Writing My Way to an Alumni Award

Passion projects are a staple in the diet of creative people. The work may pay little or nothing at all, but it doesn’t matter because the endeavors themselves are the reward.

I’ve had many passion projects as a writer — an article about a friend who died of cancer, an unpublished children’s book, a spiritual lesson I had engraved in wooden products, and a website for drone pilots, to name a few. I’ve also written blogs about everything from Congress, Twitter and presidential homes to adoption, religion and rednecks.

This year I added a new project to the list, and it came with a bonus. My high school recognized me as a distinguished alumnus.

The targeting of Paden City High School
I grew up in Paden City, a small town in West Virginia along the Ohio River. Paden City was a factory town in its heyday and is famous these days for being home to Marble King, the only U.S. manufacturer of marbles. The Paden City Marble Fest was last month.

The high school is the heart of the town, but it has been the target of consolidation dreamers in the county seat of New Martinsville for a while. Paden City residents beat back the first attempt to consolidate in 2010. Rumors of a renewed push surfaced in 2023.

I wondered whether the rumors were the result of leftover anxiety from the previous fight. I had just discovered a personal newsletter platform called Beehiiv, so I decided to try it by writing about school politics in Wetzel County.

My first article confirmed the rumors. The school board was open to consolidating some or all of the county’s high schools. Wetzel County has been losing people for decades (down from a peak of about 22,000 in 1979 to an estimated 13,786 in 2024), so fewer schools might make sense. Board members didn’t seem to be out to close Paden City High School in particular. They just explored that idea among multiple broader options.

But the tone quickly changed when the new school superintendent injected herself into the debate. She pitched the one idea everyone had avoided until then — merging PCHS into the junior high and high schools in New Martinsville. The trial balloon was in the air.

I stopped writing about the topic when a friend of mine filled a vacant seat on the school board. He spearheaded a successful effort to defeat the superintendent’s merger plan, and the prospect of consolidation faded into the background for a while. But another threat to PCHS was literally bubbling beneath the surface.

Paden City’s groundwater is polluted with a dangerous dry-cleaning chemical, to the point that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared a large chunk of the town a Superfund site. The high school is in the center of the site, which creates the possibility of vapor intrusion into the building. The dangers have been known for years, but when the timing was right, Superintendent Cassandra Porter seized on the situation as a pretext to unilaterally close PCHS.

She notified staff and students on June 11, 2024, and announced the closure publicly the next day. The closure took effect July 1.

The story ideas just kept coming
My friend’s term on the school board ended June 30, so I started digging into every aspect of the news to write about it again after that date. I only intended to write one comprehensive article, but the more I learned, the more ideas I had.

One came as I watched the June 25 school board meeting, the first after Porter announced her plan to close PCHS. Someone mentioned that a state education official had never heard of a school building atop a Superfund site. The Superfund program has existed since 1980. Surely it had happened sometime in that 44 years.

That thought led to my first story, which I published the day Paden City High School officially closed. “Getting Educated in a Superfund Mess” told the story of schools that are still open despite being within Superfund sites in New Jersey and California. The EPA touts one of those sites as a Superfund success story.

The July 4 holiday break gave me time to research and create a comprehensive timeline of Paden City history. It tracked two storylines that ran parallel for more than a decade — the discovery of the dry-cleaning chemical PCE in the town’s groundwater and the push to close PCHS. Those storylines crossed when Porter concluded the high school wasn’t safe.

The timeline laid the groundwork for the primary article I had planned to write, “Cassie Porter’s Crusade Against PCHS.” It connected the events of the past year into one coherent story of a superintendent determined to achieve a legacy of consolidation. Porter was shrewd. She forced the merger of PCHS and Magnolia only after she won a three-year contract, after the school year ended, and after the only board member from Paden City could not try to stop the plan.

My next article on July 12 was perfectly but coincidentally timed. My research into a broadly worded provision of state education law and a West Virginia Supreme Court case that indirectly mentioned the provision raised questions about the legalities of closing PCHS. “Don't believe everything the Wetzel County superintendent and school board say about the West Virginia code and court precedent,” the teaser for my essay said.

A few hours after that story went online, the PCHS community sued to block Porter’s closure of their high school, and a judge ordered that it be temporarily reopened. The court held a hearing 1 ½ weeks later, and the judge sided with PCHS. The 2024-25 school year started Aug. 19.

My most popular article to date was the one headlined “Everything Cassie Porter Got Wrong.” It was a report card for the top educator in Wetzel County, and she failed almost every subject.

A never-ending attack on Paden City
In between the judge’s two decisions, I wrote an essay that was more personal to me as a former journalist. I critiqued the bad journalism of three local newspapers that cover Wetzel County and the editor of two of those papers in particular. To the extent that they reported on Paden City at all, their coverage was soft and biased.

Later I defended the First Amendment rights of Paden City residents (and my own) when Wetzel County Schools deleted comments from Facebook and even blocked some people with Paden City ties from the the page. The school system eventually restored people’s access but has continued to selectively limit comments.

I also used the West Virginia Freedom of Information Act to get information that county school officials would rather keep to themselves — namely the money they’ve spent on legal fees and consolidation planning. And sources told me that Porter personally paid one bill to avoid a potential contempt-of-court charge for trying to block Paden City’s Oct. 11 homecoming game against Hundred High School, another Wetzel County school.

While Porter wasn’t able to close PCHS under presumed emergency powers, now she and the school board are moving to reconfigure all four county high schools by legal means. PCHS would be closed in the first phase of their plan of consolidation by chaos, but Porter’s bigger plan is to have one new high school for all students.

I hate that my home town and alma mater are still under attack. But as long as I have the energy, I will be their advocate in this newsletter.