This week on Inside Appalachia, Appalachians are often called mountaineers — but are they also “pioneers?” A new documentary reckons with what it means… to be a pioneer. In Michigan, an Appalachian mountain man competes in a championship tournament, for skipping stones — and we wade into a mountain wetland to search for one of the region’s most elusive creatures.
Appalachians are often called mountaineers — but are they also “pioneers?” A new documentary reckons with what it means… to be a pioneer.
In Michigan, an Appalachian mountain man competes in a championship tournament for skipping stones — and we wade into a mountain wetland to search for one of the region’s most elusive creatures.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
In This Episode:
O Pioneer Shares A Vision Of Appalachia
A Rock’s Throw Away
In Search Of The Bog Turtle
Trouble Finding Teachers
O Pioneer Shares A Vision Of Appalachia
O Pioneerblends animation and documentary to track the lives of three West Virginians. It explores the question of what it means to be a pioneer — and how those qualities show up in our day-to-day lives.
Producer Bill Lynch recently viewed O Pioneer and then met with filmmakers Jonathan Lacocque and Clara Lehmann.
A Rock’s Throw Away
If you’re standing next to a body of water — like a lake, or river, or even a tiny creek — and there are flat rocks lying there, the impulse to skip them is just about irresistible. Just about anybody can do it. But, some people are really good at it.
Kurt Steiner of Western Pennsylvania is considered one of the best in the world at skipping rocks.
Bog turtles are the tiniest turtle in North America, and among the most endangered. Their habitats are disappearing.
Radio IQ’s Roxy Todd went along with biologists, who are researching how many of these rare turtles still exist.
Trouble Finding Teachers
Across the country, schools are forced to double up on, and sometimes even cancel classes because of teacher shortages. The problem is felt here in Appalachia, too, where vacancies are often filled by substitutes who lack formal teacher training.
WVPB’s Chris Schulz reported on West Virginia’s efforts to keep schools staffed.
——
Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Jeff Ellis, Erik Vincent Huey, Frank George, Lobo Loco, Mary Hott and Gerry Milnes.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
The money is part of the 2024 Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant.
Six organizations in West Virginia will be awarded federal grant money to support afterschool programs.
The money is part of the 2024 Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant.
The six organizations include:
World Vision in Barbour County
Boys and Girls Club of the Eastern Panhandle in Berkeley County
Southern Educational Services Cooperative in Fayette, Summers and Webster counties
Step By Step in Kanawha County
Marion County Schools
Playmates Preschool and Childcare Centers in Wayne County
Funds are renewable for up to five years, as long as there’s continued support from the U.S. Department of Education.
The six awardees will offer learning and development support, homework assistance, tutoring, assistance in obtaining state educational standards and enrichment activities that complement their regular academic programs during out-of-school times, according to a news release.
Grantees are also required to engage with parents and caregivers in their children’s learning.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting reached out to the West Virginia Department of Education for dollar amounts for each of the six organizations, but they did not respond before this story was published.
At the May meeting of the West Virginia Board of Education, the state Department of Education announced that Grow Your Own is now a federally recognized apprenticeship, thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor.
West Virginia is experiencing a shortage of 1,200 teachers – that’s up by 200 from last fall. State education officials are hopeful the state’s new Grow Your Own Pathway to Teaching program will bring that number down – and a new designation may help.
At the May meeting of the West Virginia Board of Education, the state Department of Education announced that Grow Your Own is now a federally recognized apprenticeship, thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor.
“This partnership reflects the support behind our efforts to address the teacher shortage in West Virginia because this is not just an education issue, it affects all aspects of our state,” said West Virginia Superintendent of Schools Clayton Burch. “The department has built this scalable program to strengthen our teacher preparation efforts in real-time, because we don’t have the luxury of time to get more highly qualified teachers into the classroom.”
West Virginia is one of only a few states in the nation to designate a teacher preparation pathway as a registered apprenticeship, according to the West Virginia Department of Education.
Grow Your Own is a new initiative by the state Department of Education and the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. It will officially launch this fall and aims to inspire more high school students in the state to choose teaching as a career and stay in West Virginia.
The new federal designation elevates the initiative with wage-earning field experiences that will start during a student’s junior year of high school and continue all the way through a student’s final year of college.
High school students will complete college-level courses and graduate with a year of college already completed.
Additionally, thanks to the federal partnership, students may finish high school with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Teacher Aide certification.
Twenty-seven counties are piloting the project this fall.
Eighth graders in West Virginia are required to take West Virginia Studies, and coal has shaped many facets of our state’s economy and environment. But as employment in the industry continues to decline, how are teachers and students discussing coal in classrooms today?
Pamela Bush has taught West Virginia Studies in the heart of the state’s southern coalfields, where she grew up, for 16 years. Over time, she’s noticed coal’s presence in the classroom is evolving.
“When I first started, we had a whole unit just on the coal industry,” Bush said.
In more recent years, coal employment has declined in her area and resources like natural gas have entered the economic picture. Now, Bush said the course combines coal with all the natural resources, like salt, iron ore and timber.
“So it’s just another form of a natural resource that we look at rather than being the big, mega powerhouse that it used to be,” she said.
Then, and now, Bush teaches her students about coal’s early history — in particular, about the ways that industrialists and mining families clashed over unionization a century ago.
“I still teach a lot about the labor movement and the coal mining wars,” she said. “Because that is our local history here in the southern coalfields.”
In Cabell County, known for Marshall University and the Ohio River port city of Huntington, Brian Casto has been teaching West Virginia Studies for four years.
He agrees that coal does not have quite the same bearing in West Virginia Studies textbooks as it did several years ago. He’s also noticed more balance now in how they describe the impacts of the coal extraction process.
“Now, you see a lot more things in the textbooks that show the positive impact of coal, but it also argues some of the negative things that have come from it, like the environmental impact,” Casto said.
The current textbook, “West Virginia: 150 Years of Statehood,” discusses the controversial mining method known as strip mining, or surface mining. One passage reads, “it destroys land, and pollutes streams, increasing the potential for erosion and flooding.”
But the book also contends that companies must restore the land once they’re finished. The book reads, “in some instances, the area is actually left in better condition than before it was mined.”
Casto said his students often ask whether there are ways to mine coal in more environmentally responsible ways — or if out-of-work miners could be trained to do other jobs.
“A lot of students say that what needs to happen is how do you maybe lure manufacturing jobs to the area to fill those gaps of employment,” Casto said. “So people can still stay in those places.”
Back over in the coalfields of Logan County, Pamela Bush sees a sharper divide in her classroom.
“You have some students who have the mindset that they know that coal is never going to be as big as what it once was,” Bush said. “And then you have some that will hang on for dear life, you know, it’s gonna come back, it’s going to be as big as it ever was. So it’s kind of a mixture of both.”
In southern West Virginia, coal isn’t history at all — it’s a present and personal part of people’s lives. But that’s not the case in Jefferson County, where Keith Moody has been teaching West Virginia Studies for eight years.
“Jefferson County is in a pretty unique situation,” Moody said. “When you look at the state as a whole, Jefferson County is one of the few counties that does not actually have any coal.”
One of only three, in fact.
Jefferson County is also just an hour-and-a-half from Washington, D.C., and fewer families there have ties to the coal industry.
“Coal doesn’t impact their lives, like it does if you were to live in McDowell County,” he said.
Though they rely on coal in any number of ways, Moody said his students often feel indifferent about the industry and sometimes question why they have to learn about it.
He said many are perplexed by the control that out-of-state investors have had on the coal mined in West Virginia and wonder if it could happen again.
“One question I get from students sometimes is, are we seeing the same thing happening, you know, with natural gas? Are we allowing outsiders from West Virginia to come in and make money off of our industries and our natural resources without putting it back into West Virginia?”
All three teachers say, though, no matter what county you’re from, coal still plays a major role in understanding West Virginia today.
“Our culture is what it is because of the people that came here to work in the coal mines,” Bush said. “We can’t forget the past if we hope to move forward.”
All three teachers envision coal playing a new role in the state’s economy, in the form of tourism. As the resource dwindles, its history remains — and those stories are worth telling for years to come.
A Milton Middle School teacher is changing the way West Virginia history is taught, two minutes at a time.
Brian Casto has taught an eighth-grade West Virginia Studies class at the school for the past four years, but has recently ventured down unfamiliar roads in order to spark his students’ curiosity about the Mountain State’s rich history through a series of animated lessons on his YouTube channel titled “West Virginia History in Two Minutes or Less.”
In the video series, Casto uses animated characters, still photos and other graphic elements as the backdrop for topics like John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, the Hatfield and McCoy feud, and even some West Virginia trivia on state symbols and state parks.
Casto is wrapping up his 13th year teaching in Cabell County, the first nine of which were spent teaching history at the high school level. He used a variety of mediums in his classroom and consistently found internet videos that would help reinforce his lessons.
“Then I get the West Virginia Studies job and I start looking for resources, and there were hardly any, if any at all. I was telling my wife that there’s nothing out there and sometimes you need something a little different to introduce or review (a topic),” Casto said.
His wife responded by telling him to make his own if he couldn’t find any.
“So that’s how it started, and now a little over a year later I’ve got 41 done and some more in the works,” Casto said.
It was an idea that came to fruition about a month before the world went virtual in March 2020. When students were learning virtually, transitioning to a blended model and eventually returning to classrooms in early spring, Casto was hard at work creating mini-lessons that have gained popularity online.
“Mr. Casto is an amazing, amazing middle school teacher who, even before the pandemic, was creating digital lessons and videos that are rich with tons of information to teach West Virginia Studies,” Cabell County Superintendent Ryan Saxe said. “He’s really been able to bring West Virginia history to the digital world in a very engaging and exciting manner.”
Casto said each video takes between 15 and 20 hours to create from start to finish, working on them after his own children go to bed in the evenings.
“This is what makes everyone go, ‘What?’ I’m sure it’s partly because it’s not my field and there has been a learning curve,” said Casto. “It’s a passion project. I enjoy them, and it doesn’t feel like work when I’m putting them together.”
What he didn’t anticipate was that these videos would reach students far beyond the four walls of his classroom.
“It’s been really cool because teachers across the state are using them, which I never thought would happen,” he said. “I’ve had home-schooled parents message me on Facebook and tell me how much their kids love them. I saw a home-schooled student out one day and he came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Casto,’ and I did not know who he was because that was a little kid and I teach eighth-graders.”
Milton Middle School Principal Curt Mann said Casto’s embodied exactly what a teacher is supposed to be, and said the videos have helped students from across the state connect with pieces of their culture they might not have known about before.
“He’s not just reaching those 20-25 students that come through his class every day — he’s reaching thousands of people everywhere, even outside of the state, and everyone is learning,” Mann said. “That’s what a teacher is supposed to do — teach people regardless of where they are, and those videos do that and it’s a great thing.”
Casto was recently named the Cabell County Teacher of the Year, the reality of which he said still hasn’t quite settled with him.
“This year I’ve tried especially hard with making animated videos and doing anything I can do to try and spark their curiosity. My goal, beyond them learning, is for them to have a deeper appreciation for this state,” said Casto. “I love this state and I feel like I have a lot to offer, and my mission is to teach them, yes, but even more I want them to appreciate what’s around them and be better for it.”
Concerns over coronavirus have schools in West Virginia closed until at least April 30. And in Jefferson County, schools are closed for the rest of the academic year. As a result, thousands of kids throughout the state are staying home and attending school in new ways.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting explored some of the resources available to help West Virginia’s kids and their families succeed.
Checklists And Routine Help Young Children
We can all agree, times are pretty tough right now, and that can be especially true for parents and kids who are now teaching and learning from home.
Fortunately, there are lots of tools out there to help navigate this new normal.
Clover Wright, an assistant professor of the Childhood Education Department at California University of Pennsylvania, started a YouTube video series as a resource for parents.
In one, she is wearing cat ears and placed a stuffed dragon next to her as she reads a book called “Dragons Love Tacos,” written by Adam Rubin. She has donned her YouTube persona, “Story Girl,” which she created in response to the coronavirus pandemic to help parents with preschool aged children stuck at home.
“I thought maybe I can do this, you know, be their child’s teacher for like 10 minutes so [the parents] can get a tiny break,” said Wright, who is married to West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s former news director Jesse Wright.
Wright worked as a preschool teacher for 12 years before starting her job at California University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Every few days, she makes a new video reading a different children’s book. She ends each video with a fun, creative exercise for the children watching, like drawing or coloring.
“I can reach out to the kids and provide a little bit of comfort, sort of normalcy for the ones that are used to a preschool kind of routine,” she said.
The videos Wright makes are just one of many resources out there parents can use to help keep learning exciting, and manageable, while self-isolating.
Credit Courtesy Jesse Wright
/
Clover Wright as “Story Girl.”
Like other West Virginia parents, Wright is juggling working from home, teaching her college students online and now making lesson plans for her three sons, ages 6, 7 and 10.
She said kids thrive on routine, not necessarily a strict schedule, but a handful of daily tasks works well, especially for children. For her kids, she provides them each with a personal checklist.
“I included their assignments on it, and when they’re done with each of them, they can check it off themselves, which gives them a feeling of autonomy and accomplishment,” she said. “Who doesn’t like checking things off their list, right?”
She also includes a section at the bottom of the list where her children can add what they wantto do each week, and she keeps in contact with each of her children’s teachers.
Tips From A Homeschool Parent
But how else can parents help their kids learn while staying home?
“The first thing I definitely see is the need for everyone to just relax and not feel pressured to have a 9-to-5 school day,” Charles Town resident Amy Mason said in a Skype interview. She is formerly a second-grade teacher now homeschool parent. Amy has five children aged 11 to 21, and all of them have been or are currently homeschooled. (Full disclosure, Amy is a friend of Liz’s.)
Mason has been teaching her kids at home for more than 20 years, and she’s found for her kids, letting them drive what they want to learn and not keeping to a strict daily schedule has been a major key to learning.
That included lots of games.
“Board games, card games, video games; they all provide so much stimulation to the brain and so many things can be learned. My kids are the most strategic and creative thinkers,” she said. “And I’m sure it’s because of the games we’ve played since they were 2.”
Mason also points to free online content to help learning at home, such as virtual tours of museums, or programs like Khan Academy, which offers free online coursework to kids of all ages. This also is a resource available to all of West Virginia’s public schools, according to the state’s Department of Education.
“Khan Academy has been a fantastic homeschool resource. They have an engineering, free course right now, and I know my 11-year-old is taking that, and he’s having a lot of fun,” Mason said.
And West Virginia Public Broadcasting is also providing an array of resources for kids and their parents to promote learning at home.
Eddie Isom, WVPB’s Director of Programming, said the organization has teamed up with the West Virginia Department of Education to offer a new, locally-produced program on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m.
Education Station is part of WVPB’s PBS Kids schedule and features elementary school teachers across the state sharing their lessons.
“We know that all kids do not have internet access,” Isom said. “So we hope by expanding some of our TV programming during the day, our children will be able to watch something to keep them engaged and learning something during this time away from school.”
West Virginia Public Broadcasting is also airing history and science documentaries on The West Virginia Channel from 12 to 5 p.m. each day.
The state Department of Education’s website also offers various digital and non-digital resources for parents and their children.
And in an emailed statement to WVPB, the department said many West Virginia teachers are using social media, YouTube, FaceTime outreach and others for online learning, but it all depends on internet availability.
If broadband access is not available, the department said many teachers have sent home pencil and paper packets; they make telephone calls, or send texts and emails, to stay connected with their students.
