A trusted friend surprised me the other day. At his child’s elementary school, it had been decided parents should not walk their children into the classroom in the mornings. Seems such habits, according to the school officials, foster dependency instead of independence.

I laughed at first, thinking of my friend’s sense of humor. He knows I’ve always taken a keen interest in my own kids’ schooling, and I was sure he was kidding me. No joke, he retorted.

Even though there’s little room for compromise, I’m going to step into the fray.

Haywood County commissioners are trying to come up with a policy about Confederate flags and whether they should be allowed at the Confederate memorial that adorns the courthouse lawn. The flags — tiny, hand-held ones at that — were offensive to at least one person who raised the issue to the county, but I suspect there are many others who find the symbol just as offensive but are keeping their mouths shut.

Count me among those who hope the MedWest affiliation between Haywood, Jackson and Swain hospitals survives. Otherwise, I fear none of the three hospitals will survive, but instead be swallowed up or severely marginalized in within a decade.

It’s been a tumultuous four years for the hospitals in the counties west of Buncombe. Despite the bumps in the road, though, there seems now at least a path — via the management contract with Carolinas HealthCare — for the three hospitals to move into the future serving pretty much the same role in their communities they’ve been serving for decades.

North Carolina’s General Assembly — under the leadership of Republicans for the first time in more than a century— will hopefully refrain in the future from pushing unfunded mandates onto the backs of counties and their taxpayers.

The U.S. Congress approved the Help America Vote Act so that counties could keep electronic voting machines updated and election workers properly trained. After the Bush-Gore debacle in 2000 that ended up in the Supreme Court, that seemed a wise decision. Electronic machines could have prevented the problems that occurred in Florida, problems that left Americans in limbo as to who won the presidential election.

“You know, this is really the only thing I know I’ve wanted to do my whole life.”

That was my daughter Hannah, a rising senior at Tuscola. She’s had a lifelong gift for coming up with sweeping, profound declarations that make Lori and I laugh first and then ponder later.

She’s talking about being a guide at Folkmoot, which she is this year for the first time. The guides get to spend the entire 12-day festival with their group, eating and sleeping at the Folkmoot Friendship Center, helping the groups make it on time to all their performances and making sure all their other needs are taken care of.

We were nearing the end of our European summer vacation with three other families from Western North Carolina when we pulled into Interlaken, Switzerland on a Saturday evening. As I looked around at the neat mountain chalets on the outskirts of town, it seemed they were all dark, almost as if they were closed up for the season. The entire town, it seemed, was on dim.

State senators from the mountain region — and we’re especially talking about those representing the southwest, Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, and Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Spruce Pine — need to pull out all stops to save the colorful license plates that put money directly into their districts and benefit their constituents.

You never know what subject in a column will incite readers and friends to open up and express their feelings. Last week’s piece about the madness that the end-of-year testing brings to public schools certainly led to an onslaught of opinions.

I was at the gym when a regular whose name I don’t know approached me and said he liked my column.

Each spring as the school year winds down, I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. As preparations for end-of-year, high-stakes testing get cranked up in our public schools, everything changes.

One day it’s a potentially life-changing test that has even good students stressed out. They are told to get plenty of sleep, eat good and don’t be nervous. Right. Next day it’s a marathon of absolute nothingness, a very “un-educational” experience which for one of my kids involved a three-movie school day. Three movies in one day! Next perhaps is field day or some kind of outdoors day.

My daughter at high school, on the other hand, only goes on test days these last few weeks. I tried to check her out for a dentist appointment the other day and they couldn’t use the intercom to call her. Too disruptive during testing, the logic goes. “Text her, if she’s not testing,” I’m told by front-office personnel.

So it goes without saying that the 180-day school year, to put it kindly, is a joke. And the last 15 days are the funniest of all.

And what kind of encore performance could get cooked up to top the multitude of wasted days and hours at the end of each and every school year? Lucky for us, the powers that be have given us a two-fer: we get to start school in early August  to make sure we get enough instructional days in; and two, the Republican-led legislature has decided that public school students should attend school for 185 days, so local school leaders next year get to figure out how to add another five days into a calendar that is already impossible.

My kids go to Haywood County Schools, but it’s the same throughout North Carolina and probably the entire country. Since standardized testing became the wonder drug of accountability for politicians — the measuring stick by which we differentiate good schools from bad schools, and in some cases the tool we use to determine bonuses for educators — we’ve been headed toward the kind of madness that now is the normal for every school year’s end.

How mad, you ask? Well, I’ve had teachers tell me that border-line second-graders are being failed because principals and teachers fear their third-grade end-of-grade test scores more than they value their second-grade results and effort. I remember one of my daughters getting taught the “tricks” to help bolster standardized test scores. You know, if you can narrow to two answers, then make a guess. Or, if you have “b” or “d” as choices, pick “d” because studies show that it is more likely to be the right answer based on an average of answers over the last several years (or some such nonsense). Really, this is how to teach elementary students?

The opposite is true for teachers. While students go from total waste to ever-important testing, teachers are trying to test, re-test, find proctors, finish grades, conference with parents, finish paperwork, and wind up a school year in which work days have been cut and planning time shortened.

The great irony in this end-of-year waste of time for students is how it has become the opposite at the beginning of each school year. We keep moving school start dates back toward July in order to get enough days into the school year. I’m all for tough standards to make sure graduating students are prepared for the road ahead, including making sure there is enough instructional time.

Somehow, though, putting students through a couple of wasted weeks at the end of each school year doesn’t jive with the move to start school earlier and earlier. I can’t reconcile the two extremes. I’m looking for answers, and would love to hear from parents, teachers or administrators on this subject.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

You’d be hard pressed to name a state-run entity more closely aligned with the region it serves than the Mountain Research Station in Waynesville. The work going on there is important for the agriculture economy and critical for the emerging crop of growers trying to specialize in exotic and specialty varieties. And researchers at the farm continue to provide direct help to farmers growing crops and livestock that have for years been the traditional mainstays of mountain agriculture.

Perhaps just as important, the Mountain Research Station promotes the lifestyle that will continue to make this region unique. More and more residents place a high value on rural areas and green space, and farms are just as much a part of this movement as wilderness areas. This means doing what we can to help small and large growers remain profitable.

The products from those growers are often going straight into homes. Many who live here are more than willing to pay a little extra for high-quality and tasty foods that come local farms, and many groups and organizations are promoting this lifestyle. As the grow-local, buy-local philosophy gains steam, it builds and strengthens the micro-economies in our rural communities.

It was just a few years ago (2008) that state lawmakers suggested closing the 410-acre research station. Regional supporters fought back hard. Joe Sam Queen, at that time a state senator and now running to return to Raleigh as a state representative, was among those who rallied for the research station.

“We have a diversified agricultural sector with small producers,” he said. The research station provides vital help to these growers, he argued. However, the much-larger farms in the eastern part of the state often carry more political clout.

The Mountain Research Station survived. Bill Skelton, director of the Haywood County Cooperative Extension Office, says the test farm does important work and does it well. He cited its work to improve the cattle herd in the region, while also touting its crop research.

“They put those questions in the ground and see if they can find answers,” said Skelton.

Current work “in the ground” —35 separate research projects — includes tests on what could be new crops in this region like broccoli, truffles and canola (for alternative fuels); continued work with Fraser firs (the first experimental Frasers in North Carolina were grown at the Waynesville farm in the 1970s) and heirloom tomatoes; a project to improve weed control for organic farmers; and continued research to help cattle producers.

“We are becoming more diverse. It’s important that we remain cutting edge. We need to be ahead of the game,” said Mountain Research Station Director Kaleb Rathbone.

The test farm is succeeding at doing just that — staying “ahead of the game.” Let’s hope this economic engine for WNC is here for another 100 years.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)