New Woodburn Community School

SUPERINTENDENT: RESEARCH SHOWS WE HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO NOT STARVE KIDS! RESEARCH SHOWS! IT DOES!

“There has been research that shows hunger affects a child’s ability to learn,” said Monongalia County Schools Superintendent Frank Devono, at the school board meeting this past Tuesday, as reported in today’s Dominion Post. Well who would have thunk it?

Who but Superintendent Devono would think that research is needed to make such a point, that anyone would need to be convinced by research to know this, that anyone would need to hear of research to be concerned about denying children a day’s meal or two, or that “ability to learn” is the reason for the school district’s obligation, its imperative to feed children who lack money?

If research showed that hungry children actually learn more quickly would the the school district banish food from its domain?

And the phoniness. Superintendent Devono and company have been absolutely contemptuous of research all throughout Mon Schools’ largely secretive Woodburn and Easton school closing and siting process, in regard to a wide variety of humanitarian concerns for children, including vital safety and health issues, let alone the ability to learn.

The state basically requires that children go to school throughout the day, therefore the state should pay for the food the children need for the school day. Mon Schools’ should be pushing the state to fund all the children’s food. Mon Schools should be soliciting funds for food and for better food in addition to (or in place of) the multimillion dollars raised for an inherently dangerous sport like that big money pig: football. Instead Mon Schools pats itself on the back for standing up to the state’s insistence that it deny food to hungry children. Not a word reported that Mon Schools has done anything to raise money for food, or that Mon Schools actively pushes the state to take more responsibility for providing what it ought.

Why did Mon Schools not stand up to the state and its anti-educational, unsafe, and unhealthy consolidation of Easton and Woodburn Elementary? Oh, that’s right: because the school board’s and superintendent’s contempt for research and other knowledge about the well-being of the schoolchildren was, and remains, so great that they actively pushed for the dangerous fiasco, and continue to boast and preen about and attempt to justify the toxic idiocy. An act of pathetic comedy superceded only by its sheer negligence and unceasing menace.

The board and the superintendent are defensive about not having collected $240,000 in school lunch costs this past year. So all of a sudden citing research and their great humanitarian compassion for children, of which they are otherwise contemptuous, is laughable.

The state of West Virginia has allowed resource extraction companies to pillage the children of West Virginia forever, so the state should be viewed in the dimmest in of lights. The superintendent’s highly selective and oh so convenient recourse to research should be viewed in the same light.