Meet the High School Student Who Stood Up for His Community and the Environment

https://wvpolicy.substack.com/p/kat-weiland-wv-house-district-17 Meet my friend, Kat Weiland Learn more at : https://weiland4wv.com Conservative Policy Action mailers

What I found at this address: * Cardinal Financial Company, Limited Partnership * CROSSCOUNTRY MORTGAGE LLC CROSSCOUNTRY MORTGAGE LLC

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR EXPLANATION I found the original source of the Fletcher Consultants, LLC expenditure after the audio was recorded.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR EXPLANATION

Last Tuesday, Fayette County cut two ribbons. The first was in Hico, at the new Midland Trail Elementary. The superintendent told MetroNews the opening “brings to a close” the consolidation plan the state approved in July 2017. “The last decade there’s been a lot of change,” he said. The second was in Fayetteville, on High Street, where a U.S. senator and the state tourism secretary opened Hill Hall, a 40-room boutique hotel inside the 1923 stone building that used to be Fayetteville High School and the brick building next to it that used to be Fayetteville Middle School. The TV station’s headline was “From Pirates to pillowcases.” One ribbon closed the book on the plan that ended my high school. The other opened the hotel in the building where I learned long division. Same county. Same afternoon. Nobody planned it that way. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. I should tell you where I’m standing before I tell you what I see. In the 1990s, Fayetteville Middle School was two buildings. Sixth grade had the old stone one, the 1923 building the hotel now calls Hill Hall. Seventh and eighth were next door in the brick one. There was no cafeteria, so every day we walked down to the elementary school on Wiseman Avenue to eat lunch, in a line that never once stayed a line. The press releases call it a “historic school campus.” To me it was tall windows, a hallway that echoed, and the smell of the lunchroom at the bottom of the hill. I graduated from Fayetteville High in 2003. By then the high school was the newer campus on West Maple, but graduation was still at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Building, the way it had always been. I was captain of the dance team that year. We brought a trophy home from the Battle of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and for a few weeks it felt like the whole town knew. In my yearbook there’s a baby ad my parents bought. “Our Daughter.” A picture of me as a little kid holding an alphabet book. A note telling me to set my goals high and that they’d be there through every phase of my life. Signed: Love, Mom, Dad, and Jeffery. Jeffery is my little brother. None of us knew that sixteen years later he’d walk across the same stage at Soldiers and Sailors as part of the last class Fayetteville High School would ever graduate. Class of 2019. The last Pirates. Our baby sister, Kaylee, should have been the Class of 2023. There was no Fayetteville High for her. She finished at Oak Hill instead. She’s a senior at WVU now, studying elementary education. Of the three of us, the one who never got a Fayetteville diploma is the one who chose to spend her life in a classroom. I think about that more than I expected to. Here is the part I owe you before any of my feelings count for anything. The closing of Fayetteville High School was not sudden and it was not hidden. Fayette County had been voting down school bonds for as long as anyone could remember. The state took over the district, and bad buildings were part of the reason. By September 2016 the School Building Authority had signed off on a plan to trim 18 schools to 11 and keep only two of the existing high schools, Midland Trail and Oak Hill. Fayetteville wasn’t one of them. The SBA put up $22.6 million that December. On May 16, 2017, the county school board voted 4–1 to go from 18 schools to 11. On July 12, the state board signed off. For Fayetteville, the wording was plain: after the 2018–19 school year, “Fayetteville High School will turn into a pre-K through eighth-grade school” and its students would go to Oak Hill. The reasons were the reasons you’d expect. Old buildings. Fewer kids. No money. A state that had run out of patience. There is one small line in the record I keep coming back to. On April 18, 2017, the Fayetteville Elementary principal wrote to the county commission asking to borrow folding chairs from the Memorial Building for the school’s closure hearing, set for 4:30 on the evening of May 8 in the elementary gym. The same lett