West Virginia is on the eve of its second teachers’ walkout in less than a year. Only ten months after the state’s educators sparked what has now become a nationwide teachers’ revolt, a brazen attempt by Republican legislators to ram through a pro-privatization, anti-union bill has again set school workers on fire.

Political developments are moving extremely quickly — it’s as if the months leading up to the 2018 strike have been compressed into a few short days. Like last year, word about the Republicans’ latest attacks on educators spread late last week over the West Virginia Public Employees United Facebook page founded by Charleston educators Jay O’Neal and Emily Comer. And yet again it’s the southern, coal-mining county of Mingo — with its proud traditions of labor militancy — that has taken the lead in firing educators up to walk out.

On Monday evening in Williamson, an emergency cross-union meeting for all Mingo County school employees voted unanimously to support the authorization of a one-day strike to stop the bill. All school employees will vote by secret ballot on Tuesday, but as firebrand rank-and-file leader Katie Endicott explained to me in a text from the meeting, the walkout authorization is “[e]xpected to pass by a huge margin. [The] energy is crazy. We will be in Charleston soon.”