Cullowhee prepares for 2014 spring commencement ceremony
Western Carolina University will hold a trio of commencement ceremonies over a two-day period – Friday and Saturday, May 9-10 – to recognize the academic achievements of what is expected to be a record-breaking spring class.
Students get hands-on with science
Rocky Peebler’s wearing waders and a white T-shirt as he kneels on the shore of the Oconaluftee River. His boots are dripping from a recent foray into the river, and he’s picking through the critters wriggling across the surface of the net he and his classmates have just finished dragging through the water. It might not look like it, but Rocky is at school.
HCC leaders talk vision
Haywood Community College is entering phase two of a process it started last spring when trustees decided it was time to clean up the college’s mission statement and come up with some focused goals for the future.
Cohabitation ordinance makes trouble for drug recovery program
An ordinance designed to keep student housing from taking over the village of Forest Hills is creating an obstacle for a drug recovery program looking to start up there. Mia Boyce, director of the Christian nonprofit Kingdom Care, began her efforts to set up a home there for women in recovery in October. She had been working with her daughter-in-law’s parents, who own the 11-bedroom home, to move her Asheville-based ministry to Forest Hills, so she sought the village council’s blessing.
HCC’s low-impact development degree axed
Four years ago, Haywood Community College launched the first low-impact development program in North Carolina, a new degree to train students in sustainable development and design.
Voting from bed: WCU, Jackson County election officials hammer out a hopeful home
Walking out of the Jackson County Board of Elections offices in Sylva, Lane Perry seemed pleased. A year’s worth of work was about to pay off.
SEE ALSO: Election laws in the ‘new’ North Carolina
“At the end of the day, we want to be able to get university students to vote where they live for three to five years,” Perry explained on the way to his car.
WCU staff and students improve libraries in area jails
For most people, the word “jail” stirs up mental images of vertical bars and stark concrete walls, not of rows of books or orange-clad inmates studiously reading them. But bars have, for the most part, turned to Plexiglas and metal doors, and thanks to the collaborative research of librarians and criminal justice faculty at Western Carolina University, an initiative to expand book collections in Western North Carolina jails is gathering steam.
Schools rebut charge of impeding efforts to start secular club
Haywood County Schools’ attorney has countered accusations that Pisgah High School administrators allegedly hampered a student’s attempt to form a club for atheists and non-religious students.
From the studio to the classroom
The loud pounding echoed from the end of the empty corridor.
Crossing the threshold of the last classroom on the left at Smokey Mountain Elementary School in Whittier, one could see — and hear — that the source of the sound came from the feverish hands of students during their afternoon art class. Like an army of woodpeckers, the pupils each hammered away at copper sheet metal in an effort to make their designs a physical reality.
Pisgah student persists, forms secular club
A club for non-religious students is being formed at Pisgah High School after a freshman enlisted the help of a national group to go to bat for her.