West Virginia Blue
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I am writing this blog in response to the decision made by the West Virginia State Board of Education to provide in excess of 8 million dollars to Kanawha County to build a "School of the Future" while other projects in Southern West Virginia were ignored and Marsh Fork Elementary in the Coal River Valley of Raleigh County was offered only a portion of what would be needed to build a new school safe from the threats that the children in this school face daily. As a child I attended school in a coal town. Even though we had fantastic teachers who always did the best they could, the resources that were needed weren't always available. Every day millions of dollars in coal passed through our town on trains and trucks, thanks to the work of the fathers of many of my classmates, but still we did not receive needed resources, adequate facilities or the same opportunities available to children who attended school in Princeton or Bluefield.
As I have watched the events that have unfolded in the last year I can't help but see the similarities of these situations. The fact that the children of the coalfields are not given equal treatment by our state government is glaringly obvious. We eventually received a new high school, built on an old strip mine site that was really unstable and not suitable for building. We moved into a largely uncompleted school in the fall of 1983 and to my knowledge many of the completions were never made. Structural problems have appeared as a result of where the school was built. It is now an elementary/middle school because the declining populations of the small communities forced an unwanted but accepted consolidation of the county's four smallest high schools and in the near future the middle school students will face the same consolidation and I suspect the elementary will soon follow.
I have written all of this history to say that the children of the coalfields deserve better. The communities where billions of dollars in coal are extracted by the blood and sweat of their citizens should be some of the wealthiest in this state. Instead the coal counties of Appalachia are the poorest in the nation. The people who are subjected daily to coal dust, bad roads, unregulated coal companies, poverty and poor health conditions, should instead have the best kept roads (funded by the coal companies in my opinion), state of the art health facilities, libraries and schools along with the promise of bright futures for their children. Instead children grow up thinking that they aren't important and that they can never have professional careers because they would have to leave their homes to find work. They accept whatever insecure jobs are available from non-union coal mines or fast food establishments so that they can remain in the area where they grew up. This is oppression.
The children of the coalfields of Appalachia deserve so much more than they are given. The children of the Coal River Valley attend school in a 70 year old building that sits below the Shumate dam, which is one of the largest coal sludge impoundments in the nation. Less than 400 feet away is a coal silo with another one being constructed, a coal haul road and a coal preparation plant. They live with the daily threat of a break in the coal sludge dam that is situated directly above their school, now containing millions of gallons of thick, toxic coal sludge. Add to all of that a large mountaintop removal coal mining site where blasting is occurring daily, adding to the already ever present coal dust and the instability of the Shumate Dam.
It would seem to me that the number one project for a new school in West Virginia would be a new school for Marsh Fork Elementary followed closely by other inadequate schools in Southern West Virginia. With the health and lives of so many children and staff at stake, how can a "School of the Future" for Kanawha County be so important that it has received the largest amount of the available funding? More and more in West Virginia we are losing our communities. For too many years the people of Southern West Virginia have sacrificed so that other areas (i.e. Charleston, Parkersburg, Morgantown) may prosper. And, the people of Appalachia sacrifice every day for the comfort of America. We, the people of Southern West Virginia must demand our share of the wealth that is extracted from our mountains and it should begin with investments in the future of the children of the coalfields.
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