The annual QuickDraw art fundraiser will once again be held from 4:30-9 p.m. Saturday, June 20, at Laurel Ridge Country Club in Waynesville.

The cocktail social will include an hour-long QuickDraw Challenge, live/silent auction, refreshments and dinner. Live artists will be working in the public eye, creating timed pieces, which will then be auctioned off. 

Immediately after Jackson County Public Schools Associate Superintendent Jake Buchanan and Southwestern Community College President Don Tomas proposed their respective departmental appropriations for fiscal year 2026-27, Jackson County Manager Kevin King presented commissioners with a May 19 draft county budget that left both requests unfulfilled.  

This week’s Haywood County Commission meeting featured over a dozen speakers decrying the board’s decision to not grant the full funding requested by school officials ahead of the budget vote. 

The meeting began with County Manager Bryant Morehead presenting the budget, as he’d done during an earlier meeting. The budget looked almost the exact same as the prior presentation with one exception, an additional $1 million fund balance appropriation to bolster school funding, leaving the county $700,000 short of meeting the $3 million funding increase request. 

Historically, Haywood County Schools has run a tight ship in the face of slim county appropriations. Last year, it pulled from its own fund balance to finance operations; in 2022, it cut 36 positions. 

But for the coming academic year, Superintendent Trevor Putnam made a dire case for additional funding. Any further cuts, he said, would deny HCS students a quality education.

For fiscal year 2026-2027, Haywood County Schools is requesting an additional $3 million in annual county funding. 

The ask is driven by several overlapping needs — offsetting state and federal cuts, avoiding fund balance appropriations, covering a $400,000 increase in annual operating costs, financing salary raises and supporting continued program needs — all while facing a budget shortfall between $700,000 and $740,000. 

Haywood County School Board at a Jan. 12 meeting officially gave the new Haywood Innovative middle school the green light to open its application to prospective students. 

“We are looking for students who choose to be here, who are motivated to be here, who would benefit from a rigorous and accelerated middle school experience,” said Lori Fox, principal of Haywood Early College and Haywood Innovative. 

For nearly 20 years, the United States Department of Education has helped fund Full-Service Community School programs in “high-poverty” and “high-poverty rural” schools across the nation, while coalitions and existing community partners ensure on-the-ground, local implementation. 

A judge’s ruling earlier this month that ordered Shining Rock Classical Academy — a charter school in Haywood County — to turn over public records requested by a mother and this newspaper is a win for taxpayers across this state who fork over their hard-earned cash to fund both regular public schools and charters.

On the nine-month anniversary of Hurricane Helene, Gov. Josh Stein signed the North Carolina General Assembly’s fifth major installment of recovery funding — a sweeping $575 million package aimed at rebuilding roads, bridges, schools and government infrastructure across the state’s western region while omitting the $60 million in small business grant support that House lawmakers had supported. 

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote a column for this space. Instead, we’ve been fortunate enough to print your opinions. 

I take it as a sign of a newspaper’s health relative to its relationship with readers when we have a lot of letters to the editor or guest columns coming to my inbox.