Latest news with #Treu
Dominion Post
a day ago
- Business
- Dominion Post
West Virginia Academy planning 2027 move to Cheat Lake
MORGANTOWN — In June 2024, West Virginia Academy purchased 19.2 acres near Cheat Lake for $406,310. Now the state's first charter school is looking to make that land the focal point of its academic and extracurricular activity. West Virginia Academy Ltd. is currently accepting proposals for architectural services for the opening phase of a multi-building Falling Water Campus, located immediately adjacent to Cheat Lake's Falling Water development. The project, currently estimated at $6 million to $9 million, will begin in August and is expected to conclude in July 2027. West Virginia Academy, which first opened its doors to students in the fall of 2022, has about 300 pre-K through 12th-grade students enrolled for the upcoming academic year. Chairman and Founder John Treu said the Falling Water Campus will become the school's primary location. The question of whether it will initially be its only location will be based on the rate of growth over the next few years. 'In terms of size, part of that's going to depend on the architecture and what we can sustain out there, but we're looking to do a facility that would house about 500 students,' Treu said. 'Then Phase II would potentially do more than that, but that's the number that we're currently looking at.' At present, the school is operating in a rented 26,000-square-foot office building located off Chestnut Ridge Road behind the Suburban Lanes property. 'Our current facility is a rented facility, and it's nice in the sense that it's convenient to downtown, but we don't have a lot of outdoor space and playground space, and we have to do a lot of things off-site for extracurriculars, particularly for the secondary school,' Treu said. 'With the new facility we'll have a full basketball/volleyball gym. We'll have a mountain biking track, which will align with our mountain biking teams. We'll just have a lot more space in general, sitting on a 19-acre piece of land. We do intend to keep a lot of it forested, so it'll be different than traditional public schools, but we're excited about the design of a new facility and what we're looking to do.' Asked for a general status update as a pioneer among West Virginia's public charter schools, Treu said a lot of good work has been accomplished. For example, the school was selected as the 2023 recipient of a $500,000 Yass Prize as an innovator in education. Treu said those funds helped purchase the Cheat Lake property the academy will soon call home. In June, the school received early renewal of its five-year charter agreement with the Professional Charter School Board after meeting 'every one of its measurable goals' in just two years. The academy's new five-year term began July 1 and runs to 2030. 'There have been a lot of surprises, too, that we would have preferred not to have. As the first charter school ever, I think the [state] Department of Education has really had to figure out how things were going, and there were a lot of instances where we were not receiving the appropriate amount of funding we were entitled to as a charter school. We had to fight a few battles there,' Treu said. 'Funding has always been a challenge, but things have gotten dramatically better since we first opened. There's still a pretty significant funding gap between traditional schools and charter schools, but we'll keep working to close it.' According to Treu, the Falling Water Campus project received $3 million from the School Building Authority of West Virginia, and a $600,000 federal grant for furnishings, computers and equipment.
Newsweek
02-07-2025
- Newsweek
Man Was Wondering Why Plane 'Smelled So Bad,' Until He Saw Under Seat
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. An airplane passenger was initially baffled as to why it "smelled so bad" on his flight, until he saw what was under his seat. Francesco Treu, an Italian living in Vienna, Austria, took to his TikTok, @trueee_francesco, to reveal the source of the midair stench. "Who raised you?" a caption posted alongside the video reads. In the clip, which has been watched over 4.3 million times, Treu can be seen sitting in his seat on the plane with his right hand covering his mouth and nose. He is being filmed by another individual sitting across the aisle from him on the flight and, initially, it is not clear what is causing the smell. "I was wondering why my flight smelled so bad …" an on-screen caption says. While the more-observant viewers may initially pick up on the cause of the stink, the person behind the camera decides to ram the point home by zooming in just under Treu's seat. If there were any doubts to what was causing the smell, this zoom-in extinguishes them, with the camera focusing in on a pair of bare feet visible under Treu's seat. It would appear from the video that the person sitting behind Treu has opted to remove his shoes and socks for the duration of the flight. Newsweek reached out to Treu for comment. He gave permission for his clip to feature online but has yet to respond to the request for further comment. While there is no way of knowing conclusively that the person's feet were causing a stink, the removal of all footwear in midair is something that tends to be frowned upon. In 2023, a survey commissioned by travel website Kayak on the "unspoken rules of air travel" revealed 76 percent of respondents felt it was wrong to take socks off on a flight. It was a closer call when it came to shoes, but the practice of removing them was still frowned upon by the majority with 56 percent of U.S. respondents of the opinion that shoes should stay on during a flight compared with 44 percent who had no problem with it. Bad smells were another source of ire among respondents. The survey found that 92 percent of people polled said it was wrong to bring any food with strong smells on a plane. Tinned fish (89 percent), hard-boiled eggs (74 percent) and a rack of ribs (84 percent) were among the most vehemently opposed. Could an unseen block of cheese be the true cause of the smell disrupting Treu's flight? It is entirely possible, but if the comments left under the video are anything to go by, it would appear situations like this are common enough in society. One viewer wrote: "A few weeks ago I stepped into a train and asked my bf [boyfriend] a little bit too loud: 'that air conditioning smells like horrible cheese.' I sat down and saw a man next to me without his shoes on, looking at me. Didn't even take the hint. I didn't mean to be passive aggressive, it actually smelled like that." Another commented: "I was at the library reading a book and this guy came in a sat nearby, took off his shoes, it was like an atomic stink bomb went off, it was epic, my eyes started watering, I couldn't breathe." Beyond the smell and hygiene concerns, taking shoes or socks off on a flight can pose other, more practical problems. In an interview with the website Afar, aviation safety expert Christine Negroni said that passengers should be advised to keep their shoes on as part of the safety briefings at the start of every flight. "Most airplane crashes are survivable and don't have fatalities, but when a plane lands in an unexpected place or at an unexpected time, there are lots of things that can cause you trouble as you try to get out of the airplane, including broken glass, burning fuel, asphalt, mountainous terrain, or whatever," Negroni said. "If you don't have shoes on, you're more likely to have your feet injured. It's as simple as that."
