| By Bob Weaver
Tonight's Calhoun High commencement exercise, while a joyful occasion, has some somber messages.
The most notable is the number of students graduating.
This year, Calhoun High School will graduate 69 students, a record low since those first graduating classes in the 1920s and 30s.
The Class of 2005 had 109 members enrolled during it's Freshman year. Forty students have dropped-out, transfered or moved.
Last year there were 108 graduates in the class of 2004.
Calhoun's school enrollment continues to decline as child-bearing parents continue a 60 year trend to leave the county to find employment.
Calhoun citizens complain a lot about this exodus.
Available jobs are centered around interstate or "modern" highways, even those information super-highway jobs that politicians say can be located anywhere.
Most of West Virginia's rural counties have neither "highway".
The US Census Bureau predicts little if any population growth in Calhoun and rural WV counties in the next 25 years.
Fewer students than ever are enrolling in Calhoun's two elementary schools.
Those schools, Arnoldsburg and Pleasant Hill, could soon be unable to meet the state's "economies of scale" requirement to keep their doors open.
They will likely be moved into the empty spaces at Calhoun Middle-High School.
Small community schools, the state says, provides limited opportunities. Bigger is better, more efficient.
The work situation has gotten worse since several thousand jobs have left the region, jobs that Calhoun workers once held.
Most of our local workers have been commuting 50 to 100 miles daily, one-way.
Those jobs have been "globalized," leaving the US for cheap labor markets in Mexico, China, India and other countries.
Heaping further pain in the jaws of defeat, is the high price of gasoline, necessary to make out-of-county commutes.
I was reminded (yesterday) that kids have been leaving our backwoods county since World War II, when we belatedly made the transition from farming to the industrial age.
Few have had the luxury of staying here in this peaceful place.
Kids leaving, I was told, is not always a bad thing, in fact, most of them want to leave and seek their fame and fortune in the big world of opportunity.
It is good for them, they said, like the hungry and parched leaving a desert to find sustenance in a bountiful land,
Old timers like myself would like to see them stay and become vital members of this community and end the so-called "brain drain."
It is wishful thinking.
Unlike my generation, few of them will be connected to their place of origin.
They are members of this new global order created by corporate government, no moss under their feet, accepting transition and change at the drop of a hat.
Hopefully, they will be able to reminisce and pine about their life, changing jobs and traveling from one place to another.
My view of disorder will become orderly to them. They might even be happy, and that is my prayer for them.
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