Parkersburg News and Sentinel. May 16, 2023.
Editorial: Education: Discipline statistics show need for change
The West Virginia State Board of Education now has concrete data showing our public schools are failing our kids in more ways than just academics. Last week, the group got a look at a detailed report that confirms our policies and procedures for disciplining students are lopsided and detrimental.
According to the report, 19% of all students during the 2022 school year were referred for a disciplinary incident. Once they were referred for discipline, 56% of those students were suspended. Though Black students made up 4% of the student population in 2022, they made up 31% of those referred for discipline. The percentage of referred Black students who were then suspended was 64%.
Hispanic or Latino and multi-racial students also were referred and then suspended at higher percentages than white students. Taking away the lens of race/ethnicity, economically disadvantaged students and those in foster care were more likely to be referred for discipline and suspended.
“We’ve got the punishment-side down pat, but that’s the only thing we have down pat, and who has suffered because of that? Our children,” said state Board of Education President Paul Hardesty.
After hearing all the numbers, Hardesty said, “We have a problem of epic proportions. It’s no wonder we’re in the position we are on proficiency… We’re failing our kids. This has to be a complete overhaul. We’ve got to do something different.”
He is right. But what do we do?
“Our schools must be safe and must be conducive to learning, but we also have to understand that we can have an impact on how students behave and the continued behaviors that maybe we see,” said Drew McClanahan, director of Leadership Development and Support for the Department of Education.
McClanahan says the plan is to focus on in-person and virtual trainings with teachers and administrators with an emphasis on being less heavy-handed, working with local communities, looking at social-emotional supports, classroom management, and changing school culture.
That is a lot for one summer, but teachers and administrators must approach the training with an open mind. Yes, the burden for this change and improvement, too, is on them. Perhaps state officials can figure out a way to rope parents and community groups into the conversation, but the heavy lifting will be done in the classroom.
“Addressing school discipline is a challenge that calls for an all-hands-on-deck response,” said the Rev. Matthew Watts.
He’s right. But teachers are already on the deck. County and state officials must arm them with the tools they need to make this adjustment AND be ready to support them when the turnaround proves more difficult and complex than we’d hope.
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The Intelligencer. May 17, 2023.
Editorial: Tax Cut Making Difference
If you live and work in West Virginia, your paycheck has grown in recent months due to the tax cut enacted by the West Virginia Legislature. For many, the 21.5% income tax reduction is serving as a way to combat rising prices for food and other living expenses.
The impact also is being felt in Charleston. As of earlier this month, the state was sitting on $1.7 billion in surplus revenue funds — tax dollars over and above what the state needs to conduct its business. Giving money back through the tax reductions is the right thing to do, as we’ve argued. By the end of June, $114 million will be returned to taxpayers. By the end of June 2024, that amount will be $810 million.
“And that’s good for West Virginia. It’s going to stimulate the economy and it’s going to result in more economic activity in our state,” Revenue Secretary Dave Hardy said.
There’s also even better news — given the state’s ongoing strong economic performance, it is likely additional tax cuts will be triggered in coming years. As studies show, states with lower income tax rates typically outperform their higher-tax neighbors. West Virginia must use that strategy for population and business growth.
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Charleston Gazette-Mail. May 15, 2023.
Editorial: Permitting would be faster, if done right
Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., want to streamline the environmental permitting process when it comes to projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Nearly complete, the line, 42 inches in diameter and covering about 300 miles in length, would carry natural gas through 11 counties in West Virginia and parts of Virginia.
The project has been in one stage of regulatory hell or another for longer than some probably remember. But is overbearing bureaucracy and government red tape really the problem? Well, governing agencies have been part of the holdup, but perhaps not in the way one might expect.
If anything, in the early stages of the project, governing agencies were only too happy to try and facilitate the project. A lawsuit filed back in August 2017 accused the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection with granting a water quality certification for MVP without really considering the project’s full effect in that area. A month later, the DEP agreed that it needed to reevaluate the information (or lack thereof) used to issue the permit. Eventually, the agency vacated its own permit.
Around the same time, West Virginia and Virginia property owners potentially affected by the path of the pipeline filed a federal lawsuit that questioned the permitting process and another that challenged the project’s use of eminent domain to condemn property and seize it without paying fair value to landowners.
All of this happened before the first tree was felled to make way for the pipeline, and there have been plenty of legal challenges in the intervening years, some halting the project for a time, others not. But they all share the pattern of allegations that regulatory corners were being cut by builders, sometimes aided by agencies that were supposed to enforce those regulations.
So, is it the courts’ fault that the project has been continually delayed? Is it the fault of concerned landowners? Politicians can blame government agencies, courts and environmentalists all they want, but, in the end, it comes down to doing things the right way. Every time an agency has tried to expedite things, the results have been poor.
Just last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit threw out another water quality certification granted by the West Virginia DEP. Manchin said the court was “targeting” cases in West Virginia involving MVP. Yet, that same court recently upheld the same permit granted in the portion of Virginia affected by the project.
West Virginia has a long history of bending over backward to help extraction industries while ignoring what those operations were doing to the state and its people. Some West Virginians have had enough. It’s true, there are some who never wanted the project to happen in the first place. Still, if everyone had done things by the book from the start, the MVP would have been completed long ago.
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