You can go home again

Barnie Day was a Democratic delegate from Patrick County from his election in 1997 through the 2001 session. A former county administrator and business owner, he is now a banker.

Some Virginia governors come and go. Some stumble. Some stride. Some have impact. Some leave legacies. And then there are the rare ones, those who stride with such assurance, such ease and grace, that they make it all -- the impact, the legacy, all of it -- look easy.

He's head of the international practice group at Hunton and Williams. His counsel is sought by folks in high places. His public utterances still stir up the editorial writers from one end of the state to the other. He sits on high-profile boards. He is a big deal.

But this is not so much a column about Jerry Baliles, though he had -- and has -- it all. It is about an idea he had, a vision, and about a legacy taking root in rural Patrick County.

The Patrick County Education Foundation sprang from a linear piece of logic. Baliles repeated it in a recent speech here.

"We have seen the world around us change. Technology has telescoped time and distance. Economies of nations have become intertwined and interdependent. Jobs, lives and futures have been rearranged.

"In our part of the world, in this county, we have gone from a time when most people made their living from timber, textiles or tobacco. Education was nice but not as necessary for those jobs as it has become today.

"Things have changed, and companies today are increasingly dependent upon an educated work force as never before."

So what to you do to with a county near the bottom of all counties in Virginia in terms of the number of adults with at least a high school education?

If you're Jerry Baliles you make a 10-year commitment to move Patrick County into the top five rural counties in all of Virginia. And you get to work.

It started small. No staff. No office. No money. No nothing. But this was Jerry Baliles. He wasn't taken lightly when he was a 10-year-old.

You have to understand Baliles' basic premise: to move people back to school in numbers required to move a county from near the bottom to near the top in the state, you pay them, knowing full well that the collective benefits of that many educated people will more than pay you back. So that's what he did. He set up a foundation to pay adults a thousand dollars if they would go back to school and get a GED. Where does he get the money? He raises it.

And he made another commitment, another vow: to move Patrick County into the top five rural counties in terms of the percentage of kids who graduate from high school and go on to college. Here's the deal on that one. Keep your nose clean, make the grades, get in (and the foundation will help you on that one) and lack of money won't stop you. Where does he get the money? You guessed it. He raises it.

And then there's a thing called TekAdvantage, the foundation's first workforce initiative. Same set-up. He raises the money.

So, how are they doing after two years? What's the score? Suffice it to say that everybody's winning. The classes are filling up. Patrick County kids are getting accepted to schools they wouldn't have dreamed of before. Schools are offering up scholarships. Folks are getting their GEDs and feeling good about it.

What does Jerry Baliles get out of it?

Satisfaction.

Says he: "This will do more than just enrich the lives of our citizens. It can also help the county's educational rankings and its economic development program enormously. If that can be done, while more students are enrolled in college and more workers can find programs that will help upgrade their work skills, then the future of this county can be very bright, indeed, for our children and grandchildren."

Post a message to Barnie Day's board