New Chapmanville Regional High School
By Dianne Weaver
The newly created $23 million Chapmanville Regional High School has been dedicated, mostly built by School Building Authority funding to provide service to Logan and neighboring Lincoln County. About 200 Harts community students (Lincoln County) are attending the school.
At the dedication ceremony, Sen. Earl Ray Tomblyn lauded State Superintendent of Schools Dr. Steve Paine for his effort to globalize education in West Virginia, telling the student body that with the new two-county school "You will be competing with your peers in China and Asia and workers around the world," for jobs.
Tomblyn didn't elaborate that most, such jobs pay low wages, are unsafe and without benefits.
Challenge WV fellow Thomas Ramey said "Much like schools of choice, global education has a good ring, but in the end, the control of education is being removed from citizen boards and local communities."
Ramey said, "It surely is the destruction of a system based on community life and values and place-based education."
Ramey says the two-county school places the current Lincoln school bond in a tenuous position, saying it "Becomes taxation without representation."
Paine's globalized initiative, is for WV to be the leader in global education, while the state is generally languishing near the bottom with outcomes.
 Paine (pictured left) says WV must surpass the NCLB standards that guide elementary and secondary education.
Considering that China is expected to be a major economic engine, Paine is promoting the teaching of Chinese in state schools.
"Merging, centralizing, consolidating and globalizing are economic movements that destroy communities, our schools and institutions that we value as Americans," said Ramey.
Challenge WV coordinator Linda Martin asked "Whatever happened to giving children a broad-based education toward becoming critical thinkers?"
"This sounds like corporate education, destructive to a democratic society." she said.
Martin has said "A global citizen is a citizen of nowhere."
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