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It’s Thursday, March 13.
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Good morning, readers.
Recent headlines about federal funding cuts and mass layoffs at the Department of Education do a good job capturing the speed and breadth of the agency’s dismantling. But I wanted to understand its immediate, local impact—how these cuts are affecting students and teachers in Wake County right now—so I called up Natalie Self, a kindergarten teacher at Wildwood Forest Magnet Elementary School in Raleigh.
Self accepted her job at Wildwood Forest a little less than a year ago, largely because of hiring and retention incentives funded by a federal grant called Project LEADERS—a grant which has (you guessed it) since been canceled as part of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to reducing government spending.
Project LEADERS aimed to recruit more teachers to Wake County’s highest-need schools—those with relatively more minority and low-income students, lower test scores, and lower teacher retention rates.
When Self, a first-year teacher fresh out of college, moved to Raleigh for this job, she was excited to finally realize her lifelong dream of becoming an educator. Now, she’s considering leaving her school after only one year—“which is crazy,” she says, “because just a couple weeks before this happened, I was completely planning on staying.”
I spoke with Self about how losing access to federal funding from Project LEADERS is going to impact her, and by extension, her students.
—Chloe
Durham
The city of Durham is moving forward with converting “Reckless Roxboro”—a currently one-way street notorious for wrecks and speeding—into a two-way street, the 9th Street Journal reports.
Wake
The new Red Hat Amphitheater is being designed to keep noise downtown and away from nearby neighborhoods, WUNC reports. Check out new renderings.
Orange
ICYMI: The search for the next superintendent of Chapel-Hill Carrboro City Schools is underway. INDY’s Chase Pellegrini de Paur reports on the timeline for the search and potential challenges the next chief executive could face.
North Carolina
Enrollment in teacher programs has been declining statewide. The trend is causing a shortfall in future teachers, and at UNC-Chapel Hill, the music education program has been paused due to low demand, UNC Media Hub reports.
President Trump is threatening to revoke federal funding from institutions that provide gender-affirming care to patients under 19. The Duke Chronicle reports Duke Health is continuing to provide that care while the executive order is under a judicial pause—but that could change if the law does.
Today’s weather
Sunny with a high of 79 degrees.
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