Gov. Joe Manchin III state of state address: Killing two birds with one stone

Since his first state of the state address in 2005 to his recent address Wednesday, Gov. Joe Manchin III has been bird hunting.
His goals from the start have been about joining two ideas for maximum improvement to the state. He has been killing two birds with one stone. In 2005 Manchin started well and showed he had good experience in the game. He stated five promises he would make to West Virginia children. These promises would aim to improve health, safety, environment and adult care of the state’s younger generations and by doing so, would help to create a viable work force for West Virginia’s future.
In the following years the governor started many initiatives in various areas to fulfill his promises. He has expanded children’s health care by providing health screenings for kindergartners and announced in his recent address the Children’s Health Insurance Project covers almost every child in West Virginia. He has also worked to protect children’s parents by taking measures on mine safety with more than 300 rescue chambers and installing additional technology for tracking communication during accidents. Environments that harbor illegal drugs are also being targeted in Operation Addiction and cities will be fined for areas not being kept up to standard.
These initiatives have been slowly added upon since 2005 and most have produced very successful results, one example being a record low of mine fatalities last year.
As the children grow older the governor has continued work to put 90 programs into community and technical colleges to train students to be able to go right into the workforce. However, the killing two birds with one stone idea stops there. Enrollment has increased in the schools and 2008 saw the highest number of West Virginians working according to his 2008 address. However, graduation rates are at an all time low. The governor stated in his recent address that the “United States and Germany are the only western democracies in which parents are more likely to have earned a college degree than their children” and only 16 in 100 ninth graders in West Virginia will graduate high school.
The governor’s plan is to increase graduation rate by freezing college tuition rates for the coming school year. However, this is happening at the same time that he is taking a 3.4 cut on school’s budgets. It seems the governor is not doing a good job at hunting this time around. To keep graduates in school the education has to be high quality and that is not what the governor is getting in these initiatives. All he is doing is cutting the money that goes to schools and he is centralizing the schools by making these broad rules over them.
West Virginia senator Pat McGeehan in The Review said that schools in West Virginia actually need to be decentralized to increase the quality of education and keep good teachers. It also hurts that teachers are not getting annual salary raises this year and are only being provided annual employee increments.
While thinking through the early years of children and all its factors it involves, the governor has failed to apply that complexity to the needs of West Virginia’s older children. The governor has provided programs for the schools to offer job training but the lack of student interest to stay in the schools needs to be addressed.