Less than three percent of people raised in state care nationwide obtain a college degree. One West Virginia University (WVU) Newman Civic Fellow aims to change that statistic.
Less than three percent of people raised in state care nationwide obtain a college degree. One West Virginia University (WVU) Newman Civic Fellow aims to change that statistic.
Heidi Crum grew up in wardships, or as some know it, foster care. As an infant, she was removed from her biological parents, placed in state care and transferred across many states.
“When you’re raised in wardship, the people of influence are social workers, caseworkers, people in law enforcement,” Crum said. “As a little girl, that’s who I aspired to become. I was deeply ashamed when I wasn’t able to finish high school because of the way that I was discharged from the system. So I always knew that I aspired towards something serving other people or giving back.”
She describes her education as a journey, not a destination. She aged out of wardship at 15 years old and sought her GED as a personal goal.
“By the time I learned that less than three percent of people like me earn a college degree, I was frustrated enough, determined enough and convinced enough from personal experience that was accurate, that I wanted to get my degree,” Crum said.
Crum is attending WVU remotely from Missouri and will graduate in May of this year with her master’s degree in Higher Education Administration. She will begin doctoral work this fall in the same program.
When discussing state care, Crum said language is important. For her, terms like “foster care” paint an incorrectly comfortable portrait of the reality of day-to-day life as a ward of any state.
“As someone raised since infancy in wardship, my story has continually been written for me by other people,” Crum said. “There’s something very valuable about claiming ownership back of my voice, my story. And so the terminology, foster care, from my perspective, erases entire subpopulations because I was not only in foster care and foster care as a placement outcome after I had been removed from traumatic circumstances, the removal itself is traumatic, and the replacement is traumatic.”
According to the Pew Research Center, young adults without a permanent family fare far worse than other youth.
More than one in five end up homeless after age 18, while one in four become involved in the justice system within two years of leaving foster care. Fifty-eight percent of foster youth will graduate high school by age 19, compared to 87 percent of all 19-year-olds.
For her Newman Civic Project, Crum plans to expand her work with group homes, transitional living facilities and similar placement spaces.
“It’s just quite like WVU to continue to show up, to meet me where I am, and to validate and recognize that I am only one face and one voice, of people like me,” Crum said. “So it’s a tremendous honor. And I feel a little bit like an ambassador to sort of introduce two different worlds together. And that’s what I hope that I do very well.”
Crum completed her Regents Bachelor of Arts degree through the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences in 2021 with an emphasis on human services.
While she is a non-traditional student, attending virtually, Crum said WVU’s culture of support has helped inspire her to help others find safe spaces through education.
“But the crux of the issue at the heart of the matter was WVU simply allowing me to introduce myself, and to stand in the space that I was in, and for them to meet me where I was, in every single context, that has been the thesis,” Crum said.
Crum is one of 154 civic leaders from 38 states, Washington, D.C. and Mexico that Campus Compact has named to the 2023-2024 Newman Civic Fellows. She aims to close the gap between congregant facilities and colleges and universities, especially at regional and local levels.
Gov. Jim Justice announced in a virtual press briefing Friday that outbreaks at West Virginia’s primary and secondary schools are defined as two or more cases that are connected to each other.
The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources and the Department of Education are partnering to update the list daily.
West Virginia Superintendent of Schools Clayton Burch said he will be meeting everyday with DHHR to discuss the list.
“We will every day post the outbreaks that are active, the schools, the number of cases,” Burch said, “And we’re even going to post if that outbreak led to a school going to remote learning.”
Burch also noted the Department of Education is hoping to hire more school nurses. He said, right now, there are 450 school nurses employed in the state. New funding from the West Virginia Legislature could help hire more, although Burch did not specify how many new nurses would be hired.
The West Virginia Department of Education announced that eight counties will be remote-learning only for the week of Sept. 13. State officials rolled out updated data Saturday, Sept. 12 at 5 p.m.
Monongalia, Boone, Fayette, Kanawha, Logan, Mingo, Monroe and Putnam counties will not be open for in-person instruction this week.
The COVID-19 Data Review Panel has determined that Calhoun County will move from orange to yellow on the WVDE School Alert System Map. Calhoun County has had 13 cases which are linked and contained over the previous 14 days with no further evidence of community spread, according to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
Red (Substantial Community Transmission): Remote-only learning mode. No extracurricular competitions or practices are permitted. Staff may report to their schools, as determined by the county. Essential support services, including special education and meals, will continue. Counties in red include: Monongalia.
Orange (Heightened Community Transmission): Remote-only learning mode. Extracurricular practices may occur, however, competitions may not. Staff may report to their schools, as determined by the county. Essential support services, including special education and meals, will continue. Counties in orange include: Boone, Fayette, Kanawha, Logan, Mingo, Monroe and Putnam.
Yellow (Increased Community Transmission): School may be held for in-person instruction. Extracurricular practices and competitions may occur. Health and safety precautions include, at a minimum, face coverings at all times for grades six and above. Please refer to your county for specific face covering requirements. Counties in yellow include: Berkeley, Brooke, Cabell, Calhoun, Clay, Doddridge, Grant, Greenbrier, Hancock, Harrison, Jackson, Jefferson, Lincoln, McDowell, Mercer, Ohio, Pocahontas, Raleigh, Roane, Summers, Taylor, Tucker, Upshur, and Wayne.
Green (Minimal Community Transmission): School may be held for in-person instruction. Extracurricular practices and competitions may occur. Health and safety precautions include, at a minimum, face coverings in grades three and above when students are outside of core groups and in congregant settings and on school buses. Please refer to your county for specific face covering requirements. Counties in green include: Barbour, Braxton, Gilmer, Hardy, Hampshire, Lewis, Marion, Marshall, Mason, Mineral, Morgan, Nicholas, Pendleton, Pleasants, Preston, Randolph, Ritchie, Tyler, Webster, Wetzel, Wood, Wirt and Wyoming.
All schools, both public and private, are expected to adhere to the WVDE’s re-entry map to guide in-person instruction and extracurricular activities.
Updates to the map will be announced each Saturday at 5 p.m. and will be in effect until the following Saturday at the same time, according to the WVDE. The only exception would be if a county turns red during the week.
If this happens, the change would be made immediately to the map, according to the WVDE, and all in-person instruction and extracurricular and athletic activities would be suspended.
As of Saturday morning, the West Virginia DHHR reports 12,521 total cases of the virus and 265 deaths. 3,031 cases are considered active.
This year Central Catholic High School in Ohio County is celebrating roots that stretch 150 years back. The school has weathered many changes since the end of the Civil War. Student populations have swelled and declined along with the population of the Northern Panhandle. Today the school is looking to the future. Alums and foundations have made investments in new technologically infused learning environments, changing the shape of classrooms, and school officials hope, students’ minds.
Central Catholic High School in east Wheeling looks like many schools do from the outside: classic brick and mortar. But the infrastructure is undergoing major renovations and that, school principal Becky Sancomb says, is turning the school inside out.
“We want to provide an environment in which we can bring the outside world in,” Sancomb said.
Principal Sancomb started in 2012, and her vision of bringing the outside in is pretty literal.
Knee Surgery in a TEAL Lab
I stepped into Wilma Beaver’s anatomy class which was observing a live knee-replacement surgery in the Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) lab.
About 25 students sat along long tables that broke them into groups of 5 (each table butted up against the wall where a larger monitor hung). But during the anatomy class everyone was facing the end of the long room where a large screen displayed a scene in an operating room.
Senior Nicole Lewis described how it felt to watch the doctor saw off the kneecap of the patient as the doctor described what he was doing, the tools he was using, and the people around who helped the throughout surgery. Nicole explained that during the surgery they could ask questions through Twitter.
“I don’t think I could [be a surgeon], but I think it’s pretty interesting to watch,” Lewis said.
The lab was inspired by those developed in the early 2000s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“The TEAL lab today is I guess what you want to call fully operational,” said Deb Warmuth the Instructional Technology Coordinator at Central Catholic. “The TEAL lab today is a great collaborative learning space for students.”
A TEAL Initiative
School leaders say they knew that it would take more than a good lab to really move past the 1950-style classrooms that were in place, so the TEAL lab grew into the school’s TEAL initiative. All-new wiring, wifi access in each classroom, and bandwidth to support everyone on their individual wireless devices are among the infrastructural changes to support the initiative.
The school’s president, Larry Bandi explains that the school is now able to embrace new worlds of curriculum, with all the online, software and hardware components that exist today from 3-D printers to architectural designing and rendering software, to a new robotics lab.
“I put together a needs assessment of what it was going to take to put us in a position to have all of this renovation work and technology brought into the school,” Bandi said.
The TEAL lab itself had a $400,000 price tag. Renovating the rest of the school required a lot more money. Quietly campaigning with alum and area foundations Bandi has managed to raise almost an additional $2 million. About 30 classrooms have all needed to be rewired and renovated (at $32,000 each).
“It’s not just about technology,” Bandi said, “it’s about tools that allow us to mold critical thinkers.”
Today there are about 270 students at the school. Bandi says it costs $9,600/year to educate each student. Endowments and parish support reduces the cost of tuition which next year is calculated to be $6,110. School officials report that about 41 percent of students receive some sort of additional financial aid.
Bandi is hoping to procure an additional 1.4 million to complete renovations.
Boredom can mean trouble and bad health for children in rural America. In communities where resources are few, schools face the extra challenge of keeping students active, safe and healthy. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports from McDowell County, West Virginia, on efforts there to improve life for students and to address the teacher shortage.
JOHN TULENKO: Day and night, coal trains still rumble through McDowell County, West Virginia.
The mines in this southernmost part of the state once employed some 20,000 workers. And back then, the county seat of Welch was called Little New York. Today, most of those jobs and most of those people are gone. McDowell County is the poorest in the state, with the highest rates of heart disease, suicide and drug overdose in all of West Virginia.
For public schools here, finding a way to keep the county’s roughly 3,500 students from becoming any one of those statistics is the number one priority.
Flo McGuire is principal at Southside Elementary.
FLORISHA MCGUIRE, Principal, Southside K-8 School: I grew up here. Obviously, we’re a very rural area. So I really understand what it means to be a kid bored out of your mind because there is nothing to do here.
JOHN TULENKO: Having little to do has affected children and teenagers in many ways.
FLORISHA MCGUIRE: We are the highest ranking in terms of type 2 diabetes, weight. I mean, we are the poster child for bad health.
JOHN TULENKO: For McGuire, the solution is for schools to fill the void with new programs that reach kids in class, after school, and even in the home.
FLORISHA MCGUIRE: Statistics tell us and research tells us, when we have students that are involved in activities, they’re less likely to get involved in drugs, and less likely to get involved in those negative personal habits.
JOHN TULENKO: While schools do offer team sports, participation is limited.
The after-school program offers mostly homework help. And weekends are void of any organized activities. All that could change through a new effort called Reconnecting McDowell, a partnership among state agencies, community organizations, the teachers union and others, groups that once worked separately, all coming together to improve opportunities for students.
FLORISHA MCGUIRE: Our vision is to be the hub, I guess, of the community. I want to offer dance class, tae kwon do, music, art. Anything that we can get in here to enrich, I guess, their educational experience, we want to.
JOHN TULENKO: One early accomplishment? A West Virginia University-led effort to revamp phys-ed classes across the district. And schools are encouraging more parents to exercise, through countywide celebrations like this one.
FLORISHA MCGUIRE: Again, if you look at our area, there is nowhere to go to begin those habits. Those habits will begin with the kids that we have here.
GREG CRUEY, Teacher, Southside K-8 School: And if we get the community center open, if we get the exercise equipment that is there, the chances are life gets better for everyone in ways that we don’t expect.
JOHN TULENKO: Greg Cruey heads the local teachers union, part of the larger American Federation of Teachers. It spearheaded the partnership here and wants it to also provide social services, like a school-based health clinic and counseling for students.
GREG CRUEY: When a kid comes to school and the main thing they think about is the instability that they have at home, they come to school to eat, they come to school to feel safe, but learning arithmetic is not a big priority for them.
JOHN TULENKO: Academic performance that’s at the bottom of West Virginia is another major challenge the partnership faces. And it’s not happening just because students are distracted by bigger things. Another likely cause is a shortage of qualified teachers.
Two months into the school year, Mount View High School still had eight vacancies to fill.
Debra Hall is the principal.
DEBRA HALL, Principal, Mount View High School: And they’re not just in fine arts or P.E. or something like that. They’re in math, they’re in science, they’re in English, and it’s every year.
JOHN TULENKO: To fill the gaps, the district relies on long-term substitutes like Elvis Blankenship, whose offer to teach eighth grade honors biology came the night before school started in September.
Are you certified to teach science?
ELVIS BLANKENSHIP, Teacher, Mount View High School: I do not have my science part of — as far a teacher. But I have worked in hospital settings. My wife is a nurse, so what I don’t understand about it, she will actually fill me in with what I need to know about it.
JOHN TULENKO: We were in your class. And I noticed that the students seemed to be spending a lot of time with the textbook. How much do you rely on the textbook?
ELVIS BLANKENSHIP: Actually, I get my outline from the textbook. I’m always afraid that I’m going to be saying something wrong. I don’t want to be — get them so messed up than what they could be.
DEBRA HALL: You know, these long-term subs that we have, they’re dedicated. They know that students need them. They work really hard. But I think that our students deserve qualified, certified, content area teachers.
JOHN TULENKO: But getting them to come here won’t be easy.
DEBRA HALL: It’s a county wide concern. Part of that problem is the roads, the housing. I drive on Route 52. It’s curvy. It’s dangerous. You ride on it with big coal trucks.
JOHN TULENKO: And nearly everyone commutes, because, here, there are few good places to live.
Solutions to deep-seated problems like this one are hard to come by, but the Reconnecting McDowell partnership is trying. It recently purchased this abandoned building, which it plans to turn into badly needed high-quality housing for teachers, another example of its strategy to improve schools from the outside in.
GREG CRUEY: And unless we can change the environment so that teachers want to stay, unless we can change the environment so parents have a higher level of education and can help their kids, unless we can change the environment so that kids that show up are more ready and able to learn, no amount of good pedagogy is going to, by itself, fix our problem with test scores.
JOHN TULENKO: The challenge is immense, but vital to face. Education may be the best route students have to escape the dismal statistics here.
In McDowell County, West Virginia, I’m John Tulenko, reporting for the NewsHour.
Last week a violent altercation erupted between students at Morgantown High School that ended with one student in a hospital, with multiple stab wounds to the arms and chest. A police officer in the school, known as a Prevention Resource Officer, administered emergency first aid and prevented major blood loss. Few know about the Prevention Resource Officer program and the role these officers play throughout schools in West Virginia.
‘Security’ to ‘Prevention‘
Bonnie Bevers, the West Virginia state Prevention Resource Officer coordinator, explains that the Prevention Resource Officer program began in 1998 in Hurricane when a couple of police officers decided to try to improve on the national School Resource Officer program which placed security officers in schools.
“They partnered with my agency which is the Division of Justice and Community Service and began to develop a program that trained police officers who had been established police officers with their departments, put them into schools, had them teach, and mentor, and work toward a fuller relationship rather than just a security officer,” Bevers says.
The program continues to do well, but even as anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness continues to pour in, finding money for these positions is increasingly difficult. Federal grant money, which was a major source of funding, continues to decline. State program coordinator Bonnie Bevers says several officers were pulled from schools this year for lack of funding.
“Fortunately we’ve seen a lot of boards of education stepping up and saying, ‘This is a program we want. It’s important, and we want to keep them there.’ We’ve been really lucky because people see what a good program it is. But the funding is continuing to dwindle.”
Bevers says the program continues to grow, with more officers receiving training each year.
Prevention, Mentoring, and Safety
Currently 68 officers in 29 counties work about 40 hours each week with students in public schools to provide mentoring, safety, and to do what they can to prevent incidents. Bevers says the program has been a success and has likely contributed to the fact that West Virginia is a state that has never seen a school shooting tragedy. In fact on more than one occasion officers have been able to evade just such a tragedy.
“A student actually approached me and said, ‘Hey, Officer Speece, I need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
Officer Tom Speece has been a Prevention Resource Officer for fourteen years at Ravenswood High School in Jackson County.
“This is a kid that is really the last person I ever would have dreamed would approach me in the hallway. He comes up to me and says, ‘Hey this boy is talking about bringing a gun to school tomorrow and shooting some people,’” Officer Speece remembers.
Speece says an immediate investigation revealed evidence that included a hit list, and ultimately resulted in a conviction. A regional liaison officer for the statewide program, Speece points out that there have already been three firearms taken out of schools this year.
Assistant principal at Ravenswood High, Jimmy Fraiser, says Officer Speece plays a critical role in the healthy culture and environment of the school.
“It’s a proactive approach,” Fraiser says. “There are students that come to him on a daily basis that need to talk about various things whether it’s bullying, or a tip on drugs, it may be a situation where somebody stole something, and the kids will offer up that information.”
Fraiser says Speece teaches courses like hunter and driving safety, but he stresses the importance of his role as an authority figure who works to win the confidence and hearts of students who are really the best agents to prevent incidents among classmates.
“There’s an old saying that students don’t really care how much you know until they know how much you care. I think Officer Speece has gotten on a good step with all these students. They know that he’s an honest man, he’s going to be fair with them, and they trust him. I think this is exactly how this is supposed to work.”
Officer Speece says it’s a rewarding occupation:
“It’s awesome. If you enjoy your job you don’t work a day in your life. There’re great kids in these schools—these schools are full of great kids, but they’re going to make mistakes. 99 percent of the time, once you correct them or try to give them a better way of being, 99 percent of the time you don’t have any more issues out of them.”
Deputy Carroll
1114OfficerCarroll.mp3
“My job is to keep all the kids in the building safe, outside threats, kids who have discipline problems, I assist Mr. Wink who’s the disciplinary principal here in assuring his safety and kids safety here in the building,” says Berkeley County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Carroll is on his beat- at Musselman High School in southern Berkeley County. He shares an office with Assistant Principal Matthew Wink, who handles discipline.
Musselman has about 17 hundred students and 150 employees. There’s an On Site Emergency Team of employees that meets once a month to discuss security and review the measures that are in place. Carroll has some help in the form of what he calls his 52 eyes. That’s 52 cameras mounted throughout the school. From the office, Carroll can keep track of almost every corner of the building.
“The camera system here, I can actually zoom in onto the floor and see what’s laying on the floor. I can zoom in on a person’s face and move the camera around, this system in phenomenal.”
Credit Cecelia Mason / WVPublic
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WVPublic
Musselman High School in Berkley County
Q: Are camera’s important?
“Yes ma’m I can record, I can go back, if somebody gets into a fight I can see who threw the first punch, I can take a kid if he’s skipping I can follow him all the way through the building and find out where he goes. Smoking in a bathroom, I can see who comes out of the bathrooms into the hallways; I know who was the last person in who would be smoking. The cameras are phenomenal.”
Q: do you think it helps keep people more in line?
“Yes ma’m it does deter a lot of stuff.”
Carroll spends a lot of time walking the hallways and checking all the exterior doors to make sure they’re locked and not left open.
“Which is kind of hard when you’ve got almost 1,700 kids in the building, they’re going outside to go into the other side of the building so they leave the door open, you’ve got teachers that come in and out so I’m always trying to check the doors to make sure they’re locked, make sure nobody from the outside can get in. You walk by the bathrooms, take a real quick smell to make sure nobody’s smoking in there, and if you see a kid walking down the hallway you make sure they’re supposed to be where they’re supposed to be and not out causing havoc.”
Carroll says most of the problems he sees involve bullying on social networking sites that spill over into the school day… and drugs.
“Drugs are one of the big things. If we can get the drugs out of the building it’s better for everybody.”
Q: Is that a big issue in any high school?
“Yeah, drugs are pretty big. Prescription drugs, they can get them from their parents. Marijuana they can get from anywhere. You got the states now that are legalizing it. It’s one of the big issues.”
As Carroll walks the hallways he greets teachers and talks with students. Carroll enjoys working on cars and trucks, so between classes one student stops for a short conversation about that. Carroll is dressed in his police uniform wearing the belt that holds the tools he needs to enforce the law. He says the students will ask him questions about his career.
“A lot of the kids always ask questions about my taser, pepper spray, what it’s like being a cop. Probably the biggest deterrent on my person is my taser. A lot of kids really are intrigued by that thing. Of course I tell them I’ve been hit several times with a taser. They ask me what it feels like so I try to explain to them that it’s not something you want to have happen to you, get tased. So a lot of them, they like to joke about the taser ‘come on Carroll tase me, tase me’ I’m like no you don’t want to do that it’s not fun, it’s not fun.”
Q: There’s a lot of debate going on (regarding school safety) what’s your opinion?
“Arming teachers, I think the only person inside the building that should have a gun should be a police officer. If you want to put an armed person in an elementary school put a police officer or a retired police officer in that building, either in plain clothes or a uniformed officer in elementary schools. If you don’t have the correct training you shouldn’t have a firearm inside of a school.”
“Only way you can really protect the school is put a 12 foot fence around it, two armed guards at a gate, one way in, one way out, metal detectors. The kids don’t want to come to that, that’s just like a jail, they don’t need that.”
Q: do the students talk about it with you when things like that happen?
“Yes ma’m, some students will come in and ask how could it have been prevented? What would you do if that situation happened? I try to talk them as much as I can.”
Carroll’s marked sheriff’s department vehicle sits in front of Musselman High. Having a visible police presence, strong security system and emergency plan serve as a deterrent to students who might break the law and, Carroll hopes, offers a degree of safety as students go about the business of learning.
