State of health While Robeson County’s economic engine seems stuck in idle, the health care industry, bolstered by an aging and sedentary population, keeps chugging along.
Last week, more evidence of the good health of the local health care industry was evident when Southeastern Regional Medical Center announced it would seek the state’s permission to build a $30 million surgical unit that would sit alongside Interstate 95.
SRMC, with about 2,200 employe...
A step forward We smacked the Lumbee Tribal Government around pretty good in this space on July 24, saying that the Tribal Council needed to step out from behind the curtain of secrecy, and move toward a more open government.
An important step in that direction was taken on Monday when Tribal Chairman Sharon Hunt visited this office, hand-delivering a recent report from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was a response to the tri...
A step forward We smacked the Lumbee Tribal Government around pretty good in this space on July 24, saying that the Tribal Council needed to step out from behind the curtain of secrecy, and move toward a more open government.
An important step in that direction was taken on Monday when Tribal Chairman Sharon Hunt visited this office, hand-delivering a recent report from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was a response to the t...
Too good to be true? The improvement in the graduation rate for the Public Schools of Robeson County for the last two years is so steep that it’s difficult to believe.
Just three years ago, a fraction more than half of high school students in this county graduated four years after they entered ninth grade. Following the most recent school year, that percentage has risen to almost four out of five graduating — 78.8 percent, which is even better than the state av...
Holden’s hot seat If Holden Thorp, the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, figured that firing football coach Butch Davis would make the embarrassing headlines of the past year go poof, then he miscalculated badly — and now it’s his own future that appears uncertain.
After spending a year telling everyone who would listen that Davis had his support, Thorp fired Davis on July 20 without explanation, angering Tar Heel fans who are no...
Dead in the water Robeson County and Lumberton are among more than a dozen local governments in Southeastern North Carolina that are pushing for a state study to determine the pluses and minuses of a deep-water port in Brunswick County. But this cash-strapped state has not provided the funding for such as study, which has given opponents, including our U.S. representative, an excuse to withhold support.
Economic development officials in this part of the stat...
The last five people to die in traffic accidents in Robeson County had this in common: None of them was wearing a seat belt, and all of them were ejected from the vehicle they were traveling in.
Staff writer Teddy Kulmala plans a story on seat-belt use in this county and another factor that was common in all four of those deadly accidents — a driver’s propensity to over-correct when a vehicle drifts too far sideways. That article should be ...
Time to leave NCLB behind A true measure of this nation’s ability to educate its young people has been as difficult to achieve as the assignment.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was a worthy effort, but its flaws have been exposed over the decade, betrayed by the results: This nation isn’t getting any better at educating our children, and we doubt that anything fundamental will change until discipline again rules in the halls of our schools.
President Bush’s ...
Carolina's wrong way The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, trying to shove hot air back into a balloon with an ax, fired its head football coach last week, doing so after a 13-month investigation by the NCAA that found the coach was guilty of nothing.
Chancellor Holden Thorp said Butch Davis was being dismissed “without cause,” acknowledged that the timing — eight days before players were to report — was “terrible,” and said the coach would be given a $...
$100,000 question Sharon Hunt, the chairman of the Lumbee Tribal Council, last week said she wasn’t playing “hard ball” in her refusal to answer questions from the media concerning the tribe’s response to allegations of misspent housing money.
And we believe her.
Hunt is bound by an ordinance the tribe passed on March 18, 2010, that not only discourages such inquiries, but makes them unlikely. Hunt’s culpability is that she favored the ordinance, which was ap...
Less of a bad thing There are few things that more surely divide Americans than the issue of abortion, but on one thing we should all be able to unite: It is shameful that each year in this country about 1.3 million fetuses are aborted.
That isn’t an argument that a woman should not have the right to an abortion. Rather, it is the assertion that when there are 1.3 million “unwanted” pregnancies in the United States in 365 days, then something has gone terribly...
235 multiplied A line that was already too long lengthened last week in Robeson County when 235 teachers assistants were told they no longer had a job.
That represents 40 percent of all the teachers assistants in the county, so it’s sure to be another weight on a school system that is already dragging behind sister systems across the state. The teachers assistants, used primarily in the lower grades, do a lot of the grunt work, including trying to maintai...
$100,000 question Sharon Hunt, the chairman of the Lumbee Tribal Council, last week said she wasn’t playing “hard ball” in her refusal to answer questions from the media concerning the tribe’s response to allegations of misspent housing money.
And we believe her.
Hunt is bound by an ordinance the tribe passed on March 18, 2010, that not only discourages such inquiries, but makes them unlikely. Hunt’s culpability is that she favored the ordinance, which was...
Biggest loser The District 7 race for Congress is looking like a rematch, but this time Lumberton Democrat Mike McIntyre, who sees a ninth term imperiled by Republicans with a pen and an easel, might have to face Ilario Pantano, a conservative Republican, on his home turf — assuming both survive primaries.
A second version of congressional district maps that was released this week pulled Robeson County out from underneath McIntyre’s feet, putting his Che...
Let in the sunshine Regrettably, this state’s laws regarding public records do not apply to the Lumbee Tribe. That doesn’t, however, make it in the best interest of the tribe to continue the clandestine practices it has been known for over the years.
There isn’t enough space here for but a fraction of an inventory of examples, but these are easily recalled.
— The tribe briefly once banned the media from its meetings, saying they were closed to any except tri...
