Education

The future of the state's residential schools for the deaf and blind will be the subject of a series of public hearings this month.

Families and other interested people will gather tonight in Morganton, the site of one of North Carolina's three residential schools for the deaf and blind. Until this summer, those schools were managed by the state department of health and human services. The legislature transferred oversight to the Department of Public Instruction over the summer, cut the budget, and told DPI to recommend the closing of one of the schools.

The Chancellor at North Carolina Central will play a key role at a White House event next week. Charlie Nelms will lead a town hall at the annual conference of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Police at UNC-Chapel Hill are now using a GPS to track stolen bicycles on campus. Under the strategy implemented this week, officers plant a tracking device on a so-called "bait bike," and then follow the signal if it leaves a certain boundary. Police at N-C State started using the device last November. Deputy chief Jon Barnwell says his department started seeing immediate results.

Most school districts in North Carolina are county-wide. Mergers of county and city schools occurred mostly in the 1970s through the 1990s, driven by cost and desegregation orders.

But one county remained steadfast against consolidation. Halifax County in northeastern North Carolina has three separate school districts… Roanoke Rapids, Weldon City, and Halifax – for just 8,000 total students. By comparison, if Wake County was divided into a comparable number, there would be 53 different school districts.