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Next year’s hottest accessory: iron lungs

Children — some as young as toddlers just learning to walk, some well into their adolescence — with metal braces caging each leg, crutches tucked up under their armpits to hold them upright, while still others sat wheelchair bound. And they were the lucky ones. Some children disappeared into the gaping mechanical maws of iron lungs, only their small heads visible, cradled on thin white pillows, as the enormous machine performed for them the bodily functions necessary to survive. These are the images, in black and white, that haunt us from a bygone era. The word “polio” ...

The place where healing happens

On Aug. 1, the Monongalia County Child Advocacy Center cut the ribbon on the center’s 700-square-foot addition and ceremonially welcomed the community to explore not just the new space, but all that MCCAC has to offer. And just what does the center offer? In a word: Help. The MCCAC has four primary programs: the Child Advocacy Center Program, the Community Education Program, the Preventative Care Program and the Drug Endangered Children Program. The first is what the MCCAC is known for: This is the service for children who have suffered abuse or traumatizing neglect. The ...

Is facial rec school security’s future?

Marion County announced this week that it plans to add facial recognition technology to its schools in the near future, in partnership with Rank One Computing. The idea behind the upgrade is to use the tech — which matches the facial features of a visitor to a database of images to identify the person — to pinpoint potential threats to the school or students inside. In the vast majority of schools, visitors — or anyone wishing to enter the building after the first bell rings — have to be buzzed into the front office, where they are supposed to sign in and state their ...

Things to know before you decide to recall council

The effort to recall all seven members of Morgantown City Council has stepped up a notch. It seems the more than a month of word-of-mouth recruitment hasn’t garnered the 3,849 signatures required to trigger a recall election, so organizer Todd Stainbrook has said he and others will start going door-to-door. (Stainbrook ran as a write-in candidate for Morgantown’s 7th Ward during the 2019 council race and ran for a seat in the West Virginia House of Delegates in 2020 — and was unsuccessful both times.) Stainbrook has narrowed his focus to the “low morale and mass ...

Get ready — WVU students coming to Morgantown

In case you haven’t noticed the uptick in traffic or the proliferation of fresh-faced youth in the grocery stores — West Virginia University students are coming back to Morgantown this week. “Welcome Week” at the university begins tomorrow and extends through Tuesday, with classes starting Aug. 17. So here are some things to keep in mind as students flood the University City. Traffic will be much worse. We get spoiled every summer with 30,000 fewer cars on the roads and drastically shortened commute times. But, now that students are back, it will take longer to get, well, ...

Taxpayers spent a lot for special session flop

The Legislature’s special session that concluded Friday, July 29, was a massive waste of taxpayers’ money — at $35,000 a day for five days for a grand total of $175,000, to be exact. You likely don’t need us to tell you what that kind of money could have paid for, other than a week of legislators squabbling and producing nothing of value. Even with wasteful spending put aside, the special session was a total flop. Legislators had been clear that Gov. Jim Justice’s income tax cut proposal was virtually a nonstarter. And then, to throw instructions for the Legislature to ...