PFAS contamination found in both and Jones and Orange counties Maysville, which sits on the rim of the Croatan National Forest, is home to 1,000 people — about half of whom rely on the town’s sole drinking water well. And that well, according to a brief sentence in the both the House and Senate versions of the state budget, is contaminated.
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Archives for May 2019
Monthly Archives: May 2019
A sentence here, a paragraph there. A strike-through, a repeal, a new section. Individually, the Farm Act and the House and Senate budgets chip away at the incremental yet significant progress the state has made toward regulating industrialized livestock operations. But taken in total...
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The North Carolina public school end-of-year testing window is now officially open. With this season, comes dozens of hours of children sitting, practice-testing, reviewing, and re-testing. Children as young as eight years old will test for 3-4 hours with no break on consecutive days; Some students with an extended time accommodation will test even longer. This reality calls to question the efficacy and developmental appropriateness of our state’s testing practices. Prior to End Of Grade testing (EOG), classroom teachers already have plenty of indicators for each student’s proficiency in reading and math. Yet, children are tested at the end of the school year, when it’s no longer possible to correct the course.
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Teachers would get an average 3.5 percent pay raise over the next two years under a biennium spending plan released Tuesday by state Republican leaders. The plan calls for spending $23.9 billion during the 2019-20 fiscal year, and it increases spending on public education by $1.3 billion over the next two years.
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It’s one of the great and maddening ironies of the state lawmaking process in North Carolina that the single most important piece of legislation each year is perhaps the most poorly reported and one of the least well-understood. Every year, as the fiscal year winds down toward its June 30 conclusion, state lawmakers birth a new state budget bill that runs to hundreds of pages and includes all sorts of fundamental decisions about state funding priorities and tax policy...
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State Rep. Susan Fisher talks about the shortcomings in the House budget related to education spending, her new bill to help homeless youth in North Carolina, and why the Medicaid debate may keep lawmakers in Raleigh well into the fall.
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Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was originally dubbed, began as a tribute to those killed in the Civil War, still the bloodiest conflict – by far – in U.S. history. Its annual decoration of Civil War graves grew in communities across the country, eventually evolving to commemorate all American conflicts following the grisly toll taken in World War I.
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The United States is facing the largest number of measles cases in a single year, with 880 individual cases confirmed in 24 states between January 1 and May 17, 2019. Reporter Sarah Ovaska-Few reports on the rise in the number of toddlers in our state who are unvaccinated, raising the chance of contracting measles and other illnesses. Ovaska-Few talks about the risks and what NC pediatricians are doing to minimize the risk of infection.
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