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Arts & Music

UNC Folklore, ArtsCenter in tune for show

UNC News Services

Bluegrass, black gospel, country and a steel guitar sound rooted in the black church will come together in a celebration of North Carolina’s grassroots music on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro.

The “Carolina Breakdown” concert will feature the innovative bluegrass of the Tony Williamson Band of Siler City, the sacred steel sounds of the Allen Boys of Mount Airy, the old-time country of Laurelyn Dossett of Greensboro and the down-home gospel of the Branchettes of Newton Grove.

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Miscellany

Symbolic sprinkling


Photo by Kirk Ross

It wasn’t a groundbreaking, but a symbolic sprinkling of rainwater on native plants that marked the official event celebrating the pending construction of the new North Carolina Botanical Garden’s Visitor Education Center Saturday on Laurel Hill Road.

The center is the first building at a major U.S. campus to be designed as a Platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) structure, the highest certification given by the U.S. Green Building Council.

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Miscellany

News briefs: 4/19/07

Pig out on the green

The Chapel Hill Police Department will host the annual “Pig Out on the Green” barbecue fundraiser on Sunday to benefit Special Olympics of North Carolina.

The fundraiser, which will take place on the green at Southern Village, will run from 2-6 p.m. Tickets to the benefit are $10 and include barbecue “and all the fixins’,” according to the police department.

The event will also feature the Rhythm Brothers band, as well as a silent auction with items including a basketball signed by UNC men’s basketball coach Roy Williams, a football signed by UNC football coach Butch Davis and a Brian Vickers NASCAR racing helmet.

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Miscellany

Redistricting in limbo

By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer

After hours of heated discussion, tears and pleas for equity across the district, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education postponed a decision on a redistricting plan and instead voted to rework one of the four proposed plans while rejecting the other three.

The board is redistricting in order to move students to a new elementary school when it opens in the fall of 2008. School officials had recommended a plan that would move 1,095 students to different elementary schools, including 481 to the new school, which has yet to be named but has been dubbed Elementary No. 10. The new school will be located at the corner of Dromoland Road and Eubanks Road.

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Miscellany

Mary Scroggs, 85, schools advocate

By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer

Longtime board of education member and outspoken schools advocate Mary Scroggs died last week. She was 85.

Scroggs, who served on the school board from 1961 until 1977, is known for her work toward desegregation as well as for the construction of several schools at a time when schools were extremely overcrowded.

“When you talk about my mom, the first thing you’ve got to talk about is principles,” said Steve Scroggs, Mary Scroggs’s son and assistant superintendent for support services for Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools. “She was truly devoted to educating all the kids and she believed in what she did.

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Miscellany

School briefs: 4/19/07

Carrboro High names football, basketball coaches

The school board on Thursday approved the hiring of the men’s head basketball coach and head football coach at Carrboro High School, which opens in August.

Jason Tudryn was named head football coach and exceptional education teacher. Tudryn comes to Carrboro from Gulf Coast High School in Naples, Fl., where he also served as football coach and exceptional education teacher.

Alvin Thompson was named men’s head basketball coach and social studies teacher. Thompson presently is the men’s basketball coach and social studies teacher at E.E. SmithHigh School in Fayetteville.

According to athletic director Steven Reinhardt, Carrboro High will have a full league schedule for all sports, with all the same programs as Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill high schools.

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Miscellany

Local transfer tax would be good for the county

By Patrick Barnes and Mike Cross

In the mid-1980s, Dare County’s leaders saw a housing boom coming and didn’t know how to pay for it.

Higher property taxes were a touchy issue in the coastal county. The rich didn’t want them and the poor couldn’t afford them. Taxes on hotel rooms and other purchases wouldn’t raise enough.
Their solution? A tax on real estate sales.

With the legislature’s permission in 1985, Dare began levying a 1 percent tax on every real estate transaction. In two decades, the tax has raised more than $90 million. The money has helped pay for a gleaming high school with a view of the Wright Brothers memorial, two middle schools, three elementary schools and a $14 million justice center.

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Miscellany

For the record

Echoes from Blacksburg

Grief is immediate and lasting at the same time. In Blacksburg, a community much like our own, it has settled in while the town and the world stands in shock.

The echoes sounding on a survivor’s cell phone had barely faded when the conversation veered from anguish to politics and what to do about guns.

While not conceding any point in the debate over the parameters of the second amendment, it is doubtful that even the depth of this grief and the magnitude and horror of this crime will budge firearm policy a hair’s breadth.

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Miscellany

Open the Ethics Proceedings

By Louisa Warren

North Carolina lawmakers deserve great praise for passing a substantial lobbying and ethics reform package last year that will truly help change the pay-to-play culture that ruled in the General Assembly. But unfortunately there’s a fundamental flaw to the legislation that threatens to stain their good work and further erode public confidence.

When lawmakers created an Independent Ethics Commission last summer that now holds sway over all three branches of government, they managed to close the ethics proceedings to the public. That means that any ethics hearings and punishments given to executive branch employees or legislators will be kept secret. That means that the public may never know if a public official has committed an ethics violation. That means that legislation that was supposed to make government function more honestly and fairly actually sanctions closed-door maneuverings.

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Miscellany

Exile on Jones Street

Help Wanted

With the race for the Democratic nomination for governor tightening, it’s looking less and less like either Richard Moore or Beverly Perdue are going to blink and veer onto the federal side of the ballot to take on Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

With the two most well-funded and visible Dems not inclined to take on Liddy, the party has had a big help wanted sign hanging with no takers talking about it — at least out loud.

That changed last week when Rep. Brad Miller uttered that he’s talked with party officials about a possible Senate run.

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Miscellany

Small wonders and moments long remembered

By Frank Heath

You wake up on a beautiful Tuesday morning, but the power remains out in half of Chapel Hill, and 33 people are still dead on the campus of Virginia Tech.

Sometimes we make sports out to be as important as the things that go on in real life; but they’re not. Sports become like wallpaper on a day like Monday, April 16th.

What’s funny is that when sports fade a bit from our focus, that’s when they may actually provide a more meaningful framework for understanding the significant events and relationships of our lives.