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Seven things WV legislators say you need to know to make your idea state policy

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Home-PolicyWorkshopsOn Tuesday, July 22, about 125 West Virginians gathered in Clarksburg at the Our Children Our Future Northern Regional Policy Workshop to learn about state policy advocacy and get advice on how to advance their ideas to help end child poverty.

Tim Miley (D – Harrison), Speaker of the House; Jeff Kessler (D – Marshall), Senate President; Senator Bob Beach (D – Monongalia); and Delegates Barbara Fleischauer (D – Monongalia) and Linda Longstreth (D – Marion) came out to meet the community representatives and offer advice and support during a lunchtime panel.  When asked what tips they would give to the policy advocates in the room, the legislators had several pieces of advice.Read More

Morgan County woman works to keep family services in Eastern Panhandle

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Morgan County sees about 20 pregnancies in young people between the ages of 10 and 19 every year. For each of the last two years, the Middle School has had a pregnant student.

For Audrey Morris, who has been the Director at the Morgan County Starting Points Center since 1999, those statistics are outrageous.  “Whenever I hear of 11-year-olds, who are pregnant, or children being abused, it makes me angry, and that’s why I’m still here,” Morris says. “People don’t understand how if you are abused as a child it impacts the rest of your life.”

Audrey

Audrey Morris

Morris applied to the Governor’s Cabinet on Children and Family, for the original grant to fund the Morgan County Starting Points Center after someone told her it would be a more effective way to work on the issue of teen pregnancy prevention. At the time, Morris, a Morgan County native, had been working on the issue with the WVU Extension Service because the county had the third highest rate of teen pregnancy.Read More

How regular physical activity for youth became WV school policy

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Home-PolicyWorkshopsShortly after Laura Dice moved back to West Virginia in 2012 and took a job as the Coordinator for Keys 4 HealthyKids  in Charleston, she attended a Kanawha County School Wellness meeting, where a parent came forward to say that his son wasn’t getting any exercise at school.  His complaint was just one of many that Dice was hearing. Keys 4 HealthyKids advocates physical activity for children, so Dice began to really look at the claims.

What she found was troubling. Overall there was a lack of data about activity for students in the state’s public schools. For example, statewide, there is no requirement for recess, and sometimes it is taken away during testing periods.  With no data, there was no information about which schools had recess and which didn’t. Anecdotally, Dice heard when there was bad weather, students wouldn’t go outside, even if they did have recess, for months at a time. Meanwhile West Virginia is the fourth most obese state in the nation, and about 18.5 percent of its young people age 10-17 are obese.Read More