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Winston-Salem Journal
The UNC board of governors awarded the 13th Annual Awards for Excellence in Teaching May 11 during a recognition luncheon. These area educators were among the recipients: Melanie Greene of Appalachian State University. Read full story
Employment officials don’t expect it to drop much lower; market for unskilled jobs is tighter
he Triad’s unemployment rate reached a six-month low of 4.5 percent in April, the N.C. Employment Security Commission reported yesterday.
But local economists and employment officials said they don’t believe that the rate will fall much lower in the near future. The March unemployment rate was 4.6 percent.
“Considering the economy actually has been a little more sluggish, I would have thought that the rate would have gone up,” said Todd Cherry, an economics professor at Appalachian State University.
“It appears that in the current economy, we’re not likely to get much below 4 percent in the unemployment rate. Many employers are still uncertain about the key fundamentals that tell them when it’s right to add staff.” Read full story
Russell Warriner finished his 12-day, 390-mile jog across the state last week with a 51-mile spurt to Atlantic Beach on his final day.
“Man, it felt awesome to finish,” he said. Warriner, 21, of Cary took off running this month from the state line near Trade, Tenn., to help raise money for research on multiple sclerosis, the disorder that has left his mother’s legs weak and unsteady. He estimates he raised about $3,000 for the National MS Society.
Warriner, a newly minted Appalachian State University graduate, also made the trip to sate his thirst for adventure. Read full story
Dr. J. Mark Estepp has long admired one of Southwest Virginia’s best kept secrets.
“All of Southwest Virginia is a hidden jewel,” Estepp, the newly selected president of Southwest Virginia Community College in Richlands, said. “This whole area is a hidden gem. We are just happy to be here.” For more than 20 years, Estepp traveled past SwVCC in Richlands while visiting his family in the Matewan community in neighboring West Virginia. Estepp, who currently serves as the dean of the college of fine and applied arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., hopes to be on campus in Richlands as early as July as the new college president.
Estepp will be the second president of SwVCC, Glenn DuBois, chancellor of Virginia’s Community Colleges, said. Estepp will succeed Dr. Charles King as the first president and founder of SwVCC in Tazewell County. Read full story
Standardized tests won’t be going away anytime soon for students applying to some local colleges.
It may have to be a decision of the UNC board of governors, the state’s public college system’s board, to make the tests optional for students applying to those schools, said Bobby Konay, the system’s senior associate vice president for academic and student affairs.
Even so, some local admissions officers don’t want that to be an option. They say that the SAT and the ACT provide a well-known yardstick to measure thousands of applicants who apply from hundreds of school systems, many with heavy course loads and high GPAs.
Admissions officers also caution that the tests are just one piece of the admissions pie.
The SAT may not be a perfect instrument, said Paul Hiatt, the director of admissions at Appalachian State University. “But it supplies some measure of standardization.
“Obviously students who have more exposure to reading materials and so on, I would think, would perhaps have an added advantage. That’s not always the case,” he said. “We notice that some of the school systems regularly produce students who seem to score consistently higher than other systems. It has to do with the individual and it has to do with the school and the school systems.
“The academic record is the most important factor,” he said, “but we’re looking at the SAT as another measurement with the whole record.
“I don’t know that we are at the point where we would discontinue the use of the SAT or the ACT. We’re familiar with the national debate. I think there’s validity to both sides of the argument.” Read full story
