Mountain News & World Report; News Report on Woman's Safety, Poetry in Schools, and Educational Extension Services

In 1971 the first shelter for abused women was opened. Since then shelters have opened around the country and people have begun to talk more openly about abuse in southwest Virginia there is a shelter called Hope House that provides counseling and safety for abused women and children. Stephanie Wagner takes us there. I guess I kind of it was like it was like I think it would help you know. For you to go into court just with me and I helps a lot. You know in some like Ayers. Craford story homeless teens and abuse women written by Pamela Cox. I'm a teenager I'm homeless. I have nothing. Please someone help me. Is sad to see people homeless. Hope Pass a shelter for abused women and children in South West Virginia has a constant flow of residents. Some stay for less than 24 hours. Some stay for as long as three months. It is a place to think and heal and talk to other people who have survived physical and mental abuse. We visit Pam Cox a resident pass who shares her riding and experiences with us when we talk

to people who've never been homeless or abused. I think it will never happen to them and they're wrong for it can happen to anyone in this world. Even you always try to figure out what I had done wrong which I thought the craziest things like did I kick his dinner the wrong way or did I not do something right. The way he won it or was it just because I was there at the time. We have all thought so many different things that we do not know where else to think. But what did I do wrong and what deal with the pay. One of the worst things next to not surviving is that they say they didn't do it or that we deserved it. I know others do not deserve it for we are we're not put on this earth to be punching bags but only to try and live a good long happy life. My heart really goes out to those who didn't survive for I say this because we know what it is like to be abused. And I only hope and pray that somebody will hear the next victims cry for help and before it is too late. Somebody heard Monday and I thank God for letting me and the ones who did survive

make it through and I also think God of the people who did hear my cry for help. I had to hear about you know to your you know your calling from the doctor the hospital doctor I was sent to the hospital after my nose been broke and he told me about it and I told my husband broke it. He tell me the name of the whole pass. I was scared of leaving but. I wanted to kill him. We had six adults right now because. Some folks are bunking together six adults and seven children right now. Sylvia Moore VeriSign resident services coordinator Oh pass somebody asked me recently about if there's councilman counts and there's all sorts of counseling to help out because any time you know women sit down to table and start telling each other share in their experience you know they've got a support group in. We do formal support groups too where we talk about the issues of domestic violence and the dynamics and we also talk about the dynamic and what's going on in a shelter with five

families and then Holston Child and Family Services provides us with two therapists who come up once a week and meet with each of the residents individually or women come in from a situation where they've been controlled. And that's that's what abuse is it's a pattern of overpowering somebody just in order to control their life. And there's a lot of isolation. You know the victim is kept from him and friends are seeing her family and accused if she is going out to see some friends that she's you know going out for some illegitimate reason. So being at the hotels and recognizing that you can be a support to other people as well as get support from people and form friendships and work and ways of relating that are honest a certain your own honest feelings about something without being afraid that you're going to get stomped on for saying how you feel and how you think. So that's what I've witnessed. I don't know if it was you know you know us

off field. Yeah you do. And it's really good yeah for him there. It was like I had to be his woman and then out there I was you know didn't need friends and that was. Truly needs friends. You know at first I thought everything was me but then the more I looked at him and thought about things more realize that it wasn't me it was him doing it because he expected me to tell him by the snap of a finger. You know everybody needs their own lives and I have a good chance live for it and I want to live it now. We serve a six county area. Why. DICKINSON Russell Cannon in a city NORTON The wider the radius from the actual location of shelter the fewer people who actually know where we are and I find it. Folks understand the need for the confidentiality if a woman goes to her friends or her family it's very likely that the husband or boyfriend is going to follow her there.

This is our private property. This is our private property we have no trespassing signs up we have no compunction to call the police. This is where I work and I'm going to keep it a safe space. We try to keep posters up and you know put posters up and distribute pamphlets and cards and we do a lot of seminars and public speaking to other agencies and professionals so that referrals can be made. Try to get as high profile as we can with social services and law enforcement and doctors and attorney you know any place that folks might be a health department and a lot of people find out about the cost just from looking in the telephone directory and what they do is give us a call. And you know we discuss what the situation is and what their needs are and if they and we work with people about how to get transportation whether they can tap Social Services or whether they have a family member who's willing to drive them part of the way and we can meet them.

So we were transportation out a lot of ways I think said that we went down to pick her and what we do with the hope house is provide information so that a woman can make choices. We don't push in one direction or another you know. For what her choice. And. People make salt make all sorts of choices. There's a lot of women who choose you know to return to the husband. I'm going to kill you if you leave me as a real common common threat to women who come to the shelter. So just standing near him sticking up for her own civil rights. And that's what I consider my advocacy. I think the only way to stop the violence is for the perpetrators to realize that this behavior is not going to be accepted and that they're not getting anything good from it either that they want to stir up the Surgeon-General United States has determined that the number one cause of death and injury to women in United States is not breast cancer or

car accidents it's domestic violence and battering. People need to start paying attention to it and listen to hear Charlie hear the people who are needing Hill and stop war with themselves and think about it. For Debbie MMT and Stephanie Wagner if you would like to cover her past in southwest Virginia call 1 800 5 7 2 2 2 7 8 to find the shelter closest to you in other states. Call 1 800 333 safe or 1 800 3 3 3 7 2 3 3. Now I go to Hollywood. How are the. Thank you. For thank.

You out. School reform from Kolbein scandals to top heavy administrative staffs and salaries to stacking the deck at school based decision making elections the state of our educational system is a hot topic and it should be. But Jim Webb found another avenue for school reform at the art showcase held recently at Apple shop for regional educators. He visited with Rodney bowling of Asheville based

poetry alive a group of performers who moved poetry from the page to the stage. Poetry is alive is an interesting concept. Could you tell us a bit about it and how it started and so on. Our concept started really out of somewhat quite by accident the founder of the company Bob Falls and an original partner who is not with the company longer started by performing poetry for their own pleasure and found that by staging a poem scripting dividing the poems up into a variety of lines putting actions to it that suddenly the poem could take different meanings and if read solely or in a recitation form from that beginning in Black Mountain North Carolina and back in 1904. It has really grown to where we are now using as many as nine different pairs or traveling teams that literally go into schools from kindergarten to

college and provide performances that we hope brings poetry alive and certainly takes it as we say off the page and onto the stage. Part of our experience is not just a performance but to go into SQL ass rooms work with students show them how to do this or do teach or in services showing teachers how they can turn the fun of the classroom stage. If it's a teacher that loves teaching poetry then this is a wonderful alternative to what they may already be doing. If it's a teacher that might personally like poetry but doesn't particular like to teach it. This is a good way for them to allow their students really to teach themselves. Get him out the front of class and put the teacher in that circle of learning. So how do students react to poetry shown to them this way. It depends to a degree on age level. Most elementary age say up to about fifth grade really haven't been taught that they're not supposed to like poetry yet so they have a tendency to. They like the rhyming in the song and will do a lot of that

particular for the very young go to a lot of nursery rhymes or Ogden Nash or a lot of things that they're already going to be familiar with and the idea there is to get them physically involved up off their feet. A lot of group work. This type of thing starting about fifth grade sixth grade. Students start crossing their arms all of a sudden poetry for the boys. You know you're not supposed to like this. So it's more of a challenge with that group. However because our shows are participatory and because we get them right at the very beginning the expectations they may have within 30 seconds all of a sudden they realize this is like nothing they ever thought. Many might come to the performance you know expecting someone to stand up behind a lectern and read poetry to them. And they find out very quickly that we're off that stage very quickly that they could be chosen. And then once the audience gets caught up it's come like a magic wand kind gets waved over that audience all of a sudden they realize they forget about peer pressure.

They forget that this is not something they're not supposed to like get caught up in the the excitement and the fun of it. And what we try to do there then is make sure that all of the material they see and participate in are at least a good portion of it. They can go back to their textbooks open up and all of a sudden there's that poem that they studied and now it has an entirely different meaning to them. High school level they're glad to be there to be out of class for the most part. You know they watch chrome rust just so you have to kind of get past their idea of boredom. Does it does it usually get past that stage with them. Oh yes. My personal favorite audience is middle school seventh and eighth grade simply because they're so challenging and they're such high energy. And you know it's like they have their chin out you know prove it to me. So kind of like the bigger they are the harder they fall so they have a tendency to tumble real quick and get caught up in it. High school however though you because you do have a lot of English students and a lot of members of that audience that do appreciate Porter they've kind of gone through a full cycle.

They'll quite often recite along with your you'll see one section of the room do the road not taken and half the audience is going along with you so you know they've been studying that poem. They too I think it up in it. We also do a lot more serious material starting in about seventh grade. We're going to it's not just often again we're going to do a lot of you know Richard Corey which is about suicide or we were cool McGrattan Brooks which is about dying young. So we try to really poll. Abroad in some ways and we really kind of cheat them in that they don't realize that they're being taken down a certain path. But that's what we want we want them coming away from that performance going you know that's. I knew that form but I thought it was boring the first time I saw it. Now I want to go back to what we want them as going back to the library opening it up and start looking at poetry from an entirely different perspective and if we can achieve that then we think we've got a leg up.

Do you have any single experience that you've had any single reaction from students that is memorable with you. Personally getting a standing ovation from any many middle school audiences all is a personal thrill you know you've gotten them because that is the audience I was in West Virginia once and a show for twelve hundred students all at once which is a pretty larger than we would like. And that was a neat experience. But probably the best ones are. We do a lot of at risk programs and we work with a lot of learning disabled and poor readers partly because of what we do is excellent for students who may not be achieving well academically because of a reading problem. Poetry short is not as intimidating. We sell to them as MTV. So I think it's the ones that come up afterwards that you know you've touched you know you've got to them. And then the letters we get back from teachers and faculty about individual students that they were losing. And in fact we just got one this

week is what tears my eyes of in Ohio about a young. Child who was entering a learning disabled program. He was his mother was a drug addict and he was born and didn't read and came up and said to the teacher you know they love me and all of a sudden a light was turned on a child's life. And I think that's what we're there for I think our performers feel that even though we hire professional actors for the most part they find out very quickly this is not an acting job. This is far more than an acting job and I think that's probably I said a lot of memories of that and the letters that we get from faculty and and from students. A lot of times to. We don't often talk about agricultural extension programs and social activism in the same breath but in West Virginia the Cooperative Extension Service is taking a new and broader approach to the problems of rural folks. Richard Kirby reports.

Rochelle Tompkins is the head of West Virginia's Cooperative Extension Service. Like most extension services West Virginia has long been identified with technical matters of farming but the service is taking a new approach redefining what it should do and for whom. Rachel Tompkins says the service is in a way getting back to its own roots. I tend to describe what we're doing is going back to to the beginnings of extension which was really an effort to. Mobilize the education for the common people away from the university and to provide that education on problems that were real to those people not on what the people from the university thought they needed but upon what people out in the communities need it. Since the economy was largely agricultural when extension started those programs were primarily agricultural programs and the programs were targeted at at farmers helping them do better IRA cultural production in it at their wives helping them do things better at home prepare food better make

their homes more beautiful raise their children better those kinds of things and programs were targeted at the at the children. Partly it was socialization mainstream kinds of programs get rural isolated kids hooked into mainstream culture extension service kind of got much more middle class as the people they were working with got more middle classes kept working with the same people who gradually became successful. And so in the 50s and 60s one wouldn't think of the extension service as working with poor rural dispossessed people. They were working primarily with well-off farmers and they were linked into kind of the community elites in. In counties across the country. So what's the big change. The change today is to go back to those roots and to say what are the issues of poor not always rural rural and urban people who are kind of left out. And how is it that educational programs from a university can reach out and work with those those people. So what are we doing. Well one thing we did in West Virginia was to two years ago we

went out and held meetings all over the all over the state. We had about 70 meetings. We encouraged the county extension agents to invite people that they didn't traditionally work with. I mean we have these committees that are set up that are structured by law that are pretty well set with community either traditional agricultural people or community elites. And so we ask them to go get people that were different people that might not have. Knew it know anything about exchange people might've been critical exchange and in those meetings we we when we work with the groups of people to go through a process of identifying what the most important issues were in their communities or their counties and we worked through a process where you have to develop priorities in every one of those meetings came up with a list of five priorities for their county or their community. And the issues tended to be things related to the economy. Lots of issues related to environment protection the environment lots of different kinds of things for me everything from out of state garbage to water to air all different kinds

of environmental issues. Health care was a big issue. And a whole lot of things related to health care access to it. Problems with a lot of issues related education proving schools improving educational achievement and a number of things related to the quality of government sort of for everything from corruption to they weren't smart enough to help us figure out how to get out of the fix we were in. These are new issues for an Agricultural Extension Service to take on. Rachel Tompkins says the new approach reflects a new reality for West Virginia farmers. In fact most of the issues confronting people who are farmers in West Virginia relate to far more complicated kinds of things in agricultural production. Most farmers in West Virginia are part time. And they depend most of them on some other kind of job to maintain their farm in a rural way of life that they care about. There are very few farmers in Washington a couple thousand probably that are really earning their living from the farm and so it's very important to them that small rural manufacturing firms survive.

It's important to them that that there be a more diverse economy. For example one of the big issues in West Virginia over the past few years has been out of state garbage. Folks all this is a real way to provide jobs. There are a number of counties where the county commission which provides some of the funding for extension have been the primary advocates of bringing in large out state landfills. And there have been groups of citizens that have opposed that effectively. One of the things we're now thinking about doing in one of the counties where that has been a particularly huge battle we sort of were involved in the battle. Maybe we should have been but we can figure out a way to do it that really used our skills. Now I think we have an opportunity to help try to bring those community elites who advocated that landfill and the groups of people who adamantly opposed it and won together to talk about what do we mean by economic development. What are we what are we going to try to do here now bring some people in

from the university who can help them look at themselves think about who they are do some inventories begin to do some planning together. Rachel Tompkins describes the program as fragile dependent on public funding at a time when state budgets are under severe strain. But it is also a new opportunity to serve a large number of people. I view the people that are sort of the clients of extension programs as sort of ordinary common folks whatever the language is that people wants to want to use for that. And in West Virginia because we're such a rural state 67 percent of states rural. You know it's very easy to have them and to be to be working for and have a majority because you're you're really working with most of the people in the state. I think there are probably some new opportunities to develop some new generation kinds of cooperative programs like we were involved in the early years the cooperation we developed in the early years extenstion sort of grew into these giant kinds of cooperative programs and and now I think

we kind of need to go back to those roots again sort of think about how to develop other kinds of cooperatives that might help local people. Rachel Tompkins director of West Virginia's Cooperative Extension Service. We talked with her at the recent Appalachian Studies conference in Asheville North Carolina for Mountain News and World Report. And I'm rich Kirby.