Matthew was struggling to keep up with his second grade classmates in reading, was sleeping in class, missing school, and getting into conflicts with peers. Matthew had some unique behaviors that his teachers had difficulty managing, and repeating second grade was becoming a possibility. He even talked of hurting himself.

This week NC Child and the NC Institute of Medicine release the 2018 Child Health Report Card, an annual assessment of key health indicators for North Carolina’s more than 2.2 million children. The focus of the 2018 Report Card is Financial Security, Opportunity, and Health.

In “Lessons on political speech, academic freedom, and university governance from the new North Carolina” – an article in the most recent edition of the First Amendment Law Review, Prof. Gene Nichol of the University of North Carolina School of Law provides a detailed and fascinating account of the battles in which he and other faculty members have found themselves enmeshed in recent years as they have grappled with the regular interference of conservative politicians, advocacy groups and university officials.

After weeks of public inaction on a host of smoldering policy controversies, Republicans at the North Carolina General Assembly unveiled a new and controversial bill yesterday afternoon that addresses several high-profile issues. The new legislation, which was negotiated and written behind closed doors by and at the direction of House and Senate leaders, was made public in a contentious joint House-Senate Appropriations Committee meeting that featured several rancorous interactions between Republican defenders and Democratic critics of the bill.

Goldsboro, a mid-sized city in Wayne County in eastern North Carolina, faces poverty challenges both historical and contemporary that are too commonly seen across much of the region. Traditionally divided along black and white racial lines, the city is in the process of being transformed by demographic changes, even as it wrestles with the consequences of two recent recessions and the economic transitions that swept the state in the early 2000s.

As veteran state education policy analyst Kris Nordstrom detailed in his recent report, The Unraveling—Poorly-crafted Education Policies Are Failing North Carolina’s Children, North Carolina has lost its way when it comes to public schools: