Some of North Carolina’s top leaders in business, politics, education and philanthropy gathered in Raleigh on Monday to push for more focus on creating a skilled labor force. They said that includes providing more young adults with credentials aligned with employer needs.
In many North Carolina counties, school staff aren't tracking vaccination rates of their faculty or staff, let alone requiring a vaccine, even though educators increasingly say they support mandates, according to a survey by the N.C. Watchdog Reporting Network.
In the spring of 2020, many hospitals delayed or canceled gender-affirming surgeries, along with other procedures deemed elective or nonessential to make space for COVID-19 patient
North Carolina LGBTQ advocates argued for years that the use of legal names not only put some students at risk of being outed, potentially leading to harassment from other students, but was also an issue of privacy and safety.
The Asheville-based Campaign for Southern Equality has been working with the Department of Public Instruction since 2017 in an effort to update the system. Craig White, the supportive schools director for the campaign, said that parents and educators were working on the issue even before them.
Last week, Congress approved the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, a $2.4 trillion spending package that includes $23 billion in aid for public and non-profit colleges and universities.
The relief package will provide about $286 million in new Higher Education Emergency Relief Funding (HEERF) to UNC system schools. Of that amount, almost $90 million is allocated directly for emergency student aid and about $196 million will go to the institutions themselves. (These figures are estimates created by the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities.)
In an email to the UNC Board of Governors and campus administrators, UNC System President Peter Hans explained that the aid to universities can be used for various purposes, including: