Op-Ed Commentaries

As the past chairman of the West Virginia Section of the American Water Works Association, I have spent much of my career working alongside water professionals from every corner of our state.

I continue to read newspaper articles referring to the "high school transfer portal," yet there is no official transfer portal in West Virginia high school athletics, just very loose transfer rules.

Richard Henry Dana Jr. didn’t plan on becoming a sailor. He was a student at Harvard when illness affected him so badly that he could no longer study.

School buses are rolling and classroom lights are back on. Hallways are once again filled with laughter, excitement and the promise of a new school year. Across West Virginia, thousands of educators, service personnel, administrators and support staff are welcoming students back into our pub…

Across the American Heartland, a different industrial revolution is quietly reshaping the landscape. Down rural highways, heavy haulers roll past grain silos toward rising gigafactories, battery hubs and advanced nuclear sites. In towns long defined by legacy manufacturing, the modern workfo…

West Virginia is often portrayed to the world by its mountains, rivers, coalfields, small towns and urban centers.

Across West Virginia, families are preparing for another school year. 

Growing up in McDowell County, I heard my grandparents talk about the town of Welch as “Little New York,� a city that brought people in from other small towns for shopping and gathering with their families.

I have never done political consulting. So it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated what Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is believed to have said, “Events, dear boy, events.�

A half-dozen governors are putting math where it belongs — at the top of the education agenda.

West Virginia families are paying a larger share of their income for electricity than residents of any neighboring state, according to a new report from the Cardinal Institute.

I’m taking a little survey here, wondering how many Gazette-Mail readers ever look at the State Journal that comes every couple weeks with your subscription. Until two weeks ago, I would have counted myself among those who don’t.

West Virginia has already examined whether its Certificate of Need law protects patients, and the findings are clear: patients are not prioritized.

When growing up in Michigan, I used to love to shop for new clothes ahead of the first day of school, which — at the time — was the day after Labor Day. The winding down of the hot summer and its mostly timeless days led to the excitement of crisp, clear fall weather and rejoining my classma…

The recent cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems should serve as a wake-up call. While much of the public attention focused on whether hackers could disrupt drinking water supplies, the larger lesson received far less attention. Water has quietly become one of the most important str…

Jamie Johnson’s recent opinion piece stating more women are needed in the West Virginia Legislature is correct. But she also points out that we need the right women. We need women — and men, too — who care about West Virginia, its land and its people. The majority of legislators we have now …

Democracy scholars and practitioners have examined many theories of the case as to why, after years of democratic growth around the world, particularly the third wave of the 1990s, democracies are eroding in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies.

Rural Appalachia has long been shaped by coal. For generations, Appalachian coal powered the nation’s industries and sustained local communities. Today, many of those communities face coal’s environmental legacy, including the loss of two million acres of forestland in one of North America’s…

It’s an easy question to ask: Where should we be spending our money?

Last week, an 85-year-old physician sat before a Senate committee and — for the first time in more than 250 congressional appearances spanning five decades of public service — declined to answer.