Recent editorials from newspapers:
April 25
Gannett Tennessee, on voter registration bill:
Tennessee should be proud of recent voter registration gains.
Active, engaged and newly registered voters took the Volunteer State from second-worst in the nation in 2014 to 44th in 2018.
However, instead of rewarding this important, if modest, civic engagement feat, lawmakers want to punish registration efforts for their success.
That is a disgraceful step backwards.
This voter suppression play has not gone unnoticed. The story is being watched nationally and Tennessee has become a symbol for old-time politics that seeks to silence the opposition in the most nefarious of ways, in this case, by criminalizing errors on voter registration forms.
The state House approved House Bill 1079/Senate Bill 971 on partisan lines on April 15 and the Senate approved it 25-6 on Thursday, with Republican Sen. Steve Dickerson of Nashville joining the five Democrats in the Senate. Senators still have to work out some differences with the House, but it will go to Gov. Bill Lee sooner than later.
The bill requires groups that register 100 people or more to take unspecified training and risk being charged with a misdemeanor and fined with civil penalties if there are mistakes on voter registration forms.
Secretary of State Tre Hargett pointed to major deficiencies during the 2018 election, especially in Shelby County, for why such a heavy-handed legislative response was needed.
There needs to be a better way to deal with mistakes rather than stymieing efforts to enfranchise new and previously lapsed voters.
That is why Lee should veto this legislation once he receives it and send the message that this is not the right solution.
Groups such as the League of Women Voters Tennessee and the Equity Alliance, which successfully registered people of color as voters in 2018, have sounded the alarms that this will discourage and possibly end some voter registration efforts and effectively keep people, especially those in marginalized communities, from exercising their right to vote.
Eighteen national groups sent a letter to the Tennessee General Assembly on April 15 warning about the same thing.
Sadly, their counsel fell on deaf ears.
There are improvements that Tennessee can make, such as same-day voter registration, voting by mail and ensuring citizens 18 and older are registered when they receive their driver’s license.
Tennessee has an interest in ensuring that elections are fair and free of fraud.
However, going after voter registration efforts is not the way.
We should be encouraging voting, not suppressing it.
Gov. Lee, we implore you to defend the rights of all citizens of Tennessee. Oppose this bill and once the final version comes to your desk, veto it.
Online: www.tennessean.com
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April 27
Cleveland Daily Banner on higher education:
Less than two weeks after Cleveland State Community College turned the eyes of higher-education advocates by receiving the College System of Tennessee’s first College of the Year honor, Lee University kept them looking in this direction with a prestigious ranking of its own.
We speak of the NCAA Division II school’s latest academic conquest, the recognition of its School of Nursing as the best such program across the state, and one of only seven in the nation to boast a 100% passing rate by its graduates on the NCLEX-RN licensing exam.
Surely, our Cleveland and Bradley County hometown has been given yet another reason to take great pride in the quality of education available to our local young people, as well as to those who travel here from neighboring counties, distant states and nations abroad.
Already in this editorial space we have trumpeted the most recent achievement by Cleveland State in earning the Statewide Outstanding Achievement Recognition, or SOAR award, as sanctioned by the Tennessee Board of Regents.
CSCC President Dr. Bill Seymour and a handful of administrative staff attended an awards ceremony in Nashville where the local community college was selected from a field of three finalists. We applaud the institute’s prowess in overcoming multiple challenges that earned it the right to be considered among the best in Tennessee.
But the most recent accolade belongs to Lee U’s School of Nursing, a 5-year-old program still in its infancy, yet one that has already ascended the ladder of success and is now counted among the elite of nurse programming in the nation.
Why, and how, has the school achieved such early success? We suggest the answer lies in the faculty, as well as the vision of Dr. Sara Campbell, dean of the School of Nursing, who understands the value of training outside the textbooks.
At Lee, faculty work diligently with nursing students in the classroom, but also dedicate time to prepare them for the stresses, and the academic demands, of the licensing evaluation as required by the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses, or NCLEX-RN.
To become a certified RN, a graduate must pass the grueling assessment. It is not easy, nor is success a given. It takes study. It takes training. It takes academic oversight by faculty who serve as educators in the classroom and advisors in the preparation.
For those unfamiliar with the Lee School of Nursing state rank, consider these points that might help explain its significance:
. The ranking is compiled annually by RegisteredNursing.org, a respected career education website.
. Of the 45 nursing programs in Tennessee, Lee University’s was the only one with a 100% pass rate; coming in second was the University of Tennessee at Martin with a score of 99.64%. Additionally, Lee’s School of Nursing was the only perfect score in the Southeast region.
. Of the 639 nursing programs ranked nationwide, only seven boasted 100% pass rates: Stanbridge University in California, Baton Rouge General Medical Center in Louisiana, Pace University in New York, University of Mount Union in Ohio, Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania, LeTourneau University in Texas, and our own Lee University.
Obviously, the School of Nursing dean is elated over her students’ academic performance. But its positive impact inside the medical field makes her most proud.
“What I really enjoy hearing is our employers talking about how prepared students are for their jobs,” Campbell stressed. “They want our students, and that means a lot to us.”
It should. Performance by graduates in the world delineates the difference between universities that are great, and those that are OK.
We applaud this huge success story emerging from the Lee University campus.
It comes as no accident. Those familiar with President Dr. Paul Conn, and who understand his sense of inspiration and spirited leadership style, already understand why.
Online: www.clevelandbanner.com
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April 28
The Roanoke (Virginia) Times on Appalachia stereotypes:
Ron Howard is making a movie based on J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
This is not a good thing.
It will no doubt be a very well-done movie. Howard’s resume includes “Apollo 13,” ’’The DaVinci Code” and being brought in to rescue “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” But it’s not a movie that is likely to be helpful to those of us in Appalachia.
Vance’s book certainly told truth - his personal truth about growing up in an unstable family in southern Ohio and seeing lots of people who simply decided not to work and take advantage of welfare instead. That’s undoubtedly true; we’d be fools to deny that those kind of things happen. But is that the whole truth about Appalachia?
Appalachia is so poorly-understood beyond its borders that it’s painfully easy to stereotype. We see that every time some out-of-town political candidate comes to Roanoke and starts talking about coal as if the mines were next door. Most of Appalachia - which culturally covers everything west of the Blue Ridge Mountains out to the foothills of Ohio - doesn’t even mine coal at all. Appalachia is a far more diverse region than people give it credit for, sometimes even the people who live in it. That’s where “Hillbilly Elegy” the movie is likely to be so damaging. If people outside the region see Vance’s book brought to life - the drug addicts, the welfare cheats, the layabouts -and think that’s an accurate depiction of all of Appalachia, it will just become yet another stereotype for a region that’s been stereotyped long enough. It’s as if you could only watch one movie about New York and what you saw was “American Gangster.” You’d form a very different impression of the city than if you watched, say, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
The popularity of Vance’s book has prompted some literary rejoinders, pushing back against his depiction of the region. First came “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” by Elizabeth Catte, a historian who lives in the Shenandoah Valley. More recently comes “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,” a collection of essays by scholars and community activists in the region, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. These rebuttals are all well and good, although they do tend to be a bit ideological. Catte is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, hardly typical in Appalachia, or anywhere else. The New York Times reviewed “Appalachian Reckoning” and found that “for every essay … that’s provocative, another is unreadable,” stuffed with academic language about “”wider discursive contexts.”
-What Appalachia needs is not another book, but an entirely new story to tell about itself. In popular culture, if Appalachia gets depicted at all, it’s in a negative way. Think “Deliverance.” Or District 12 of “The Hunger Games.” Our fear is that the movie version of “Hillbilly Elegy” will simply add to those negative portrayals. Appalachia certainly has its problems, particularly in adapting to a new economy that puts a premium on things that the region doesn’t have - principally, a highly-educated workforce. Amazon chose to locate in Arlington, where 71 percent of the adults 25 and older have a college degree. In Buchanan County and Covington, that figure is 8.3 percent. The economics of the so-called “knowledge economy” are pretty cruel. Vance depicts an Appalachia peopled by lazy people who disdain education. “We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school,” he writes at one point. In another, he says: “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” Perhaps that’s so in some places, but there is another Appalachian story to be told - we just need a larger megaphone through which to tell it.
-Students in Southwest Virginia (the portion of Appalachia we care most about) don’t “perform poorly in school” as Vance writes. They perform quite well. The Virginia Department of Education divides the state into eight regions. In 2018, one region finished first in the state in the Standards of Learning testing in all three categories - reading, math and science. Was this Northern Virginia, the sons and daughters of the state’s most well-to-do and well-educated citizens? No. Northern Virginia finished second. Instead, the region that finished first was Southwest Virginia - from Pulaski County. And yet state officials in Richmond still dared to ask St. Paul attorney Frank Kilgore - a frequent booster for the region - whether Southwest Virginia “has the DNA to fill cybersecurity jobs.” That’s insulting, but typical.
-In 2015, Dickenson County merged its high schools into Ridgeview High School. What was the first team from Ridgeview to win a state championship? Not the football team, but the robotics team. That team went on to compete in the world championship in Detroit, in which it placed 9th out of 64 teams - and was a finalist for an award that honored enthusiasm. Vance might have known some lazy people growing up, but he sure didn’t know these kids.
-The Dickenson students weren’t even the only team from Southwest Virginia to go to the world championship last year, either. So did a team from Southwest Virginia Community College that included students from six different high schools in the region.
-Students in five Southwest localities - the counties of Wise, Russell, Washington, Bland and Norton - took part in NASA experiment that involved launching satellites into low-earth orbit.
-The American Wind Energy Association sponsors an annual contest where school teams compete to build functioning wind turbines. One school system has become - no pun intended - a powerhouse in this competition. Is this school system in Northern Virginia, which aspires to be Silicon Valley East? No, it’s Bath County, where last year, the team from Bath County High School took first place in the nation.
Given all this talent, technology companies ought to be competing to locate in Appalachia, not acting as if it didn’t even exist. These are the stories we need to be telling the world - that we are a topographically-challenged and economically-challenged part of the country that is populated by smart, hard-working people.
We don’t need an elegy; we just need a new economy - and a chance to tell the world a different story than the one Ron Howard and J.D. Vance will.
Online: www.roanoke.com
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