US/NC

Navigation

countries: United States: North Carolina

Overview

This page is for issues local to the state of North Carolina in the United States.

Active Issues

Stupid Rule for Charter Schools

(To be researched) If you are a charter school in NC, your funding is based entirely (or mostly?) on how many students show up on the very first day of school. The only exception is if a student is actually in the hospital. Even if a student has to be out of town for a vacation planned months and months earlier, they still have to show up for the first day of class for at least three hours, or else they do not count towards the school's enrollment -- and the school is forced by circumstances to give away that student's spot to the next person in line who can be there. (What's more, as long as the student has shown up on the first day, s/he can be absent for months afterward without affecting the school's funding. It's not, then, a matter of having high standards; the rule is simply arbitrary in the extreme.)

The regular public schools, however, have a twenty day window in which students may show up in order to be counted towards the school's funding.

It seems obvious that this rule is unfairly biased against charter schools. It only inconveniences a very few people, but the conflict can be massive when it does -- and can end up hurting both the child and the school, depending on what ultimately happens.

Past Issues

Limits to Municipal Internet

House Bill 1587, aka "The Local Gov't Fair Competition Act" aka the bill to prevent local government from competing "unfairly" with the local internet monopolies (the people who name these things obviously have the same sense of irony as the real-estate developers). This issue appears to be dead for the moment, as the bill has gone to committee – but don't be surprised if it appears again in another form.

• 2007-07-24 N.C. Bill Limiting Municipal Internet Effectively Killed!

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia (stub as of 2007-08-05)
• HTYP

Projects

• 2007 The NC Home Sales Tax: It's a Bad Idea
  • This appears to be a site created by the NC real estate industry. The tax was not on "equity" but on the sale of homes, paid by the seller. It's not clear how this is different from an impact fee, but the industry has certainly done its best to get rid of impact fees wherever possible (Durham recently did away with them, 2006?) in spite of the obvious need for impact fees to pay for new infrastructure (utilities, schools, roads...).

Articles

• 2006-08-16 The Vanishing Voter by Bob Geary, The Independent: gerrymandering and other systematic political corruption in NC government

News

• 2007-08-05 Campus research hits budget jackpot: "North Carolina has long been generous in its financial support of universities, and this year is no different. But another thing stands out in the new state budget approved by the legislature: big bucks for research. .. The centerpiece is a cancer research fund at UNC-Chapel Hill -- $25 million in the coming year, growing to $50 million a year starting in 2009."