As schools shut down during the pandemic, students were sent home and instructed to tune in online. Chromebooks were loaned out, and teachers began the process of getting material for the rest of the school year online. But for many students, there was still the problem of reliable internet. 

Something Dawn Gilchrist’s father-in-law, a retired Methodist minister, once said has stuck with her throughout her career as an educator — follow the gleam, mind the bend and enter the open door.

As Primary Election season sets in, a number of statewide races will have voters making some serious decisions at the polls. Few contests hold more consequence for the prosperity of the state as a whole than the one for Superintendent of Public Instruction.

A new kind of professional development training session hosted by the Haywood County Chapter of the NAACP left local educators with a lot to think about as they return to their classrooms. 

As it nears the end of its 50th anniversary year, the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont has its eyes set on the half-century to come. Within five years, the nonprofit aims to build out a second campus to supplement its existing facilities in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s Walker Valley. 

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.