After years of a sluggish real estate recovery, the home market in Haywood County is on a noticeable upward swing. Houses are selling quicker, the inventory glut is finally shrinking and home prices are inching upward again. Second-home buyers and retirees are returning, and overflow from the red-hot Asheville real estate market is leading younger buyers to Haywood’s doorstep to boot.

Haywood County Schools has been a part of my life for 24 years now — as a journalist, the husband of a teacher, and the parent of three children who were each students for 13 years in the system — and never has there been a time when I have heard more criticism about its leadership. 

I sort of get it — you close a school, that’s what happens. Understandably, people get emotional. But the larger, more important issue for parents and taxpayers, though, is whether the school system is in good hands. Is there any validity to the voices critical of Superintendent Anne Garrett and the school board’s leadership through these trying times?

A little-known contract crafted in 1980 will take center stage in coming months as Haywood County school officials and county leaders sort out who owes who what if the school system gets the boot from its central office location.

Haywood County School officials could be ousted from their central office by early spring 2017 to make way for an affordable housing project.

An innovative high school dropout program in Haywood County was rescued from the chopping block this week after county commissioners and school officials agreed to go halves on the $61,000 needed to keep it open.

Haywood County could be turning a corner after a slow, stubborn climb out of the recession, according to some obscure tidbits of data hidden in the bowels of the county’s budget for the coming fiscal year.

Haywood County commissioners were greeted with silence at their meeting Monday night when they asked if anyone in the audience wanted to speak during a public hearing on the county’s $72 million proposed budget.

Kyle Ledford spent years working with at-risk youth and high school dropouts in the Haywood school system. Saving kids was his calling, but it always felt like he was not playing with a full deck.

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• Trying to put a square peg in a round hole? Kyle Ledford’s your man

“The problems these kids were having could not be addressed in and of itself by a school. We couldn’t do anything about getting them a job or providing childcare or getting them housing and clothing,” Ledford said. “I can teach kids all day long, but I can’t do anything about housing and I can’t do anything about food stamps and I can’t do anything about transportation. The school system can’t solve a societal problem. It takes the community.”

Despite wild success rescuing high school dropouts and turning their lives around, the Haywood Community Learning Center is on the brink of closing if a funding quandary isn’t solved soon.

The trials of adulthood came early for Nicole Ferguson.