought of before?

Schulz: If there’s anything that I haven’t given you a chance to discuss with me, or something that we have discussed that you’d like to highlight, please do so now.

Ramsay-Seaner: I think that it’s really important to provide more universal based trainings. And what I mean by that is a training that doesn’t target just a certain population. So we’re not just thinking about the kids who are already doing in-school suspension, or we’re not just thinking about the kids who maybe are involved in a juvenile drug court. We really want to think about all kids, and that’s why we really want to train a wide variety of youth development professionals and even potentially caregivers, because risky behaviors are not unique to one group.

If you use the internet, the reality is risky behaviors then exist, whether it’s even the fact that youth are often targeted for scams And I think you made this point of, so much of what we’re talking about is not just behaviors that youth could fall into, or youth could be at risk for. But the reality is, we as adults, I think, are sometimes prepared differently than we prepare youth, because we’re often caught off guard that youth are even experiencing some of these things. So we’re really excited to hopefully help professionals just feel like I feel a little bit more confident in doing this job. I feel a little bit more confident in serving the youth that I’m serving in my community.

Rural Appalachia Community Coalition Building Creates Positive Change

A book from an academic researcher covering rural Appalachia shows how marginalized rural communities can create change by forming grassroots coalitions.

In her soon to be published book, “Hauled Away, How Rural Appalachians Leverage Place in the Face of Extraction,” WVU assistant professor of English Erin Brock Carlson balances the history of extractive industries like coal with combating a rural town’s cultural, economic and intellectual extraction.

“The mission of all of this is really that rural communities, especially in Appalachia, are painted in very one dimensional, oftentimes stereotypical life,” Carlson said. “I’m really committed to honoring the expertise of people that live in rural places, because they oftentimes aren’t viewed as experts of their own experience. This project is all about casting those people as experts in demonstrating that rural communities are capable of solving their own problems.”

In her book, Carlson showcases hometown problem solvers. For example, in a former coal hub, organizers involved the cash poor and houseless in economic development. In a town that suspected a local arms manufacturer had polluted its air and water, an environmental activist engaged residents of a Black neighborhood close to the manufacturing facility, as well as elderly white residents who valued the manufacturer’s importance to the local economy.

And in a rural area with little access to broadband, an organizer tried to build an internet network owned by the community, with support from youth.

“The project really shows how going into a space thinking you have one project and really listening to community members to see what are the most pressing needs, and then adapting based on that, is a way to sort of address these other issues, but in a way that meets community needs directly,” she said.

Carlson said successful coalitions must bring those most marginalized, the poor, elderly, young, disabled, people of color, migrant workers and more into the public conversation.

“They are the ones that are most directly impacted or most deeply impacted by these problems,” she said. “When they’re not represented, their needs aren’t heard.”

Carlson said the expertise community members possess is often overlooked in favor of technical insights from lawyers or engineers.

The “Hauled Away” manuscript is expected to be completed in 2025.

CDC Begins Appalachian Fact Finding Mission In West Virginia

Public and private health care leaders and community stakeholders gathered at the Cabell Huntington Health Department on Tuesday to meet with leaders from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The session was intended to showcase what’s working locally and address the challenges of rural health care delivery.

Public and private health care leaders and community stakeholders gathered at the Cabell Huntington Health Department on Tuesday to meet with leaders from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The session was intended to showcase what’s working locally and to address the challenges of rural health care delivery.

CDC Health Care visit the Cabell-Huntington Health Department.

***Randy Yohe/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting***

Dr. Leslie Dauphin, CDC Director of Public Health Infrastructure, said this mission started here after learning about the successes of local community based partnerships.

“This was recommended as a place to start because of their accredited health departments,” Dauphin said. “That, and the way that the public-private partnerships work together with the health system to protect people.”

Dauphin said that due to a federal flexible funding program, the Cabell-Huntington Health Department has been able to hire staff. She said her concern was what will they do when that funding runs out.

“In order to get the work done to protect the health of communities, we must have a sustained growth,” Dauphin said. “We know that with their workforce, we’re here to learn what’s working, how they’re using the funding that they’ve received, to hire, recruit, retain a workforce, and what we can do to help them sustain.”

Cabell-Huntington Health Department CEO Dr. Michael Kilkenny said the CDC infrastructure director needed to know the state’s continuing broadband access challenges relate directly to health care.

“Telemedicine is showing a growing importance, Kilkenny said.” One of the ways to break down some of the transportation difficulties that we hear time and time again from the public is being able to come into your living room no matter where you’re at.”

Dauphin said the CDC is here to learn more about infrastructure, workforce issues, community partnerships and data modernization. She said the results must be federal health care policies made to bring the most benefits to those with the greatest need.

WVU Researcher Investigates ‘Biofilms’ In Water Pipes

For most of us, we turn on the water faucet and clean water comes out. But we may not realize the water pipes that deliver the water to our homes have a micro slime inside them.

WVU professor and researcher Emily Garner has a grant from the National Science Foundation to look into micro-organisms in water systems. She spoke with News Director Eric Douglas to explain what she is finding.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: First off, introduce yourself and explain who you are.

Garner: My name is Emily Garner. I’m an assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at West Virginia University. I’ve been in that position for four years and I study the role of microorganisms and engineered systems for the treatment and transport of drinking water and wastewater.

Douglas: Let’s talk for just a second about what it takes to deliver water from the treatment plant to your house.

Garner: When drinking water leaves the treatment plant, it still has a really long journey to travel before it arrives at your home or the businesses in your community. It can take days or even weeks for the water to make that journey. It’s one of the biggest jobs that our water utilities have – is making sure that that water stays high quality and safe for people to drink from the time it leaves the treatment plant to the time when it arrives at people’s homes. Even a relatively small community might have hundreds of miles of pipe that are buried underground.

Douglas: That’s, that’s actually kind of stunning. I would never have thought it would be in the system that long. Is it going to a holding tank somewhere?

Garner: Certainly tanks are really prevalent throughout distribution systems, especially in West Virginia, where we’ve got a lot of hills. They can help us overcome some of the elevation differences that might exist throughout a community. Those things are also really important for holding water so the treatment plant can treat the same amount of water throughout the day and night and not need to kind of adjust to the fact that everyone wakes up at 6am and takes a shower. But water doesn’t usually sit in those tanks for days or weeks at a time. It’s just that when water has to travel through hundreds of miles of pipe, it can take a really long time. That time just starts to add up.

Douglas: Explain to me what biofilms are within the water distribution system.

Garner: It’s very normal in any aquatic environment. If you’ve gone down to the river or the stream, you might see kind of a film that forms on the surface of rocks. That’s exactly what we’re talking about in drinking water. But of course, the water is much cleaner. When that water leaves the treatment plant, the utility has dosed some sort of chlorine disinfectant to kill harmful microorganisms. But there’s lots of research out there that shows that there still might be some microorganisms present in that water. Most of those are going to be harmless, they’re not going to make people sick but as that water flows over the surface of pipes continuously, it can lead to formation of those biofilms.

We care about those for a number of different reasons. When they accumulate in great enough quantities, they can affect water quality in different ways like compounds that affect taste and odor. They could slough off into the water and lead to discoloration events. Really importantly, they can also create environments where harmful bacteria do get into the system. While these biofilms are totally normal, in small quantities, it is really important to have strategies to control them and to make sure they don’t get out of hand and start to accumulate in ways that can affect water quality.

Douglas: You’re not talking like big green slimy build up inside of a water pipe. This is a microscopic level, typically.

Garner: We’re talking about these really, really thin biofilms. But when they accumulate on the inside of many, many miles of pipe, it can still be something that can affect water quality.

Douglas: In West Virginia, especially in the rural areas, some of the smaller communities, there’s some aging infrastructure, there’s aging water systems. So what do we do about some of that? Is that a growing problem?

Garner: Certainly our infrastructure is aging across the country, but certainly in a lot of parts of West Virginia. I think it’s important to be really concerned about the state of that buried infrastructure that we can’t see that was maybe put in the ground 50, 60 plus years ago. And so that’s absolutely an important thing to be concerned with, and making sure that we can minimize some of these impacts to water quality.

Douglas: Is chlorine what we’re using and it just works best beyond anything?

Garner: It’s a balancing act. Chlorine is really, really important. You know, it wasn’t much more than 100 years ago that we had diseases like cholera that were affecting huge swaths of the population because we weren’t able to disinfect our water before we drank it. So chlorine is absolutely essential, making sure we can disinfect that water is absolutely essential.

But today, we do know that it can react with other compounds in water, like organic matter, to create compounds known as disinfection byproducts. A lot of these disinfection byproducts are possible carcinogens. And so we certainly want to minimize how prevalent those are in our water. It’s a really big balancing act for water utilities to deal with: how do they make sure there’s enough chlorine present in our water to kill microorganisms, while making sure that they don’t contribute to the propagation of these disinfection byproducts? And that’s one of the reasons we really care about control of biofilms. Because organic matter can accumulate in those biofilms — microorganisms are organic, they create organic compounds, to help them kind of stick to the walls of the pipe. And so controlling biofilms are also important to help make that balancing act a little bit easier.

Douglas: One of the big issues facing the water community is people who can work in these systems, who have a lot of these water facilities, are aging out or they’re retiring. Talk to me a little bit about what you’re doing to help get people who can work in the water systems?

Garner: This grant from the National Science Foundation that is supporting a lot of my work, it has two major goals. One is research, and the other is education. That education includes things like, I plan to work with a lot of undergraduate and graduate students so they will come out of this better trained to engineer good systems, designing good systems that can address some of these challenges that we’re talking about.

But the other part of my education component associated with this grant is through K through 12 outreach. My goal is to help K through 12 students better understand what opportunities they might have for careers in the water sector. I want them to, you know, decide whether or not they want to pursue careers in that field, how important water workers in our state are for the health of our communities.

Douglas: What haven’t we talked about?

Garner: I did want to mention that for this National Science Foundation project, one of our main goals for this research is to better integrate our understanding of the microbiology of drinking water systems with modeling of flow patterns present in drinking water distribution systems. With lots of other aquatic environments, we know that the forces that are exerted by flowing water can impact how biofilms grow, but we don’t really have a thorough understanding of how flow impacts what happens to microorganisms in drinking water distribution systems. And part of why this is so important, and interesting to my research team, is that one of our key hypotheses driving this research is that we think these conditions will be very different in rural areas where it can take many, many miles of pipe to reach even a relatively few number of homes in a small community compared to much more densely populated urban areas where we’ve got a lot more data on this subject.

That’s what one of our goals is, to better understand what some of the challenges that might exist to integrating flow modeling of distribution systems with understanding microbiology especially in rural communities.

AmeriCorps Teams Head To W.Va. To Help With Projects

Several West Virginia towns will get assistance from five new AmeriCorps teams for projects that include tax preparation, park and river cleanups, and rural infrastructure upgrades.

The AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps teams will go to Fairmont, Thomas, Mullens, Gandeeville and Elkview, U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito announced.

“The projects will support West Virginians in a variety of ways, from increasing financial literacy to creating new opportunities for outdoor recreation and more,” Manchin said.

Capito said the projects will give the communities a boost.

“West Virginians understand the value of community service, and are always first in line to help fellow residents in times of need,” she said.

The programs include Tygart Valley United Way in Fairmont for assistance with tax preparation in several counties; Friends of Blackwater in Thomas for help with signage, trails and planting; Rural Appalachian Improvement League in Mullens for aid with park upgrades; Roane County Commission in Gandeeville for assistance with maintenance and upkeep at Camp Sheppard; and Elk River Trail Foundation in Elkview for help with trail and river cleanup and other maintenance.