Student loan debt is a major issue for many millennials. A bill in Congress would offer loan forgiveness to West Virginians who want to return home, or stay in the state, to work.
Senator Shelley Moore Capito and Michigan Senator Gary Peters recently introduced SB676. The bill, which if passed would be called the “Workforce Development Through Post-Graduation Scholarships Act of 2019” would update tax law, allowing foundations, non-profits, and some for-profit companies to provide a multi-year loan forgiveness grant for employees. The new program would be focused on communities with population loss and which have lower than average rates of people with college degrees.
Paul Daugherty, CEO of Philanthropy West Virginia, said the bill would create economic growth in West Virginia, by bringing young talent back to the state.
“This would be one of the first steps to attract young people back to retain them and keep them here when it comes to paying off their loans,” Daugherty said. “Not too many communities offer that in this country.”
Daugherty points to a similar program in Michigan, called Come Home Awards, which successfully used loan forgiveness as an incentive to attract and retain young people.
According to the latest U.S Census report, West Virginia lost more than 11,000 people between July 2017 and July 2018.
This is chapter four of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay. In the first chapter, we met a young man from Harlan County, Kentucky, who thought a college football scholarship was going to be his ticket out. But a serious neck injury led Derek to drop out and move back home.
When he was 21 years old, Derek Akal decided to move to Los Angeles, California. It wasn’t that he had anything against his home of Lynch, the coal-camp town in Eastern Kentucky where he grew up. Derek loves his family and his home in the hills, but he dreamed of moving somewhere far away.
“You know my friends down here, they see Lexington as the city to move to. For me, I’m looking past that. I’m looking to go way farther than that. And if I have to go to the other side of the nation to do so, then I will,” Derek said.
In late 2016, Derek made the decision to visit Los Angeles, California. But moving to California is expensive, and Derek hadn’t had luck finding anything close to a stable full-time job in 2016. But, he still found ways to save up some money. He sold some of his clothes, worked on computers, stashed away money his grandparents sent him, and gave lots of haircuts.
“Part-time barber, basically,” as Derek described it. “I saved up for almost a year and a half. And most people, especially my family, they didn’t even know that I had almost like $2000 saved up in a shoebox under my bed.”
Secretly Crossing the Country
The night before Derek left for California, he was so excited he didn’t even sleep. “Only thing on my mind was going straight to California.”
The next morning, Derek told his family he was leaving, but he didn’t say how far he was going, or for how long.
“My family didn’t think I was going to California.”
Derek got a ride to Knoxville from a couple of friends, and from there he caught a bus. He said he chose to travel to California by bus because he wanted to see as many places as he could. He wanted it to be an adventure.
Derek hopped on a bus to Memphis, then got on a train to Denver, where he got back on a bus that went straight to California. That last bus ride made an especially big impression on Derek.
“That was really breathtaking, especially going through Arizona,” Derek recalled. “I seen a lot of land that I’ve never seen before, a lot of canyons. All through there was just…beautiful.”
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Derek Akal
New Mountains and New Possibilities
Derek arrived in LA on December 29th, two days before New Year’s. He was picked up by two close friends he met the year he was in college, Jessica and Vince. Jessica is from California, and lives near LA. Derek explained, she makes good money working as a wrestling coach. Vince is from a small town in Georgia. He and Derek had been talking for months, trying to figure out where they could move to find more opportunity.
Moving to California was Vince’s idea. The point of this trip was to spend a couple of weeks scouting for jobs and houses so that Derek and Vince could be ready when they decide to make the big move.
Derek’s friends picked him up, and straight away they drove to the top of a mountain. It was a lot higher than the mountains Derek knew back home, and Derek said right from that first night, he got the sense that these mountains held a whole new world of possibilities.
“Imagine all these mountains, there’s nothing but houses and lights. I was so stuck on that. I remember I made a whole complete 360, just looking around. Nothing but houses and lights.”
At the same time, Derek said the mountains felt familiar. He said he didn’t get homesick at all, and he thinks that’s in no small part because the landscape reminded him of home. “I was expecting nothing but flat land all over the place,” Derek said. “But it was just a whole lot bigger mountains.”
Derek, Jessica, and Vince spent their days exploring the area, visiting places like Malibu, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills.
The whole experience made Derek feel like he was living the exciting life he’d been longing for.
“I just felt like this [was] just a new beginning,” he said. “Spending New Year’s in California, you know, ready to explore the world. Because, you know, I already explored basically the nation already.”
Letting the World Know
At this point, Derek’s family, and almost everyone else back home, still had no idea that Derek was in California. Derek had kept the trip a secret, but the moment came where he decided to tell the world, through social media.
Derek wanted to surprise people, and judging from the response he got, he seems to have succeeded. “As soon as I posted a picture of me in California, I had like a hundred something snapchats and text messages.”
One of the people who saw that post was his cousin Karida Brown. She’d recently moved to LA because she’d joined the faculty at UCLA.
Karida had just picked up the keys to her new house and started moving in when she was surprised to see Derek’s post on Facebook, a picture of him looking down on the San Gabriel Valley, with a caption telling the world that he’s in California.
“He didn’t even say anything to me!” Karida said, her voice rising with a mixture of laughter and exasperation.
“So, I inboxed him, saying ‘Hey cousin, you know I’m here, come anytime.’ ”
The next day Derek visited Karida at her house.
Credit courtesy Karida Brown
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Derek’s cousin Karida Brown
Derek and Karida
Derek seems to really look up to Karida.
“Karida, she does a lot,” he said. “You know, she’s been literally all over the world. I want to be on the same level as Karida, always traveling somewhere. I want to explore the world.”
Karida said she really appreciated getting to spend time with Derek, and hearing more about his life and his thoughts than she ever had.
“Derek doesn’t talk much, that’s a part of his personality. He’s a close to the vest person; he listens way more than he talks,” she explained. “In fact, I heard Derek talk more in the four or five days that he stayed with me in California than I’ve heard him talk in his whole life.”
Karida observed, that’s not the only change she saw in Derek when he visited.
“I remember a year or two prior to him coming to California, Derek said, ‘I ain’t never leaving the mountains, I’m staying right here.’ All that went out the window while we were sitting in my living room in California. He sounded like he wanted to come to California and make roots permanently.”
When Derek’s Mom Found Out
Credit courtesy Derek Akal
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Derek with his grandmother and mom
Back home, Derek’s mom Katina Akal reported she was glad that Derek had Karida to turn to.
But remember, Derek had kept his trip a secret from his mom. She admitted it was really hard on her. “Those two weeks he was gone, I was a nervous wreck the whole time,” she said. “I could not sleep.”
Derek’s mom found out that he was in California from a friend she bumped into at the store, whose son is one of Derek’s friends.
The friend asked Katina, “So how do you feel about Derek in California?”
Katina remembers, all she could say was, “What?!?”
Back to Kentucky
When Derek got home, after another long journey by bus and train, he and his mom had to talk.
“At first I was just happy that he came back,” said Katina. “After I got over that, then I was mad. I was mad, and I was like, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ And I asked, ‘Why did you not tell us that you was going?’”
Derek told his mom, “I didn’t want you all to talk me out of it, or say I couldn’t go.”
Derek said he and his mom have worked some things out since then. Part of why he came back home, he said, was to be able to spend some more time with her, as well his grandma, and his little brother.
“Everybody’s asking me, ‘Why’d you come back?’ You know, I just want to spend time with my family and friends.”
There’s one other thing Derek needed to do before he made the big move to California: save up some more money. Derek’s plan was to be ready to move by June 12th. He just needed to find a job first.
As Derek explained, “All I got to do is just get some money, get a plane ticket, then I’m already there.”
Will Derek find work and be able to move away? Find out next time, on the final chapter of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay.
This story was produced by WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley ReSource, which is made possible with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Music in the audio version of this story was provided by Marisa Anderson.
“Jobs aren’t a silver bullet,” says Coalfield Development Corporation CEO Brandon Dennison.
But they are a good start.
Dennison’s social enterprise has helped 100 percent of its first 30 graduates find employment or further their education. Now, it’s hoping to repeat that success with 50 employees.
Meanwhile, the larger goal is ambitious – to reinvent the Appalachian economy from the ground up, through sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, renovating buildings and restoring former mine lands.
These enterprises earn some money, raise more and receive some from government grants.
Dennison thinks this is a model for development throughout Appalachia. But it takes a lot of mentoring to help employees overcome childhood trauma and keep their jobs.
On the Front Porch, we ask if it can it become more than a pilot program.
Welcome to “The Front Porch,” where we tackle the tough issues facing Appalachia the same way you talk with your friends on the porch.
Hosts include WVPB Executive Director and recovering reporter Scott Finn and avid goat herder Rick Wilson, who works for the American Friends Service Committee.
An edited version of “The Front Porch” airs Fridays at 4:50 p.m. on West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s radio network, and the full version is available at wvpublic.org and as a podcast as well.
Share your opinions with us about these issues, and let us know what you’d like us to discuss in the future. Send a tweet to @radiofinn or @wvpublicnews, or e-mail Scott at sfinn @ wvpublic.org
The Front Porch is underwritten by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail. Find the latest news, traffic and weather on its CGM App. Download it in your app store, and check out its website: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/
After going for a year unemployed, Dave Hathaway was back underground, working at a new coal mine — the Cumberland mine — in Greene County, Pennsylvania. He didn’t want to have to go back underground, but no other job came close to paying him enough to support his family and be able to live in his hometown.
The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier visited Dave a month after he started back at the mine. He’d dropped 20 pounds that he’d put on during his year of unemployment, and had shaved off his beard, which had gotten pretty wild–like Duck Dynasty wild–by the end of the year. Was it hard, getting back into the swing of things?
“I mean, you close your eyes, and you could think you’re at the Emerald. I mean other than the guys. I mean my whole crew is all young guys like 25, I think. I’m like the oldest guy on my crew,” he said.
At Emerald, Dave had pretty high seniority. He was operating equipment above ground. Generally, the further away from the place they’re mining coal, the better. Whatever seniority Dave had, went away when the mine shut down.
At his new mine, Dave was back at the bottom of the totem pole, even beneath the 20-year-olds he was working next to. He was working the “section”– the active part of the mine where they cut into new rock with a huge machine called a continuous miner. He handled advancing the mine’s ventilation system at the face of the coal seam.
“All day eight hours, well, nine and a half hours. Gets pretty boring. Same thing every day,” he said.
Dave said it was hard to adjust, not just to the physically demanding parts of the job, but the hours. Every week, he has to work a different shift — daylight, afternoon, or midnight.
“The first midnight shift, that was pretty brutal.”
Dave was sitting at his kitchen table — it’s one of those high tables you sit at with tall chairs. He walked across the kitchen to blow his nose. The Kleenex was black.
He and Ashley want to move–not out of Greene County, just a little outside of city limits. They live in town and want a house with some land. Coal mining is the best way he can afford to do this.
Credit Reid Frazier/ The Allegheny Front
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Ashley and Dave Hathaway and their son, Deacon
But in the back of his mind, he’s still wondering, ‘how long will this last?’ For years, coal mines have been getting more coal out of the ground with fewer and fewer workers. And the country is simply using less of it than it used to. In 2016, Pennsylvania’s coal mines produced the lowest amount of coal in the state since 1894. What happens when the longwall machine finishes the section of coal they’re currently mining?
“I mean they’re so short, too. Like, the long wall just it’s going to rip through them. Kind of. I’m thinking it might happen again. We’ll see when it happens. Ride it out again.”
I asked him, what would he do if he could do anything else?
“I don’t think I could do anything else now. Probably — this is probably where I have to be. I don’t know if I’d want to do anything else. I mean I tried. No one would hire me. I mean everyone else thinks I’m just a stupid coal miner, too, I guess.”
Dave has a pointed sense of humor. It’s like a coping mechanism. A way of saying, ‘screw it.’ He often jokes with Ashley that someday he’ll move into a van and just live there. He says it so often, it’s hard to tell whether he’s joking or not.
Ashley carries Deacon into the kitchen, and sits the baby on Dave’s lap. While she washes up some dishes. He’s now five months old, and he’s up to 20 pounds.
The baby stares at my microphone, and tries to touch it–it’s got a fake fur windscreen that probably looked like a stuffed animal to Deacon.
“Daddy making that coal miner money now,” Dave said to his son. “You haven’t seen that, huh?”
I asked whether they’d ever want to leave Greene County. Dave pauses, like it’s a question he’d never spent too much time thinking about.
“I don’t think we’ll move out of Greene County. We’re stuck here. We’re lifers.”
Dave said maybe once Deacon is in college, maybe then they’ll try and find somewhere else to live.
Dave’s older son, Grant, is one of the big reasons why Dave doesn’t want to leave. I’ve told you about Grant’s wrestling match that Dave took me to, how he lost to a bigger, stronger, better wrestler.
Well Grant had another match that night. It would determine whether he moved on to the next round in his school’s wrestling playoffs. He paces the floor of the gym. Finally, it’s his turn.
Grant and another boy square off. They’re well-matched, and neither of them can gain much of an advantage. Dave is in his seat just staring at Grant, who manages to go up by a point. That’s Grant’s coach you hear yelling out instruction.
Finally, the match ends, and Grant ekes out a win.
I give Grant a high five. Ashley is there, carrying Deacon in on a car seat. So are Dave’s father and stepmother.
Dave roves around the gym, chatting with other dads, wrestling coaches. He knows a lot of the people in this room.
Grant is beaming. The dejection he felt from losing that first match is gone. Like it never happened. He has a medal around his shoulders, which he keeps touching.
That was in March.
In April, Dave suffered an injury when a rock fell from the ceiling inside the mine. He was on workman’s compensation for months for while his knee healed. He had to have surgery for his meniscus to heal. And the knee still hurts. Adding to the ache he has in his lower back from a previous coal-mining accident.
I visited Dave a few days ago at his house. He told me if he’d gotten a different job when he was laid off, he wouldn’t have gone back to coal mining. But now, a year later, there didn’t seem to be any reason to think about what could have been. And even with this injury, he said he was happy to have a job at the mine. He had a paycheck. He had insurance for his family. And that night, he’d be headed back to work to take the midnight shift.
This week we meet the next person we’ll be following in our Struggle to Stay series. 37-year-old Crystal Snyder is a single mother of two, who says she wants to stay in West Virginia, where her family has lived for several generations. But being a single mom in West Virginia is challenging for her, and sometimes she worries whether raising two kids in this state is good for their health.
15 years ago, Crystal Snyder’s mom was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, which had already spread to the rest of her body. She died a few weeks later when Crystal was just 22 years old.
“When you see a map and it shows you this area of poverty, people die 15-20 years earlier than they do over here in Virginia, and your mother died at 41, it kind of makes you think…is it a good idea for me to leave my children here? Like, part of me wants to take them out so they don’t die 15 years, you know, premature. But…just part of me wants to fight for them because this place is so beautiful.”
Crystal has blonde hair, and her face is tanned from working in the sun. On her back, she has a tattoo of a fiddle; actually the tattoo covers up the name of her second husband, a marriage that was a mistake, she says. She’s made other decisions she isn’t proud of, but being a mom isn’t something she regrets.
“My kids and I, we have a good bond. It’s not been easy.”
Crystal married early, when she was 16. She had her son Aaron a year later, and her daughter Morgan when she was in her 20s.
“I just want to cherish these moments, cause I know it’s not gonna last long, and I am single, and it’s just us, and I’m just trying to relish in these moments. Cause I know I’ll look back and remember, years down the road, this important time that we had together. And I love them.”
Crystal recorded one of her first entries at her home, while she was cooking dinner with her daughter Morgan. While they cook, Morgan tells her mom about an episode of McGiver.
Morgan says she hopes she’ll soon be taller than her mom. At nearly 5 feet, she’s close.
"I love to see new places, but nothing compares to West Virginia."
“She’s independent. She’s been independent since she was like four,” Crystal said, looking down at her daughter with a smile. “She would never let me brush her hair, or pick out her clothes. She always did it on her own. I wanted to because she has beautiful red hair, you know, and she wouldn’t ever let me brush it, but she just developed like her own style, and I’m glad we did that because she knows a lot.”
Credit Kara Lofton/ WVPB
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Crystal Snyder, who is part of a farmer-training program called Refresh Appalachia, fixing a weed eater at a farm in Milton.
"I used to call the mailbox dad. I'd drive by the old Cabell County courthouse and I think, 'thats where I used to see my dad.'"
“I’m proud I keep a house. Somehow I keep it going. I just somehow always find a way. I don’t give up.”
There were some scary things that happened to Crystal when she was a little girl.
She remembers late night parties, with strangers coming into their house, drug deals at the home, and fights between her parents.
“It was total neglect. But my mom…had been abused as a child, and it was just turmoil. No, she loved us. But…no…they didn’t know how to take care of kids. No, it was neglect, and abuse. And I was an accident and they weren’t going to have me. Then [my mom] decided not to have an abortion, or maybe she saw my heartbeat, I don’t know. So I’m really lucky to be here.”
“But I wasn’t two, and my mom and dad were fighting, like they fought constantly, and my mom kicked my dad out of the house and said to take me too.”
As a girl, Crystal moved back and forth between her grandparents’ house, her mom’s, and her dad’s. Her parents broke up and got back together several times. Her dad was in and out of prison for most of her childhood, serving time for selling drugs.
"I wanted a stable family. I wanted, I guess, people to care about and who cared about me."
“So I was like a baby before I remember, the first time. I mean I drive by the old Cabell County courthouse and I think, ‘that’s where I used to see my dad.’”
And then, Crystal’s mom met a guy at a truck stop, left with him, and never looked back. Crystal was just 15. She only saw her mom a few times after that.
“She’d come back and visit and say, ‘I’ll never live here again.’ And, I don’t know, I thought she was brave for that, but, I wanted her close.”
Around this time, Crystal decided she wanted a family and kids of her own.
“I wanted a stable family. I wanted, I guess, people to care about and who cared about me.”
Hoping her children are safe and healthy is what weighs heaviest on her mind.
“But just as much of me wants to fight for them, because this place is so beautiful! And I just feel so blessed to live here. And I should be able to live here with clean water! And (sighs) I think the part of me that wants to fight is stronger than the mother in me that wants to get my kids out of here.”
"I'm proud that I shine my light still, maybe more so than if I hadn't of experienced darkness."
But beauty isn’t the only reason Crystal wants to stay in West Virginia.
“I love to travel. I love to see new places, but nothing compares to West Virginia. It’s just not home, like, if you see flat… if you see too far, it’s like, this isn’t right.”
And although Crystal doesn’t have a lot of family here, she does have a sister, who’s a year older. Having that tie is important – especially getting to see their two daughters grow up together.
One evening last summer, they came to Crystal’s house to cook dinner and play.
It had been raining all day. As Crystal and her sister were cooking in the kitchen, the sun peaked through the clouds, and Crystal noticed her niece Olivia and her daughter Morgan dancing and running in the rain. They looked up to see a rainbow peaking out from behind the clouds.
It’s moments like these that make Crystal want to stay, to raise her kids in the mountains. So, she’s going to continue to try to live here, and to make West Virginia better, and safer.
What is Crystal most proud of?
“My tenacity. I’m proud that I shine my light still, maybe more so than if I hadn’t of experienced darkness.”
We first began recording Crystal’s story in January of 2016, in the middle of a major life change. She’d recently been laid off from her job at a nearby T-shirt factory.
Do people who identify as LGBTQ struggle for acceptance in Appalachia? In this week’s episode of Inside Appalachia, we explore how ideas about gender are changing across the country and in the region.
Still, some people, like 20-year-old Soleil-Dawe, who lives in Shepherdstown and identifies as gender queer, have found that coming out to their family isn’t easy.
“Do you care about your perceptions of girl and boy more, or do you care about your kid more?” Kyra told West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Liz McCormick. “And I think that those are the lessons my family’s learning right now, that I’m learning right now as well. But I love them dearly; they love me back. We’re working out the kinks in between.”
How Does Appalachian Culture Affect Gender Identity?
“In Appalachia culture, which is a valid culture, they have very strong views on what is masculine and what is feminine,” said Dr. Darlene Daneker, an Associate Professor in the Counseling Department at Marshall University. She’s had several peer-reviewed publications on gender identity, and for the past three years, she’s worked to counsel transgender people, both adults and teens.
At the same time, Daneker says transgender people are finding acceptance here in the Mountain State. “It’s not like these people aren’t loved by anybody. Their moms and dads and their family love them, and so they’re not outcasts. That’s one really big benefit for Appalachians in West Virginia.”
Daneker recently spoke with Inside Appalachia’s Jessica Lilly to discuss how changing attitudes towards gender are affecting teens and adults in West Virginia.
Q Daily
This NPR story from WNYC’s Yasmeen Khann follows the story of a child who was biologically born female, but started identifying as a male at 3 years old. He is right on the cusp of puberty, and is now starting to face the reality that they have to make a decision before puberty really sets in. Q is a vibrant, happy child with many hobbies and interests. But he has some tough choices to make on the road ahead of him.
Bill Richards
As a small child, Bill Richards remembers always feeling sort of feminine. He grew up in Rainelle, West Virginia, and spent lots of time with his family. Although once he got to high school, he thought that he was just a normal, sexual guy. Later he found a book called City of Night, which he claims changed his life forever. He started realizing that he really had an interest in gay life, but his family didn’t accept it. When Bill returned to West Virginia after being in Chicago for some time, he relinquished his gay identity and married a woman. He quickly found that he couldn’t live a lie, but the law caught up to him even faster, as he told Trey Kay for the Us and Them Podcast.
The Struggle to Stay
It’s nothing unusual to think about leaving your hometown after you graduate high school, but sometimes it’s not an option to leave, and sometimes, as we’ve heard, leaving can be difficult and expensive, too. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
The past few months, we’ve introduced you to three Appalachians onThe Struggle to Stay series. Recently, we’ve heard from 20-year-old Kyra Soleil-Dawe in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, who, at the age of 17, started a small theater group calledWhiskey Shine and Pantomime Productions, or WSP. Kyra hopes WSP will become credible theater group – one that’s recognized and taken seriously. Achieving this dream is part of Kyra’s struggle to stay.
Kyra identifies as gender fluid and prefers they, them, and their pronouns. In this episode, we’ll talk more about changing attitudes toward gender.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Opening night of Hamlet. Lydia Johnson and Kyra Soleil-Dawe sit together at a table selling tickets. October 20, 2016.
We had help producing Inside Appalachia this week from WNYC, NPR’s Weekend Edition and the Us and Them podcast. Music in today’s show was provided by Marisa Anderson, David Mumford, Michael Howard and Kaela Drew.
Inside Appalachia is produced by Jessica Lilly and Roxy Todd. Jesse Wright is our executive producer. Scott Finn edited our show this week. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Claire Hemme helped with our digital correspondence. We’d love to hear from you. Send us tweet @InAppalachia.
