Some good news

 A friend drew this for me as a joke.

The American Friends Service Committee first came to West Virginia 99 years ago. There were hard times in the coalfields and child nutrition was an issue. Sound familiar? 

It's something I've worked on for the last eight years, from nudging county school boards to expand free school meals to trying to fight off attacks on food assistance programs at the state and federal level to supporting .

Free school breakfasts and lunches are a winner all around. They can improve child nutrition, learning, behavior, discipline, academic performance and a host of other things.

I was very excited to learn that the USDA decided to expand/extend free school breakfasts and lunches to all public schools through 2022. This also means more Pandemic Electronic Benefit cards. This is a huge win for kids, schools and working families. I'm hopeful that these measures will prove so popular and beneficial that they'll become permanent.

One of a kind (I hope)

 The WV legislative session ended on April 10, a 60 day stretch that felt like an eternity. I had to take a week off to lick my wounds. For a nice recap of how awful it was, here's a column by Gazette-Mail statehouse reporter Phil Kabler.

There were many defeats and a few wins, some proactive and some defensive. I haven't got around to making a full list. There were so many bad bills flying around so fast that it felt like we were running in circles, albeit mostly remotely due to COVID.

Working on legislative issues here was never easy, but this session makes all the others seem like a cakewalk. These days a glorious victory often consists of working to make an awful bill a little less bad; killing a bad bill is worthy of an epic like the Iliad; and a proactive win is like winning a lottery or being dealt a royal flush.

A friend reminded me of something I posted here four years ago after the 2017 session ended (at the time I thought that was a rough one. I'd forgotten about it, but I think it still holds:

Mulling over that and other limited victories has led me to formulate a maxim which I plan to copyright:

"Those who minimize hard won but limited victories for social justice tend not to be the people who worked their ass off to win them."

And you can quote me on that.