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View Comments Just three months before its opening, PEAK Academy, Asheville’s newest charter school, is in search of its second superintendent after Raul Saldaña resigned in late March due to “personal reasons,” school officials said. The school will announce a new superintendent within two weeks, PEAK Operations Coordinator Meredith Foulke said. “I can’t give too much information about where we are in that search,” she said. “All I can say is that we do hope to make an announcement pretty soon.” Saldaña was hired as the school’s leader last summer and started in August. He moved to Asheville from New Mexico where he worked in the Las Cruces Public School District. He oversaw PEAK Academy s curriculum and enrollment planning, according to the school s Facebook page. ....
is a “black-person thing.” Can rising gun violence in Asheville be stopped in its tracks by roughly $200,000 of funding supporting a year of on-the-ground programming? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean community organizations don’t plan to try. Over the last year, the urgent need to address the interrelated causes and impacts of gun violence, systemic racism and poverty grew even more pressing. In 2020, the Asheville Police Department reported a five-year high for calls related to gun discharges and shootings, the vast majority of which involved Black men. Community members grew tired of witnessing the disproportionate impact of gun violence on their friends and neighbors, explains Tiffany Iheanacho, Buncombe County’s justice services director, prompting county leaders to look for new solutions. ....