May 31, 2024 3 min read

HIT: Thanks to his job as a school supervisor in the communities within proximity to Avella, Alvin Dinsmore White was able to compile valuable information about people and families in the region. White himself died in 1994, just a few months before his 100th birthday, but his legacy endures with the A.D. White Research Society, which is housed in Avella’s old train station. Among the resources there are hours of cassette recordings made in the early 1990s that have White reminiscing about people and places in that corner of Washington County. On Memorial Day, the society had an open house at the train station to honor World War II veteran Orrin Guy Miller, who died in a bombing mission over Hungary in 1944. They are hoping to honor additional veterans in the years ahead. In lieu of Avella having a formal Memorial Day commemoration, this is an excellent tradition to start.

MISS: If you have noticed graduating high school seniors gnashing their teeth, or their parents yanking their hair out, it could be because filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid – FAFSA in shorthand – has been such a colossal headache this year. The U.S. Department of Education released a new form that was meant to be simpler, but it arrived later than normal, and processing the forms has been marked by a bumper crop of glitches and errors. It’s to the point where many students still do not know how much financial aid they will be receiving when fall rolls around, and that has an impact on where they will go, or if they will even be enrolled. Courtney Baker, the scholarship coordinator at Uniontown High School, told the Observer-Reporter, “It has affected a lot of students with the delays in processing. It has caused a big problem.” The problems with the form coincide with a substantial drop nationally in the number of completed forms, and that is reflected in this region – at Brownsville High School, for example, there are 40% fewer students who have completed applications compared to the year before. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but the Department of Education clearly should have waited a year and worked the bugs out of the system before launching this new form.

MISS: If you work in the news media, or even pay reasonable attention to current events, it can sometimes come as a shock to realize how little some Americans know about what is happening in the world beyond their doorstep. That fact hit home with the recent release of a Harris poll conducted for The Guardian. It found that 56% of Americans believe the country is mired in a recession, and almost half think the stock market has been swooning even though it’s up by 12% in 2024. Amazingly enough, 49% of those polled believe unemployment is at a 50-year high even though it’s actually at a 50-year low, as evidenced by all the “help wanted” signs dotting the landscape and news reports about labor shortages. Sure, inflation has taken a bite out of a lot of wallets, but price increases are nowhere close to being as bad as they were in the 1970s. The economy may not be the absolute best it’s ever been, but it’s a long, long way from being the worst.