By Nick Fouriezos for Open Campus via The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

A black-and-white film plays beside Mountaineer sports pennants at "The New Place," the area's last remaining bar, now two decades old. It's 8 p.m. on a weekday, and it's just me and two other souls.

"I love West Virginia University," one says, "but they wrecked the city of Montgomery."

In 2017, WVU relocated West Virginia Tech from its home of 120 years, citing low enrollment - around half its peak of about 3,000 students - and high costs while moving from Montgomery to Beckley, a bigger city an hour up the valley.

The decision risks making the former college town of Montgomery into a ghost town. More than five years later, it still inspires emotional reactions from residents, even in a state and region well familiar with resource extraction.

Life without the local college is a reality that more rural areas are having to contend with (even if the closure of a public university is still exceedingly rare). Since 2016, more than 90 public or private nonprofit colleges have closed or been marked for closure, according to Higher Ed Dive's tracker.

"In West Virginia, we're robbing from the poor towns and putting wealth into richer towns," Montgomery Mayor Greg Ingram says.

In the Appalachian state, it's clear that the state's flagship university isn't the sole culprit for the challenges facing Montgomery and the surrounding region.

On the surface, the valley has all the trappings of a prime tourist destination: a sparkling river, a gorgeous waterfall, and hills of houses that paint the white West Virginia snow in pastel pinks, blues, yellows. However, the drive down Highway 60 is a drive that deceives.

That sparkling river? It's the Kanawha River, the toxic recipient of two centuries of coal mining (and, in 2015, a train's worth of spilled crude oil that literally set it on fire). And those pastel houses? Many sit empty, ravaged by the same factors (drugs, poverty, aging) that contribute to West Virginia being one of the nation's leading states for population loss.

Montgomery and its neighbors will have to grapple with those obstacles as they try to transition to rebuild its economy around tourism, although "that's nowhere near the same size as what our college was," Ingram, the mayor, reflects.

West Virginia Tech, and its once top-10 engineer program, had been one of the area's proudest assets - the rare case that imported new people and ideas, rather than exporting them out for others to enjoy.

But then WVU bought the campus in 1995. Ever since, residents here feel, the flagship university has worked to move it out, before finally getting approval to do so in 2015.

"WVU swings a big political club in West Virginia," Ingram says, singling out Gordon Gee, its president, who has also been known for aggressive expansion at other flagships, including Ohio State University and the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Rural communities and their universities are facing special difficulties as pandemic aid dwindles, and enrollment remains down. It's feeding distrust of larger state universities, many of which have grown larger by acquiring rural outposts that end up being the first cut once leaner times hit.

"They just wanted it out of here: It's all political," Ingram says, lamenting the loss of the Kroger, the car dealership, more than 100 well-paid university professionals, and, of course, the students who rented hundreds of rooms throughout the region.

"People should just come and look at the desolation they left. It would be a good education for the whole country, really: Don't move a college."

I went to Montgomery, and saw the aftermath of WVU's decision, which I will explore in more depth in a future issue. In this newsletter though, I want to reflect on the frustrations rural communities feel toward state flagships - "the big university," as many say, and not just in West Virginia, but across these divided states of America.

"This was the lifeblood of this town: It's what the area is known for," Ingram says. "Morgantown is known for WVU - well, pull WVU out of there, and see what Morgantown is left with."

'A Tyranny of Distance'

The frustrations bubbling up in West Virginia are playing out across the country.

Lori Gilcrist, an education advocate in western North Carolina, has no problem with university students coming to rural areas and giving their time and effort.

However, she sees some university efforts to recruit rural students as uninformed by local realities - and programs that promise to "help," such as efforts to boost FAFSA completion, are often gone as quick as the grant cycle.

Often, researchers come in but aren't there to fix problems at the local level. Instead, they want to get enough of a rural sample size to suggest a national or statewide fix that doesn't account for variations in rurality.

As a result, many rural residents feel like big universities like UNC-Chapel Hill only nod to their needs while offering overly prescriptive solutions - an approach that creates and exacerbates long-simmering tensions.

That's particularly evident in North Carolina, where gaps exist between the state's rural areas and its Research Triangle, home to Chapel Hill and Duke University, among others.

The attitude is "I'm from Raleigh, and I'm here to help you," as Misti Silver, a program chair at local Mayland Community College, put it. As far as asking what they needed? The concept makes both Silver and Gilcrist chuckle. "Oh, absolutely not." "Lord no!"

Gilcrist is a white woman who was born in Mississippi, grew up in Alabama, and has lived in Appalachian North Carolina the last two decades.

Yet when she finds herself attending UNC rural-focused events in the Research Triangle, she often finds herself sitting in the back with rural Black folks from the eastern part of North Carolina. "There's no other people from the west there and I have more in common with those women," Gilcrist says.

During one such event at UNC-Chapel Hill, a rural resident noted that the less rural central and southern parts of the state already had access to NC Rural services, while the rural east and rural west did not.

When folks asked why, a staffer said those areas didn't have the money to pay for those UNC-affiliated programs in the unserved parts of the state, as Gilcrist says: "The problem is, we don't have the money to afford this because the funding streams systematically underfund rural programs like ours."

That feeling is also acute in Wyoming, where the flagship university in Laramie can be as much as an eight-hour drive from some rural communities.

"We face a tyranny of distance: I have never been in a rural environment that is so disconnected," says Scott Thomas, dean of the College of Education, as he takes a Zoom meeting with me from his parked car.

Thomas is well aware that such distances can foster distrust, especially if a flagship swoops in purporting to have all the answers. "There is a great deal of suspicion of higher education learning: We're like the Berkeley of Wyoming," he says.

That's why Thomas, a sociologist at heart, has focused on a new model for rural personalization while crafting an asynchronous, mostly online Master Educator Competency Program to start addressing some of the state's overall teacher retention challenges.

"We don't say 'This is your curriculum.' We say, "What do you need in your place?" he says, a process that led the university to realize that educators were less interested in hot-button issues, like civic education, and more curious about how to really create more student-centered environments at their schools.

The competency program, currently being piloted in seven districts, will also allow communities to shape a portion of the curriculum to fit their specific circumstances and needs. "We're listening a lot more, and making it accessible to everyone in the state, rather than expecting them to traverse to some site distant from where they are."

In the end, he hopes that level of community outreach, engagement, and ongoing input will become a model for professional development that can be adopted elsewhere.

"It's bringing the University of Wyoming to Wyoming. And that's different from, 'Hi, we're here from the university, and we're here to help.'"

Student loan forgiveness took center stage on Thursday at the American Federation of Teachers conference.

The Biden administration has canceled more than $62 billion in federal student debt for more than 871,000 public service workers nationwide, including teachers.

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris spoke at the conference, thanking educators for their work for children's well-being. She told them the administration sees a "future with affordable health care, affordable child care, and paid leave - not for some, but for all."

"We see a future where every student has the support and the resources they need to thrive, and a future where no teacher has to struggle with the burden of student loan debt," she said. "So, as an example, our administration has forgiven student loan debt for nearly 5 million Americans."

She pointed out that federal student debt relief plans, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, face potential threats from legal challenges and some resistance from Republicans in Congress.

A Pennsylvania recipient of student loan forgiveness introduced Vice President Harris. Brittany Shoup, a member of Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers Local 400, is a special-education teacher in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. Shoup said she had heard about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, but most people who applied for it didn't receive it during the last administration.

"The Biden/Harris administration fixed PSLF and made the process easy," she said. "So I applied and later had my student loans forgiven. This is a huge weight off my shoulders. And now, I help my fellow teachers get the debt forgiveness they deserve."

The AFT conference wrapped up Thursday in Houston, with more than 3,500 educators in attendance.


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As summer winds down and North Carolina students prepare to return to school, the focus shifts to the urgent need for better public education funding.

The future of North Carolina school funding may hinge on Leandro v. North Carolina a decadeslong court battle about the financial challenges many districts face.

Matthew Ellinwood, director of the Education and Law Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, stressed the crucial role of state funding in ensuring a quality education for every child.

"We're waiting to see what the decision will be for that but there's a lot at stake for families who are feeling these lack of resources in their schools locally," Ellinwood observed. "People need to understand the huge role that the state plays in funding our schools locally, because of what our Constitution said and the rights that it provides to families."

In recent years, the court developed the Leandro Plan, a comprehensive strategy to ensure the state meets students' constitutional rights to education, from early childhood education to college and career transitions. Earlier this year, the state court reheard the case, which could determine the state's obligations but there has been no ruling yet.

North Carolina ranks 49th in the U.S. for school funding, with 92% of students in underfunded districts. Ellinwood noted the Leandro Plan aims to bridge these gaps.

"To deal with the shortages that we're seeing in teachers across the state and the number of teachers who are leaving the profession," Ellinwood explained. "And get back the nationally recommended ratios for nurses, counselors and therapists. It's something that a lot of families are seeing are not in place in their school for their health and mental health needs."

Ellinwood predicted the plan would also help address the child care crisis in the state. He explained rising costs and the end of federal pandemic funds have worsened challenges for child care centers and schools, leading to closures.

"I think the state is doing some kind of Band-Aid to try to keep the system going but we really need a significant investment there and that is laid out in the Leandro Plan," Ellinwood emphasized. "In a really, again, comprehensive way, we need funding through different wages for the quality measures, to ensure that those are met and continue to be high quality."

State lawmakers have approved a $68 million emergency fund for child care. Despite it, the state Department of Health and Human Services warned of more closures this fall without more support.


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Some Illinois educators made their way to Texas this week for an American Federation of Teachers convention. AFT is one of the nation's largest labor unions for educators and school personnel, with nearly two-million members - including more than 100,000 in Illinois.

The organization promotes democracy, economic opportunity and quality public education. Earlier this week, AFT President Randi Weingarten spoke to attendees in Houston on the impact of public schools in Illinois and nationwide.

"Public schools are essential to our children's future and to our democracy. Every public school should be a place where families want to send their children, educators want to work, and all students thrive," said Weingarten.

Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to give today's keynote speech at the convention.

Illinois Federation of Teachers President Dan Montgomery echoes the union's reaction to President Joe Biden's announcement not to seek re-election. He expressed his gratitude for what he called Biden's "unwavering dedication" to the American people, including investments in public education.

The IFT also supports some issues unrelated to education. These include defending reproductive health and improving healthcare access, and fostering an economy that uplifts the middle class. Another battle many educators face is evolving technology aimed at youth. Weingarten called on social media giants to operate more responsibly.

"We're fighting back against the addictive and predatory practices of social media companies, demanding that they protect - not prey on - children, and we're focusing on artificial intelligence. AI can be a powerful tool, but there must be strong guardrails," she said.

According to the Illinois State Board of Education, there are 867 districts and nearly 3,900 public schools in the state, with an 88% graduation rate. The average annual teacher salary is $75,000.