(Special contribution by Michael Sankey of BRB Publications, Inc.)

Effective June 8, 2008, the recording fee for each document recorded in West Virginia recording offices will increase by $5.00. There is no fee increase for document searches, copies or certifications.

The new fees will be as follows:
Deed will be $36.00; Deed of Trust will be $16.00; Amendment will be $16.00; and Assignment or Release will be $11.00. Thanks to the folks at Ernst Publishing for their assistance on clarifying each of the new fees.
The fee increase was part of S.B. 622 which can be found here.

If you read the bill, please be aware it is somewhat confusing. The bill does not contain language that says “there is a $5.00 fee increase,” but instead mentions monetarily the segments that make-up the entire cost of recording.

The Department of Education Web sites for Alaska, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, New York, Tennessee and West Virginia are a few that have a searchable database of certified public school teachers. These databases can mostly be searched by partial name, a convenient tool to obtain a teacher’s full name, verify her certification or how long she’s been teaching. States that don’t have educator certifications online - such as Mississippi - but whose teachers are nationally certified are in the database of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Search by state, city, district or name.

If you want to identify states that have online teacher certification records go to the specific state Department of Education Web site. Not everything can be found in a search engine! As an additional measure, you can formulate a Google query. One way you might look for the Massachusetts teacher licensing:

Massachusetts “teacher certification ” “department of education” -site:.com

Some states may refer to this as an “educator certification”.

South Carolina requires the last 5 digits of the teacher’s Social Security number to verify a credential - making the site unusable for the general public. California teacher lookup is at the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing site, which won’t come up if you’re using the phrase “teacher certification”.

The California Department of Labor Standards Enforcement has 5 different personal information databases, including a studio teachers certification database. Search other State Labor Department Web sites.

I previously wrote about some school finder resources and other state educator certification lookups.

Many state appeals and supreme courts post their decisions at their Web sites and will deliver newly issued opinions, some with captions and summaries, to you by email or syndication. Look at your state’s court site to determine if it offers a notification service.

The Iowa Court of Appeals offers email notification of “supreme court opinions, court of appeals opinions, press releases and orders.” Conversely, the New Jersey judiciary Web site posts opinions and calendars of upcoming decisions but doesn’t have a built-in notification. In this case, I use the low-cost service, WatchThatPage, which sends me the new content whenever this Web site is updated. I receive case summaries that look like this.

A-52-05 State v. Saleem Crawley (58,340)
Where police officers, in response to an anonymous tip about criminal activity, requested defendant to stop and answer some questions because he matched the description provided in the tip, can defendant be found guilty of obstruction for running away? Certification granted: 10/12/2005
Argued: 2/15/06
Decided: 7/24/06

I can then go to the court site to read the full opinion. Rutgers Law library has constructed an RSS feed for New Jersey appeals and tax cases.

Even better, the Utah Appellate Court provides real-time delivery of court opinions by RSS, a free means of receiving updated content from user selected sites. The RSS program I like is Bloglines. Here you can collect and read all your dynamically refreshed content at one Web site.

Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Nevada and Maryland all distribute court opinions by RSS. The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinions are also syndicated.