Education

This is a story about choice. And it starts in the lunch line at Arapahoe Charter School in Pamlico County when students choose between pizza and french fries.

And while that choice may seem easy to make, the choice to offer it is a little more complicated.

Charter schools aren’t required to offer meals, even to kids who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. But Arapahoe does – and sixty percent of the students here qualify.

It was a day of goodbyes at today's UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees meeting. Chancellor Holden Thorp and several trustees are leaving after a tumultuous tenure. 

Over the past few years, Trustees meetings have often been tense, uncomfortable, and even demoralizing for the members, as the leaders of UNC-Chapel Hill have dealt with scandals in athletics and academics. But with Thorp on his way out, Board chairman Wade Hargrove offered nothing but praise.

Charter schools have been around in North Carolina for about a decade and a half, and for most of that time, the relationship between charters and traditional public schools has alternated between frosty and hostile.

About 1,000 undergraduates and 600 graduate students received degrees at Wake Forest University's commencement exercises today.  The school's Class of 2013 includes 11 recipients of the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship.  Those students will be taking on post-graduate work ranging from researching regenerative medicine in Sweden to teaching Vietnamese children. 

PBS journalist Gwen Ifill  delivered the commencement address and urged the graduates to keep several promises.