Colin Campbell/WUNC News  Public schools in North Carolina are facing billions of dollars in unfunded school construction projects, and a lottery-supported grant program is only able to address a fraction of the requests it receives. As one of the state’s poorest school districts, Halifax County hasn’t had enough funding to...

Steve Harrison/WFAE Radio The controversy over the proposed toll lane on Interstate 77 in south Charlotte has been raging for seven months. And it’s far from over. The new Republican-written state budget includes a provision meant to get the toll lanes back on track. If Charlotte and other local governments...

Kate Denning/Carolina Public Press The long-awaited state budget signed by Gov. Josh Stein last week included a number of provisions for the state’s private schools and Opportunity Scholarship Program, including reallocating some funds from the voucher program back to public schools. Researchers and critics of North Carolina’s private school vouchers...

Will Doran/WRAL News Earlier this year State Auditor Dave Boliek put a former leader of the North Carolina Republican Party, Dallas Woodhouse, in charge of overseeing county elections boards. Woodhouse resigned last week amid allegations of putting pressure on some of those boards to make partisan decisions for how voting...

Skye Crawford/NC Health News Ben Ingraham wanted to be a doctor. He planned to attend medical school after serving as a U.S. Navy corpsman, but his time in the military was unexpectedly cut short. A traumatic brain injury and a leg injury forced him to medically retire. While in therapy...

Emily Sawaked/Port City Daily Within 10 miles of Sledge Forest, a limestone quarry has been proposed for expansion much to the chagrin of neighbors and environmentalists. At a  public hearing on July 14, speakers raised concerns about irreparable damage to the local environment. The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s...

Chloe Courtney Bohl/IndyWeek A Wake County initiative announced Monday sets an ambitious goal of moving 400 people from homeless encampments into housing in the next 18 months. Led by the Wake County Continuum of Care (CoC), the county’s umbrella organization for homeless services, with help from local government and private...

Molly Steur/Education NC A new career pathways program at Appalachian State University will kick off this fall, designed to “address the shortage of special education teachers in rural Appalachia,” according to a recent article from Appalachian Today. The program is funded by a more than $1.4 million grant from the...

Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline “If we don’t get a handle on this, the consequences may become fatal.” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Estella Patterson told the city council’s safety committee Tuesday that “teen takeovers” have become a growing problem nationwide. It works like this: A post appears on social media inviting youth to...

Matt Lamb/The Southern Pines Pilot After nearly six months and over a dozen court filings, Clerk of Superior Court Todd Maness and District Court Judge Beth Tanner have reached a settlement agreement for their ongoing litigation. Maness agreed to drop his defamation suit against Tanner, and Tanner has dropped her...

Jennifer Fernandez/NC Health News Before getting therapy, Abril Chavez Diaz’s 5-year-old autistic son, Angel, would have meltdowns that lasted for an hour, she said. He has made a lot of progress since he’s started with applied behavior analysis therapy, she told supporters and lawmakers at a June 19 event at...

Jay Price/WUNC News Thousands of veterans and family members are entitled to sue the government under a law Congress passed in 2022, which accepted responsibility and allowed compensation for a long list of illnesses affecting people who lived on the North Carolina Marine Corps base. Now, the plaintiffs and the...

Shea Carver/Port City Daily Brunswick County commissioners will have final say over development decisions after the North Carolina General Assembly unanimously approved a bill stripping the authority from the county planning board. Supporters believe it will increase accountability for elected officials as one of North Carolina’s fastest-growing counties grapples with...

David N. Bass/The Carolina Journal The most exclusive and expensive private schools in North Carolina receive little or no money from the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program, while the program’s largest recipients are predominantly lower-cost religious schools, according to a Carolina Journal analysis of state disbursement data. Of the 703 schools...

Bill Moss/The Hendersonville Lightning  Speakers on Wednesday morning lined up to strongly support a $25 million bond referendum to fund farmland preservation, saying that the bond issue would be a worthwhile investment to prevent farms from becoming subdivisions and to protect the county’s rural character. Among the speakers were former...