I don’t have children so I’ve had not experience with the local school systems. But I do know a bunch of local (Berkeley County) teachers, active and retired, and they have uniformly impressed me with their intelligence, dedication, professionalism, and love for teaching kids.
Teaching is a honored profession in West Virginia, and you may remember the famous teachers’ strike back in 2018. My neighbor was in a book club with several of its leaders and one night, through a series of unexpected events, I found myself at a book club dinner with them. It was a fascinating evening.
On Tuesday I read that Berkeley County had hired a new school supervisor, Ryan Saxe, who had just resigned from that position in Cabell County. His name seemed familiar, so I looked him up.
First I found this:
Adam Cheeseman, 2023 WV Superintendent of the Year, and Dr. Eugenia Lambert, Marshall University chair of Leadership Studies, presented Saxe with the award. He will represent the Mountain State as a candidate for the 2025 AASA National Superintendent of the Year. That award will be announced in February 2025 at the National Education Conference.
According to Cabell County Schools, the district has increased graduation rates for all students and academic achievements since Saxe’s term as superintendent began. Saxe also helped the school district form partnerships with local colleges and universities to help students earn college credits while still in high school, helping to remove some barriers for them to pursue higher education.
Dr. Saxe also helped the school district pass the state’s largest school construction bond issue to renovate two high schools, construct three new elementary schools and construct the Woody Williams Center for Advanced Learning and Careers, Cabell County Schools says.
OK, seems promising, right? Except here in Dollar Store Gilead we can’t have nice things.
While in Cabell County Saxe removed all elementary school librarians under the guise of creating a balanced budget. His solution to the problem of children not knowing how to use a library? They could use the local public library. You can guess what happened next: the Board of Education had the responsibility for funding public libraries and the very nice Cabell County park system, and Saxe and his buddies came for library and park funding, while going forward with plans to build a new school, in a school district that has lost enrollees in the post-Covid world.
Oh and Saxe got some nice raises every year, too.
In the end the voters mobilized and defeated his levy plan and will try again in the fall. And Saxe jumped ship to a new county.
There’s no question that WV schools are in trouble, with the post-Covid era’s lower enrollments and accordingly lower state funding. But extremists always come for the libraries. I’ll let a librarian explain why public libraries are so important:
She said books are the centerpiece of the libraries. But she noted they also provide knitting clubs, toddler time, story hours, audio-books, 3-D printers, help for homeschooling parents, genealogy databases, teen internships and even in-house social workers.
Libraries provide free notary services and computer access for people who wouldn’t otherwise have it. They also bring books to homebound people.
[deletia]
Less library funding might be felt the most at smaller branches in the Cabell library system.
At the West Huntington Public Library, Olivia Picklesimer, branch manager, noted that it’s a low-income area and many patrons are seniors.
She said if her branch closes, her patrons who don’t have cars won’t have any library to visit.
Latchkey kids also go to the library after school or during the summer because their parents are working but still can’t pay for childcare.
Some people who are homeless visit the library during the day to get out of the heat or cold, and some people who stay in homeless shelters are required to leave during the day.
“We’re the last place that population can go where they can just go to just be, to just exist,” she said. “And if we’re gone, where are they gonna go?”
And that’s why extremists hate public schools and public libraries—they are places for community and ways to gather in the people left behind in society: poor people, kids, unhoused people, vulnerable people. It’s harder to scare people when they are together.
I’ll close with a song about all of us standing together:
Right-wing extremists hate public schools , public libraries , public housing , public transportation , public broadcasting , public-sector unions , public financing of elections , and anything else that benefits the public. If you’re part of the American public , the right wing hates you.