The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

(Darren Dugan) #1

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C7


ready for school when the day
came. Working with the organiza-
tion Parents to Te achers, she
brought children’s books and
crafts, showing Stanley activities
that would give Marabella a foun-
dation to learn reading, math and
writing. The goal is to close the
gap in preparation between mid-
dle-class children and their im-
poverished peers. Research shows
that by the t ime children in pover-
ty enter kindergarten, they al-
ready lag behind other, better-off
students.
But Stanley said Pace did more
than prepare her children for
school. She brought donated
clothes and diapers when Stanley
could not afford them. Stanley
said Pace felt like her only friend
as she battled drug addiction.
Once, after a bad fight with her
husband, she drove off with her
two children — and landed on
Pace’s d oorstep.
“I pretty much l ost all hope, and
it felt like there was nothing for
me to pretty much live for,” said
Stanley, recalling the throes of
drug addiction. “She h elped m e in
more ways than I could even ex-
plain.”

N


one o f these t hings can help
tackle an intractable prob-
lem f acing McDowell Coun-
ty and rural school systems e very-
where: a lack of teachers. At
Mount View High School, which
sits in adjacent buildings built on
an abandoned strip mine, a fifth of
teaching positions are vacant or
filled by long-term substitutes
who may be doing little more than
babysitting students. The school
has not had a full-time English
teacher for ninth- and 10th-grad-
ers for three years, said Debra
Hall, the h igh school principal.
This year, desperate for a quali-
fied instructor, Hall started using
a program called Proximity
Learning. A certified teacher,
working remotely, gives live les-
sons over Skype three days a week.
The rest of the time, students
work on their own and turn in
their a ssignments v irtually.
For Miranda Osborne, a top
student in the senior class, the
rotating cast of teachers and sub-
stitutes has proved frustrating.
And she blames the high school’s
persistently low test scores on the
teacher vacancy p roblem.
“With the substitutes and all of
that, it’s hard for a kid to get
immersed in it,” Osborne said.
The vacancies have created oth-
er issues. Students have grown
distrustful of new instructors, of-
ten asking upon their arrival:
“How long are you going to stay?”
And the high school can’t offer
many electives. Osborne has al-
ready taken all of the classes of-
fered at this campus. So this year,
she’s t aking college classes online,
an experience that can be isolat-
ing.
Hall knows the dearth of hous-
ing and the slow parade of busi-
nesses leaving has made it diffi-
cult to attract teachers. And she is
skeptical a single building in
downtown Welch will make much
of a difference. The solutions in
the meantime, she said, are far
from ideal.
“It isn’t fair,” Hall said. “But it’s
the best I can do.”
[email protected]

East aims to help her staff see
the behavior of students through
the lens of what the children
might b e experiencing outside the
classroom — something that has
transformed a spects of the s chool.
This year, teachers learned how
trauma at home — an unstable
family, a shortage of food, a parent
on drugs or in jail — can cause a
child to act out.
Discipline at Welch Elemen-
tary now looks different. Children
who break the rules are sent to
Kimberley Newbill, a social work-
er whose official title is “attitude
and behavior coach.” Newbill tries
to determine the root of the mis-
behavior and help students devel-
op coping mechanisms.
At lunchtime one day, a half-
dozen students lingered in her
classroom for detention. But rath-
er than have them sit idly at d esks,
Newbill had them arrange them-
selves on mats. In this classroom,
hundreds of miles from the near-
est beach, at a school where many
children s carcely leave the county,
she switched on a relaxing guided
meditation recording.
“Listen to the seagulls. Listen to
the water,” Newbill told the stu-
dents, who stood quietly, eyes
closed. “ Focus on that.”

N


ot far from the ground-
breaking, on a hill near
Welch’s downtown, 33-
year-old Misty Stanley lives in a
rowhouse painted bright green
that sits atop a steep set of broken
steps. For Stanley, the help from
the county came even before her
youngest daughter, Marabella, set
foot in Welch Elementary.
Pace, the Communities in
Schools coordinator, arrived at
Stanley’s home with the mission
of ensuring Marabella would be

would miss s chool.
So East brings as many health
care workers as she can to the
school. Mental health providers
from local clinics send psycholo-
gists and therapists to see young
patients for appointments, con-
verting empty classrooms into
makeshift offices. It allows them
to communicate directly with
teachers about a child’s p rogress.
One day in early September, a
mobile dental team arrived before
the first bell rang, turning a com-
puter lab into a dentist’s office.
There, hygienists and a dentist
inspected and cleaned teeth amid
posters warning about the dan-
gers of the I nternet and encourag-
ing students to “always be polite”
online.
“I’d rather do this than math,”
said Pace’s son, Braxton, 8, before
settling into t he dental chair.

basic needs,” Welch Elementary
School Principal Kristy East said
of students. Nearly 70 percent of
her students come from low-in-
come families, according to state
data, and many come with issues
— trauma, depression, illnesses —
that teachers felt ill-equipped to
deal with. “We were realizing that
it’s more than what the school
system can do,” East said.
As she struggled to tackle ab-
senteeism, East discovered that
many children were missing a full
day of school because they or their
siblings had a dental or medical
appointment. Because of a short-
age of medical professionals in the
impoverished county, many peo-
ple have to drive an hour or more
on the county’s winding, two-lane
roads to see a doctor or a dentist.
For a family with one car, it meant
that every child in that household

necessity and partly because oth-
er measures have failed. The state
took over the schools in the early
2000s, handpicking administra-
tors and s uperintendents with t he
hopes that new leadership could
turn the district around. It did
not, said Gayle Manchin, wife of
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.),
who served on the West Virginia
Board of Education from 2007 to
2015.
“It didn’t take much investiga-
tion... to see that the problems
went a lot deeper than the super-
intendent and the classroom,”
said Manchin, who now serves on
the board of the U.S. Commission
on International Religious Free-
dom. So she contacted Weingar-
ten, and together they hatched a
plan to expand the county’s exist-
ing efforts to tackle the roots and
the symptoms of poverty through
an alliance called Reconnecting
McDowell. The apartment build-
ing is their crowning achieve-
ment.
And so the McDowell County
schools have tried to meet stu-
dents’ needs, large and small,
from connecting them with psy-
chologists to providing them with
lip balm — an often-overlooked
necessity for children who endure
long waits for the school bus in
cold weather.
“You’ve heard before that it
takes a village to raise a child,” s aid
Shannon Pace, the coordinator of
Communities in Schools, a drop-
out prevention initiative. As part
of her job, she manages reams of
donations and secures sneakers,
undergarments, jackets, back-
packs and yes, lip balm, for needy
students. “We are rebuilding that
proverbial village.”
“They’re not able to access the
learning part until we meet their

instructors and substitutes.
Slated to be completed in the
spring, the building will have 16
apartments and two floors of com-
mercial and retail space. The $8.5
million project is being funded by
the teachers union, tax credits a nd
a capital campaign and is the first
multistory building to be con-
structed in McDowell County in
50 years, according to the union.
The building represents the lat-
est in the county’s ambitious ef-
forts to boost academic achieve-
ment by first tackling the effects of
rural poverty — including a lack of
suitable housing.
Built i nto the verdant, tree-cov-
ered slopes of the Appalachian
Mountains, this county was once
among the nation’s largest pro-
ducers of coal. There was a strong
middle class and a robust busi-
ness district in downtown Welch.
The decline of the coal industry
devastated the county, with popu-
lation losses accelerated by natu-
ral disasters, including a pair of
ferocious floods that struck in
2001 and 2002. The arrival of opi-
oids sparked another catastrophe.
At one point, McDowell County
had the second-highest rate of
deaths from prescription opioids,
a number 13 times the national
average. Fewer than a dozen coun-
ties in the nation have a lower life
expectancy. This convergence of
events has made McDowell the
poorest county in what by some
measures is the poorest state in
the union, a distinction that resi-
dents h ave internalized.
The events that have befallen
McDowell County — a nd its isolat-
ing geography — have created a
constellation of challenges for
schoolchildren: absent parents,
overwhelmed grandparents, a
dearth of medical care, a lack of
grocery stores and all of the trau-
mas associated with household
poverty. More than 40 percent of
elementary schoolchildren live in
multigenerational households —
with parents and grandparents —
or are raised by grandparents and
other r elatives.
The school system faces a
daunting challenge: With so
many having abandoned the
county, how could it ensure its
children w ere not left behind?

T


he shifts that have beset Mc-
Dowell County are happen-
ing all over the country.
With the growing recognition of
the ways poverty can impede
learning, schools are playing a
larger role in meeting the basic
needs of children: feeding them,
clothing them and connecting
them w ith medical care and coun-
seling. T here i s evidence, t oo, that
schools are educating a larger pro-
portion of students from low-in-
come households. The Southern
Education Foundation, analyzing
2013 data, found that a majority o f
U.S. schoolchildren qualified for
free- and reduced-price meals, the
first time that threshold had been
breached in five decades.
The driving principle is that
children w ho come to school hun-
gry or traumatized or sick are not
poised to succeed academically
until those problems are ad-
dressed. McDowell County has
taken this to heart, partly out of

WELCH FROM C1

OBITUARIES


BY ADAM BERNSTEIN

Alan Diamonstein, a power
broker in the Virginia Democratic
Party who represented Newport
News in the House of Delegates
for 34 years and championed
greater s tate investment in higher
education, died Oct. 17 at his
home in Newport News. He was
88.
The cause was a heart ailment,
said a grandson, Ben Allen.
A confidant of governors, sena-
tors and even a president, Mr.
Diamonstein was described as
understatedly savvy and enviably
connected. He was a successful
commercial and real estate law-
yer who blended Tidewater bon-
homie with a ringmaster’s o rgani-
zational skills, and he cultivated
the financial resources and per-
sonal relationships to advance in
state and national politics.
He served in the House of Del-
egates from 1968 to 2002, repre-
senting a district along the James
River that included Fort Eustis
and the Newport News shipyard.
He preferred backroom negotia-
tions to media interviews and
steadily advanced to chair the
Education and Appropriations
committees, giving him leverage
over policy as well as funding.
The Daily Press of Newport
News once described him as “Mr.
Inside, lobbing tennis balls with
the state’s most powerful lobby-
ists, flying to be with his friend
Bill Clinton on election night,

playing host to state power bro-
kers in his box at the presidential
inaugural gala, squatting in duck
blinds with millionaires who are
building Virginia and deciding its
future course.”
First elected to the state House
on a promise to empty what he
called “the dustbin of Virginia
politics,” referring to the racist
Byrd political machine and its
resistance to desegregating
schools, he helped prepare the
way for moderate Democratic
governors throughout the 1980s
and early 1990s: Charles S. Robb,
Gerald L. Baliles and L. Douglas
Wilder, the last of whom became
the country’s first popularly elect-
ed black governor.
Mr. Diamonstein chaired the
state Democratic Party in the mid-
1980s, around the same time he
was elected to the executive com-
mittee of the Democratic National
Committee and led its Southern
bloc. He advocated a centrist
brand of politics that presaged the
rise of President Clinton, another
moderate Southerner.
“He fit the changing Democrat-
ic Party almost perfectly,” said
Larry J. Sabato, founder and di-
rector of the University of Vir-
ginia Center for Politics.
In R ichmond, Mr. Diamonstein
became known for soothing
bruised egos in a party known for
fierce rivalries and nasty f euds. In
the early 1990s, he showed un-
bending loyalty to then-Sen.
Robb, who saw his presidential

ambitions plummet amid a sex,
drug and wiretapping scandal.
Robb stayed at Mr. Diamonstein’s
home in Newport News during
part of the ordeal.
On policy matters, Mr. Diamon-
stein left a n enduring mark on the
state’s higher education system.
He backed legislation to allow the
admission of undergraduate
women to the flagship state uni-
versity in Charlottesville (where
he was an alumnus) and support-
ed bills to increase f unding for the
public university system’s general
operations and student aid.

He also helped create the Vir-
ginia Housing Development Au-
thority to help low-income resi-
dents attain affordable housing
and used his clout to place women
and minorities on state boards
and commissions. Admired for
his pragmatic streak, Mr. Dia-
monstein was one of a handful of
legislators who served on a pow-
erful committee that helps r esolve
budget differences between the
General Assembly’s two cham-
bers.
“A lan’s one of these people
[who] is a very good barometer on

what will clearly fly, on what
clearly won’t fly, and what the
person might negotiate,” former
attorney general Mary Sue Te rry
(D) once told the Daily Press.
Mr. Diamonstein’s dealmaking
prowess allowed him to top off the
pork barrel f or his district, specifi-
cally funding the Mariners’ Mu-
seum and colleges such as Chris-
topher Newport University.
With a reversal of Democratic
fortunes and the GOP takeover of
the General Assembly by the late
1990s, Mr. Diamonstein saw his
previously unalloyed power
weaken. He d id not run for reelec-
tion in 2001, instead making an
unsuccessful run against then-
Richmond Mayor Tim Kaine (D)
for lieutenant governor. He re-
turned after that race to full-time
law practice at his Newport News
firm.
Alan Arnold Diamonstein was
born in Hampton, Va., on Aug. 20,


  1. His father owned a furniture
    store and later a telephone an-
    swering service. His mother was
    active in Jewish philanthropies
    and women’s groups.
    A graduate of the old Augusta
    Military Academy near Staunton,
    Va., Mr. Diamonstein served in
    the Air Force during the Korean
    War. He received a bachelor’s de-
    gree in commerce from the Uni-
    versity of Virginia in 1955 and
    graduated from its law school in

  2. (He later served on the uni-
    versity’s Board of Visitors.)
    His first marriage, to Barbara-


lee Dworkin, ended in divorce. In
1972, he married Beverly Hicks. In
addition to his wife, of Newport
News, survivors include four step-
children, Candice Trusty of Mi-
ami, Trey Diamonstein of Hamp-
ton and Karen Allen and Kevin
Diamonstein, both of Newport
News; a sister; and five grandchil-
dren.
Mr. Diamonstein was generally
reluctant to draw attention to
himself, but he occasionally al-
lowed a glimmer of his diffident
charm to shine through in an
interview.
To the Daily Press, he recalled
the time the film company mak-
ing “Giant” ( 1956) — a big-budget
production starring Elizabeth
Ta ylor, Rock Hudson and James
Dean — came to Charlottesville to
hire extras for crowd sequences
filmed in Virginia.
Mr. Diamonstein agreed to par-
ticipate and, by his account, for a
few weeks did little more than
unobtrusively fill screen space —
only to have his scenes scissored
out in the final cut. But when he
returned to campus on a bus with
some of the cast, he shared in the
hollers of enthusiasm from auto-
graph seekers.
“Elizabeth Ta ylor would sign
some... and Rock Hudson would
sign some, and they’d come to me,
and I’d sign some,” Mr. Diamon-
stein said. “Could you imagine a
kid getting home and saying,
‘A lan Diamonstein?’ ”
[email protected]

ALAN DIAMONSTEIN, 88

Longtime Virginia delegate helped pave the way for moderate Democrats


To help kids, schools focus on poverty


ROBERT A. REEDER/THE WASHINGTON POST
Thomas W. Moss Jr. (D), left, speaker of the Virginia House,
confers with Alan Diamonstein (D) in 1998. Mr. Diamonstein
represented Newport News for 34 years, from 196 8 to 2 002.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: Downtown Welch, once home to a robust business district.
ABOVE: Robert Slagle, 7 9, with his great granddaughter Kaitana,
10, in their home. More than 4 0 percent of elementary students in
McDowell County are living in multigenerational households.
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