It’s teleconferences instead of car trips and fewer new staff and faculty at Cape Fear Community College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington as both schools prepare to absorb mid-year budget cuts.

Colleges and universities across the country have felt the pinch of the gloomy economy, and CFCC and UNCW are no exception. Both schools say they have tightened their belts, though past fiscal caution is making the process less painful. Current construction will continue and there will be no mid-year tuition hikes, but the cuts are forcing both schools to adjust priorities. The emphasis is on minimizing the impact on students.

“We’re a university – we’re about the classroom above everything else. That’s why we exist,” UNCW Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo said. “So as much as possible, we need to protect what’s happening in the classroom.”

Since the beginning of the semester in August, both schools have seen budget cuts by the N.C. General Assembly. (more…)

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) - North Carolina Senator-elect Kay Hagan has named several members of her senior staff in Washington.

Hagan said Tuesday that former campaign manager Crystal King will be chief of staff. Hagan said King has 15 years of political experience, including working for former astronaut and Ohio Democratic Sen. John Glenn. (more…)

RALEIGH (AP) - North Carolina Democratic Party chairman Jerry Meek, who presided as Democrats improved their electoral standing in the state from president to county commissioner, said Tuesday he won't seek another two-year term.

Meek, 38, is leaving the post he won in 2005, when he was the favorite of local party activists over the preferred candidate of Gov. Mike Easley. The party's executive committee will meet Jan. 31 in Raleigh to choose his replacement.

"I've enjoyed my four years. But four years is a long time in a full-time unpaid job," Meek said in an interview.

Meek, a Fayetteville attorney, also is stepping down in part because he's getting married Dec. 5 to state Rep. Tricia Cotham, D-Mecklenburg. He will share time between Charlotte and Raleigh while working at the Poyner Spruill law firm. (more…)

RALEIGH, N.C. Sheriffs in seven North Carolina counties have identified more than 3,100 people in their jails processed for deportation proceedings this year.

The North Carolina Sheriffs Association provided legislators Tuesday with data from a program in which sheriffs work with federal immigration officials to determine if people arrested are in the country illegally.

The deputies run names and fingerprints through federal immigration records to determine legal status. More than 4,500 people had been interviewed through the so-called 287(g) program through Sept. 30. (more…)

Governor-elect Beverly Perdue expanded the leadership of her transition team this week, adding prominent African-American leaders and female business executives to the three white male Raleigh insiders she earlier named to head up her efforts. Good for her.

Members of Congress from North Carolina say they can't keep up with the requests for tickets to the inauguration of Barack Obama as president. The excitement around his election doesn't seem to have dissipated much in the last two weeks and social justice advocates are still scrambling to harness all the positive energy and collective hope created by Obama's campaign to make a difference in North Carolina policy debates.

There's plenty to work on. That was made clear in several places Tuesday as not much of the best of the state was on display.  Lawyers with the North Carolina Attorney General's office spent the morning trying to convince the State Supreme Court to pave the wave for executions to resume at Central Prison.

Executions have been on hold in North Carolina for more than two years while the courts consider the role of doctor when the state puts an inmate to death. State law requires that a doctor be present. The State Medical Board voted to discipline any doctor that participated in the execution procedure and the dispute has been working its way through the courts.

There is also a lawsuit pending about the lethal injection procedure the state uses to kill people. The legal issues don't seem that complicated and the moral issues are even clearer. The Attorney General's office is fighting vigorously to resume executions when the lawyers know that race plays a role in the system.

They know that the death penalty is random and arbitrary and wealthy people who commit murder are rarely sentenced to death. 

In most of the cases in recent years where innocent men were freed from death row, they were freed over the objections of prosecutors and the Attorney General's office.  Not much hope or positive energy in that.

While state lawyers were fighting to begin executing people again, a few blocks away a legislative committee was listening to a report on a federal immigration program that allows local sheriff department personnel to become immigration officers.

The North Carolina Sheriffs' Association gets state funding to help counties with the program touted by Senator Elizabeth Dole and others as a way to get tough on immigration. Seven counties have chosen to participate and the program requires sheriff's departments to determine the citizenship status of people arrested and turn over undocumented workers to federal immigration authorities.

Dole and others originally said the program was designed to identify and deport immigrants here illegally who had committed violent crimes, not to harass immigrants who commit minor traffic offenses.

Figures provided by Eddie Caldwell of the Sheriffs' Association showed that 33 percent of the more than 3,100 people deported so far this year were arrested for violating traffic laws. Caldwell described people interviewed who turned out to be in the country legally as "nonremovable," a label that sums up much of the attitude toward immigrants in many parts of the state. 

Not a surprise though when you consider the head of the Association's Executive Committee is Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell , who said in an interview with the News & Observer that "Mexicans are trashy" and said "All they do is work and make love."   Not much evidence there of a new day in the state.

Just a few rooms away from the discussion about nonremovables, another legislative committee was discussing how to compensate the more than 3,000 living victims of the state ‘s horrific eugenics program that sterilized women against their will until the early 1970s.

The committee was wrestling with how much financial compensation the victims should receive and there seemed to be a consensus that it couldn't be too much because the state faces a severe budget crisis. 

This is not the first time a study committee has discussed helping the victims. A similar group met a few years ago when the state was not facing a budget shortfall. Nothing was done that year. Now the victims may be told that the state that mutilated them doesn't have the money to help them.

Nothing like an overwhelming display of political courage.

State officials clamoring to resume putting people to death, law enforcement leaders hailing the deportation of speeders and lamenting nonremovables, and lawmakers unwilling to demand help for people whose lives were devastated by the state.

Hard to think of more compelling examples of policies and attitudes that simply cannot stand in a civilized society or in a state in which leaders proclaim that it is a new day.  Talk about change we need.

Published: November 18, 2008

WASHINGTON

Sen.-elect Kay Hagan, D-N.C., joined other freshman legislators for orientation Monday on her first visit to Washington since defeating Republican incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

Hagan met with Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, and planned to spend time looking for a place to live when her term begins in January.

Hagan's victory — a win that many thought unlikely as recently as six months ago — was one of six Senate seats that Democrats took from Republicans in the election, helping the party expand its majority to at least 57 seats.

Hagan said she had formally requested seats on the Senate banking and armed-services committees, and hoped to hear a decision by the end of the week.

The banking slot would give Hagan, a banking executive be­fore she joined the N.C. Senate, a voice in the continuing national debate about regulation of a key industry in the state. Dole serves on the banking committee. (more…)

RALEIGH - Thirteen school systems in the Triangle and surrounding area received a combined $1.79 million as part of the N.C. School Connectivity Initiative this year, Gov.-elect Beverly Perdue announced Monday.

The money, part of a statewide, two-year allocation totaling $22 million, will be used to connect schools to the N.C. Research and Education network, a statewide broadband network that links schools to the UNC and N.C. Community College systems online. (more…)

WINSTON-SALEM - A public university says it will repay the government and lenders more than $1 million for loans and grants given to ineligible students.

Winston-Salem State University said it would repay $1.15 million over the next three years, the Winston-Salem Journal reported Monday.

A review team said the university owes $710,855 to the U.S. Department of Education and $437,901 to lenders of subsidized loans. The review was prompted in 2006 by a tip to the Department of Education.

At issue were students who got $1.15 million in aid, then dropped out and didn't tell the university. The review said the university had difficulty tracking students who withdrew from classes. It also said the university's academic standards weren't stringent enough to meet federal rules for student aid. (more…)

In late October, a letter from the North Carolina Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission arrived at Linda Curry’s house. It informed her that the man serving a life sentence for killing her son 15 years ago was eligible for parole and has a hearing scheduled for Dec. 22.

“They said something about like he’s trying to go to school and said he’s not going to get out right then, but it’d probably be about three years for him to go through this schooling thing,” Curry said. “And I told her I don’t think he deserves to go to school. He needs to sit and think about what he did to my son. He took Scottie’s life.”

In 1992, Scottie Curry and his wife, Nevetta, had recently moved back to Lexington from New Mexico where he was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. They were high school sweethearts. Scottie joined the military after graduation, and Nevetta moved to be close to where he was stationed.

The couple came back to North Carolina, now with a 3-year-old son, Scottie Jr., but they’d taken to calling him Chuck. They moved into a little house on Pennington Avenue, and Scottie took a job at Lexington Furniture Industries Plant No. 2. Scottie was 22, and Nevetta was 23. (more…)

By GARY D. ROBERTSON
The Associated Press

Monday, November 17, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. — Gov.-elect Beverly Perdue added black and female members to her transition team late Monday, a few days after some outside her campaign questioned a lack of diversity with the three white males initially chosen to lead the group.

The additions — three of whom are women and three black — bring a great deal of experience in state government, education and business to the team of Perdue, who will be North Carolina's first female governor.

The team's newcomers are State Board of Education chairman Howard Lee of Chapel Hill and community college system chairwoman Hilda Pinnix-Ragland of Cary. Former Golden Leaf president Valeria Lee of Rocky Mount and ex-lottery commission member Linda Carlisle of Greensboro also are on board.

The four "will provide valuable insight and guidance as our transition efforts continue to take shape," Perdue, the outgoing Democratic lieutenant governor, said in a statement. (more…)

North Carolina's education officials say they will raise high school graduation rates by supporting proven methods for promoting achievement, things like increasing access to pre-kindergarten programs and bringing new, qualified teachers to poor and rural schools. 

They spend less time talking about how they will re-engage and nurture the millions of young people who are already failing, the ones whose personal and emotional problems have exacerbated academic ones. 

The problem is that at least some officials are unsympathetic toward students who they view as trouble makers so they willfully ignore the direct link between North Carolina's dropout rate and statewide suspension numbers that are rising.

During the 2006-07 school year, one out of 10 students or 308,010 of them received an out-of-school short-term suspension, up 2.1 percent from the previous school year. Long-term suspensions, those that last for 11 days or more, increased 2.7 percent to 4,682.

Unfortunately, the number of alternative learning programs that serve suspended students is not rising at the same clip, because too many local school districts do not believe they have a responsibility to educate rule-breakers while they are punishing them. State law encourages schools to provide continued education for suspended students but stops short of mandating it.

State legislation requires that, unless granted a waiver by the State Board of Education, every district must have an alternative program or have an agreement with another school district to refer suspended, expelled and at-risk students to its program. Still, in most school districts, alternative programs are small initiatives that do not serve all grade levels. Many are filled to capacity or have selective admission policies.

So every year, thousands of suspended and expelled students are left to their own devices where they become more at-risk of academic failure and more likely to engage in high-risk or delinquent behaviors.

Recently, at a meeting of the Joint Legislative Commission on Dropout Prevention and High School Graduation, a representative from the state Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention spoke about that department's efforts to highlight the disproportionate number of long and short -term suspensions awarded to minority students. Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is doing important intervention work with students and school districts in an effort to reduce the number of suspensions across the state. But it will take many years for those increased efforts to stem the growing tide of suspensions across the state.

In the meantime, legislators and education officials who say they are committed to lowering dropout rates and boosting retention must stop allowing school districts to withhold education as a form of punishment. Until the legislature requires every school district to meet the educational needs of students who are most at risk of failing, North Carolina cannot say it is seriously committed to helping all students reach their full potential.

Rochelle Williams is an Education Policy Analyst at the N.C. Education and Law Project of the N.C. Justice Center

Click here to listen.

RALEIGH, N.C. Smithfield Packing Co. and the United Food and Commercial Workers say employees at the company's massive North Carolina hog slaughterhouse will decide next month whether to unionize.

Company and union officials said Monday the vote is scheduled for Dec. 10-11 and results will be made public. Smithfield Packing is owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc.

The union has been working for more than a decade to organize the plant in Tar Heel, where roughly 5,000 workers slaughter up to 32,000 hogs a day. (more…)

Submitted by markjohnson on November 17, 2008 - 11:42am.

Rep. Jim Harrell lost his bid for re-election but may keep a Raleigh work address. He's in the mix for an assistant secretary's post at the Department of Commerce.

Harrell, a Surry County Democrat, said the transition team for Gov.-elect Beverly Perdue has not interviewed him, but he sidestepped whether he was making a pitch for the job.

"I'm always looking for a way to help North Carolina's economic development," said Harrell, a three-term lawmaker who was defeated by Republican Sarah Stevens in the swing district.

As a legislator he helped push legislation creating incentives for movie production in the state and another bill that updated other tax incentives for new businesses. (more…)