What started as a traveling bookmobile 75 years ago has now evolved into a regional system of six library branches. Together they are striving to provide a broad range of services to their communities while defending their relevance in a changing society. 

“I think we need libraries for a lot of reasons,” said Karen Wallace, who serves as the librarian at the Franklin library and also as the director of Fontana Regional Library System. “We always try to respond to the needs in the communities. Where is the lifelong learning coming from if not from a public source like the library?”

After more than six months spent searching, the Haywood Community College Board of Trustees announced on Sept. 19 that it had identified a successor to retiring President Dr. Barbara Parker. Parker will leave the school in December after six years, but not before spending her remaining days working with the school’s next president, Dr. Shelley White. 

With a new school year just begun, the 300 students who participate in Waynesville Middle School’s robust agriculture program now have an array of new woodshop equipment at their disposal. 

“In two weeks this will be like Santa’s little helper’s woodshop,” Noal Castater, agriculture teacher at WMS since 2010, said in an interview the Friday before the first day of school. 

Western Carolina University’s newest chancellor is fairly certain that, of the teachers and students she knew years ago while pursuing her undergraduate degree, none would have guessed that she’d one day end up leading a thriving campus of 11,000 students. 

Summer is ending and schools are opening. It’s the time year when I remember the teachers.

These days, teachers are too often scapegoats for the shortcomings of parents, politicians and society at large. Truth be told, what they do each day in the classroom changes lives and changes the world. 

The property tax rate in Macon County will be increasing by half a cent after commissioners approved a 2019-20 budget that puts additional funding toward public education. 

Nearly 15 years after the North Carolina General Assembly narrowly passed a bill establishing an education lottery system, state legislators and local school districts are still arguing over how the revenue should be spent. 

More than 12,000 donors contributed over a five-year period to raise over $60 million for scholarships at Western Carolina University.

Last May, more than 25,000 educators across the state took to the streets of Raleigh to march for additional public education funding, and they plan to do it again this May. 

Despite proposed increases in nearly every major budget category, Haywood Community College is proposing a substantial new facility that could be hard to fund — and even harder not to fund.