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Season nears its end

It’s hard to believe, but the football season will officially come to an end sometime between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Sunday night, when the clock finally runs out on Super Bowl LX. And, even though the Steelers saw their season come to an end Jan. 12 with a 30-6 loss to Houston in the wild card round of the National Football League playoffs, fans across the Tri-State Area, the country and the world, for that matter, will be watching when New England and Seattle face off in Levi’s Stadium. That’s because, even though following the Steelers during the past several years has rarely ...

Guest column/Fixing Hancock Schools a marathon, not a sprint

By now nearly everyone has most likely seen the dire financial situation that the Hancock County school system finds itself in. Years of inadequate personnel management, overspending and a lack of thorough financial oversight finally caught up with them when it was recently announced that the school system is facing a budget shortfall of approximately $8 million. All of this occurred during the stretch of multiple superintendents and numerous county board members, and was finally brought to light this past fall when then-Superintendent Dan Enich notified the West Virginia ...

If you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them

There are some days when the world feels unbearably heavy, days when the headlines seem to blur together and the noise of everyday life makes it hard to hear anything at all. And then, in those rare, quiet moments, the ones where we finally sit still long enough to feel something … a single sentence can change everything — change our perspective on how we see the world. For me, it was the Dalai Lama’s gentle reminder, “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” Such simple words, and such a simple ...

Guest column/Life on the region’s frontier could often be difficult

It’s going to snow — a lot … Our ancestors did not have the advantage of modern weather warning systems to prepare for things like bitter, raw, sub-zero temperatures, blizzards and ice storms. The Upper Ohio Valley was settled during some of the coldest winters of the Little Ice Age. The wintry weather that could be remembered might have been blended from the stories told in front of a hearth with a roaring fire and a black bake kettle and a bean pot, from a forebear of my mother’s side of the family. It was a time when youngsters were put to sleep in their feather beds to ...

Guest column/Beware of naive educators who promote socialism

First of all, you must understand that the vast majority of educators at all levels do not have a clue as to what it is like working in the real world. Once they acquire tenure, K-12 teachers and higher education professionals have a job for life unless they do something really stupid. In the real world of business, one can be fired at a moment’s notice. I’m reminded of a teaching colleague (yes, I was an educator) who took a year’s leave-of-absence. He told us, “Now I’m going out to work in the real world.” It was sort of a put down and quite condescending to the rest ...

We had been warned

There are many things that you can say about the snowstorm that hit our area last weekend, but one you can’t is that no one told us it was coming Reports started to come in more than a week before that the potential existed for a major snow event the weekend of Jan. 24-25. Many of the predictions came from sources that didn’t seem to have much credibility, but some came from the meteorologists across the Tri-State Area who almost always advised that “the conditions are there, but it’s too early to know anything for sure.” Depending on where you live in the region, it’s ...