March 30
March 31
April 1
Second WV COVID-19 death School closure extended to April 27
WV state campgrounds close
WV primary election postponed to June 9
Credit Where It’s Due
the 15 most popular bus stops across the county had been established as distribution sites, and a web page was created where people could sign up, feedmonkids.com. Sysco and Mona Supply had offered refrigerated trucks for food storage. On Wednesday, 20 volunteers in two assembly lines bagged and boxed 1,500 packages of five breakfasts and five lunches each and another 1,500 packages of drinks. The information network was so efficient that, in two days, families had signed up to receive meals for 1,200 kids, leaving a comfortable few hundred packages for anyone who would just show up. And on Thursday, Byers doesn’t even know how many volunteers—“tons”—turned out to distribute. The first weekly meal distribution, on March 26, wasn’t exactly perfect—the meals were a little skimpy, and not all of the “extra” meals ended up where they were needed, so a small number of families were helped by others. Hundreds of additional people were signed up on-site. That same day, Kiehl at the school system placed orders for meals for twice as many students for the following week’s distribution. He was having a hard time sourcing the right kinds of foods from the school district’s suppliers. “We’re ordering different foods than we usually do, trying to order individually wrapped foods, like breakfast cereal bars, that are easy to redistribute,” he explained. Because it wasn’t just him—every school system across the nation that plays an important role in its students’ nutrition must have been placing similar orders, and it was a sudden strain on the market. “Heading toward the end of the school year, I’m guessing manufacturers were cutting back on many of the school items that are individually wrapped,” Kiehl says. “All of a sudden we’re ordering 100 times the amount we’d normally
Meanwhile, feeding the kids During the first week of school lunch distribution, March 16–23, West Virginia went from no confirmed COVID-19 cases to 16, two of them in Monongalia County. It was becoming clear that the schools would be shut down for longer than the originally planned two weeks. And while feeding kids was a priority, gathering kitchen staff every day in order to do it couldn’t be the safest approach. Byers, who had been first to offer students lunches, was one of the calls Monongalia County Schools Operations Officer Beth Harvey made at the end of the first week in search of partners to organize a weekly food distribution. “He said, you provide the food?” Harvey recounts. “I said ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘No problem!’” On Monday the 16th she called him again to say the school system had ordered five days’ worth of breakfasts and lunches for 1,500 kids— could he organize getting it packed and distributed on Thursday? It’s a big ask. Imagine your phone rings. You answer it. You are asked, “Can you coordinate the storage and packaging of 15,000 meals and get it all distributed to hungry kids across the county three days from now?” You might understandably hesitate. Where would a person even start? Byers will tell you it’s the volunteers that made what followed happen, and that’s true—but it clearly took a logistics mastermind to pull it off. He owns a tennis club near University High School, so the decision to use that site for receiving, packing, and redistributing was a no-brainer. By the afternoon of Tuesday, March 24,
Solid leadership and a surprising fact put Morgantown in good shape for the pandemic. In early March, long before COVID-19 became a topic of daily conversation, WVU administration and health care leaders saw the risk that thousands returning from March 14–22 spring break travel could mean for Morgantown. University- sponsored spring break trips abroad were canceled and, on March 10, President Gordon Gee suspended classes after spring break. That foresight minimized the number of people who might bring the virus into our cosmopolitan little town. Dr. Clay Marsh, WVU Health Sciences vice president and executive dean, was a voice of reason early on, educating the public with straightforward facts and offering clear advice. Governor Jim Justice recognized Marsh’s leadership on March 25 by appointing him the state’s Coronavirus Czar. And—who knew?—it turns out Morgantown has the most health care workers per capita of any metro under 350,000 people, according to a study released in early April by Self Financial, with more than 7 per 100 residents. Thank you, health care heroes!
60 wvl • the community issue 2020
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