On the weekend of March 20, the Carrboro Django Reinhardt Festival returns for its fifth edition, bringing acoustic jazz, communal jam sessions, and a rare slice of European musical culture to local venues.

Founded in 2016 by local musician Gabriel Pelli, the festival survived a pandemic hiatus and several years of lost momentum before springing back to life last year, when every concert and workshop sold out and the Sunday jam ran for seven straight hours.

For Pelli, staging the festival is a side gig—albeit a consuming one. 

“It is basically a one-man show,” Pelli said. “I’m the founder, director, creative director. I do get help along the way, for sure. But I didn’t revive it until last year. I just ran out of steam.”

Running even a modest festival is no small task: booking artists, coordinating international flights, signing contracts, managing ticketing platforms, handling marketing, scheduling workshops, negotiating venue splits, and balancing guest lists against a tight budget. Pelli does it between rehearsals, teaching, and the rest of life. 

Growing up, Pelli didn’t play this kind of music—he didn’t know it existed.

“It all started with a friend of mine, Wells Gordon,” he said. “He wanted to put together a hot-club-style band and needed a violinist. Any warm body that could play violin.”

At the time, Pelli played only classical violin and had yet to hear of Django Reinhardt. Gordon sent him recordings.

“I loved it right away,” Pelli said. “He told me I could just sight-read the melodies. I’d play the melody at the beginning of the tune, the guitarist would take the solos, and then I’d come back at the end. That’s how I started.”

From there, curiosity turned into obsession. He began experimenting with improvisation on violin, then later picked up guitar to better understand the language of the style. What started as filling a seat in a band slowly reshaped his musical life.

The festival itself came nearly a decade into that journey. The first edition was sparked by a French guitarist named Stéphane Wrembel, who grew up near the town where Django Reinhardt lived. When Pelli saw he was touring nearby, he reached out cold.

“I just wanted him to come here so I could hear him,” Pelli said. “I told him I’d set up the show and promote it.”

Wrembel agreed but suggested they call it the Django Reinhardt Festival and add a workshop. That first year was straightforward: one afternoon workshop and an evening concert. 

The festival is devoted to Reinhardt, the Belgian-born Romani guitarist who reshaped jazz in the 1930s with a radically inventive approach. Born into a traveling Romani family that moved throughout western Europe, Reinhardt eventually settled on the outskirts of Paris. After a caravan fire severely damaged his left hand, doctors recommended amputation. He refused.

With limited use of two fingers, he rebuilt his technique.

“He had these two fingers for lead melodies,” Pelli said, describing Reinhardt’s approach, “and the others mainly for chords. When you try to play one of his licks, you realize it actually works best with two fingers—because that’s how he had to do it.”

Often labeled gypsy jazz—also known as jazz Manouche, Sinti jazz, hot club jazz, or Django-style jazz—the musical style blends American swing with European waltzes and Romani traditions. While the terminology carries cultural nuance, the style has endured most vibrantly within Western European Sinti communities, where it functions as living folk music, learned young and passed down socially across generations.

“It’s really become their folk music,” Pelli said, referring to communities in the Netherlands, Germany, and France. “There’s no better way to get really good than to be surrounded by other good players and to play all the time.”

That communal ethic anchors the Carrboro festival. Alongside ticketed concerts and workshops, Sunday’s free jam session at Lapin Bleu in Chapel Hill serves as the weekend’s gravitational center. Musicians rotate in and out. At one point at a past festival, Pelli found himself trading choruses with Reinhardt’s great-grandson.

“It was surreal,” he said. “You realize you’re inside a lineage.”

This year’s lineup leans into that living tradition. Dutch guitarist Paulus Schäfer headlines the weekend, traveling from the Netherlands for two nights at Cat’s Cradle Back Room. Schäfer grew up immersed in the Sinti jazz scene and is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary voices in the style.

He’s joined by Baltimore guitarist Sam Farthing, 24, whose playing has drawn high praise from aficionados.

“He plays like he grew up in a Sinti camp in Holland,” Pelli said. “Which is about the highest compliment you can give.”

Concerts run Friday and Saturday nights, March 20–21, with daytime workshops focused on rhythm technique, improvisation, and ensemble interplay. Sunday’s March 22 jam is free and informal, no ticket required.

“Even if you can’t afford a workshop or a concert, you can come by for free and listen to the jam,” Pelli said. “Anybody can participate in the festival in some way.”

Carrboro isn’t an obvious stop for European touring musicians. Most cluster in New York, Chicago, or the Bay Area. That this music lands here at all is a testament to Pelli’s persistence.

“Django started something almost a hundred years ago,” Pelli said. “Every time we play it together, we’re keeping that conversation alive.”

For a few nights in March, Carrboro joins that conversation.

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Having concluded that no school in Mexico, public or private, could properly educate his child, who has a rare and severe speech disorder, Guillermo Cepeda set out to identify the best bilingual school in the world.

He found it in Chapel Hill, Cepeda told the members of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board on a Thursday night last month.

The board members were slumped in their seats, drained after almost two hours of discussion about how to select which schools will be closed. 

Due to a combination of lower birth rates, higher housing costs, and more families sending their children to private and charter schools, enrollment is on the decline. State funding to the district, awarded primarily on a per-pupil basis, is falling as a result. Enrollment is down 350 students this school year alone, which will translate to about $2.6 million less in state funding next year. 

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining multiple half-century-old buildings is mounting. Without quickly moving to close two elementary schools, somewhere between 50 and 80 employees will have to be laid off, Superintendent Rodney Trice had told the board.

It was after 9 p.m. when Cepeda, a slight man with slicked back hair wearing a Ralph Lauren button down, approached the lectern in the packed room at the district’s headquarters. He was the 30th speaker to offer his thoughts during the meeting’s public comment session. Dozens more were still on the list. 

As a professional head hunter, “I am trained to find rare gems,” Cepeda said. He reviewed schools in 15 countries, from Australia to Argentina, and decided that the very best for his son was Frank Porter Graham Elementary, a bilingual PreK-5 school in Chapel Hill.

“What I’m trying to say is FPG has a reputation globally,” he said. “So it is just a matter of promoting the school and not killing what brings you the enrollment, right?”

Districts across the state, and the country, are grappling with the same confluence of factors reducing the number of students enrolled in traditional public schools. 

By the calculations of the nonprofit North Carolina Justice Center, the pace of closures is picking up. At least seven other North Carolina districts voted to close a school in the past year; closures or mergers are under discussion in at least four others, from Beaufort County on the coastal plain to Gaston County in the Charlotte suburbs.

Leaders in metropolitan-area districts have the especially sticky challenge of making the cuts necessary to balance their budgets while maintaining and even growing the programs that appeal to the most mobile and highly educated parents. With the General Assembly incentivizing the expansion of charter schools and private schools, these parents have more alternatives to consider.

Frances Tong, a parent at Glenwood Elementary School, which hosts Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s Chinese-immersion program, summarized the results of a parent survey at the school board’s February 5th meeting: If the program ends, parents will flee.

Demography As Destiny?

Superintendent Trice has been trying to prepare the school community for change since late last summer. He laid out the district’s demographic trends in a series of community meetings.

“We are positioning ourselves to become a smaller district, and it’s time we acknowledge that publicly,” he said at the start of a November presentation at Smith Middle School. 

Trice used a battery of graphs and charts to explain how Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools arrived at this inflection point.

The line representing enrollment over the past decade looked like a lopsided mountain. From the left, it sloped moderately upward to a peak of 12,335, then dropped off abruptly amid the pandemic. It hit a plateau in 2022 and 2023, then descended rapidly again, arriving at 10,825 in the 2025-26 school year.

The district investigated where those students went. About 71% moved to another part of the state or out of the country, according to 2023-24 data. About 3% were homeschooled, 7% attended a charter school, and 16% went to a private school. 

The private schools receiving the most former Chapel Hill-Carrboro students were Durham Academy (10 students), St. Thomas More Catholic School, Carolina Friends School, and Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill. (The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a two-year public residential high school in Durham that received 11 students, was also put in this category.)

The analysis didn’t capture the impact of the General Assembly’s expansion of the state’s private school voucher program, Opportunity Scholarships, to families of any income, which took effect the following year. But many of the state’s most elite private schools don’t participate in the program; only two of the four mentioned in the district’s analysis, St. Thomas More and Trinity, do currently.

For as much attention as the voucher program has received, it was not the dominant factor explaining Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s enrollment decline. Out-migration and a decline in the birth rate seemed to play a larger role.

While Orange County’s population has been growing, most of the growth has been among people 65 and older, Trice pointed out. The youngest group, under age 4, actually shrank from 2010 to 2020. The most recent kindergarten cohort was 28% smaller than a decade ago.

“There’s just not as many 5- to 17-year-olds living in our community anymore,” Trice said. 

He said the takeaway should not be all “doom and gloom.” There’s also an opportunity to form a new vision for the education the district provides.

“It’s not a crisis if we work together to pivot to become a smaller district, perhaps a 9,000-student district,” he said. “And there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a 9,000-student district—unless you’re funding yourself as a 12,000-student district.”

Cutting Costs

Parents of Chapel Hill-Carrboro students have gotten used to staffing levels far above most North Carolina schools.

In every one of the 11 elementary schools in the district, there is a nurse and a counselor. In every kindergarten through third grade classroom, there is a teaching assistant. There are 11.5 elementary school world-language teachers.

Few of those positions are covered by state funds. The district’s schools get more local tax funding than in any other part of the state—roughly $8,800 per student. Local parents expect to get something extraordinary in return.

In a series of meetings with overflow crowds this winter, Trice and his deputies have cautioned that if schools are not closed, those benefits will have to be peeled away.

“The DNA of what our elementary schools are is going to change significantly, just because we’re going to have to reduce the amount of resources that has made Chapel Hill what it is,” the district’s chief financial officer, Jonathan Scott, said at the February 19 meeting. 

Many parents say they see the financial need—district staff estimate that closing an elementary school would save about $1.7 million a year, including about $1.4 million in staff pay and benefits, plus utilities, maintenance, a custodial contract, and property insurance. Major spending on new roofs and HVAC systems would also be avoided. So closing two schools could take a large chunk out of the $3 million to $7 million potential deficit Scott has projected. 

It seems unlikely that Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools can expect a significant boost in funding anytime soon. The General Assembly has failed to pass a budget for this fiscal year. Some lawmakers have threatened to slash Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s funding in particular over culture war issues. Orange County commissioners are worried about raising property taxes. And the Trump administration has made drastic cuts to education spending. 

Without reducing fixed costs, the district will have no money to reinvest in a new vision, Trice and his staff have warned. They will have no money to expand pre-kindergarten programming, language programming, career and technical education, or any other community priority.

Still, no parent wants their kid’s school to close.

In a district that’s home to the state’s flagship university and a major medical complex, the board was guaranteed to receive ample feedback.

Its meandering approach to the decision has seemed to elicit even more.

Temperature Checks

On January 15, district staff recommended considering three elementary schools for closure: Ephesus, Glenwood, and Seawell. 

A 2023 evaluation of building conditions showed that as some of the district’s oldest schools, built between 1940 and 1971, they would need major investment to remain open. 

The same report found that three other elementary schools—Carrboro, Estes Hills, and FPG—had similar investment needs. But the board had already committed to replacing those schools, in that order, with the funds from a 2024 bond referendum.

Some board members argued that the bond money prioritization should not be binding. As a matter of law, it is not. The bond language committed them only to spending the money on school facilities. But other board members were loath to revisit what had already been a protracted and painful process.

Chair Riza Jenkins took a “temperature check”—an informal, nonbinding vote—that revealed the board was split 4-3, with the majority in favor of considering only the three schools. “I fear if we reopen the discussion of which elementary schools it’s just going to get quite cloudy for the community,” Jenkins said. “We’ve already been there, done that.”

But at the next meeting, the majority flipped. Four members favored studying a larger pool of schools, taking only one of the six high-needs schools out of consideration: Carrboro, because the district had already spent millions to begin the new school’s design.

Parents began to fine-tune their arguments about their schools’ indispensability and uniqueness. At the next meeting, the crowd spilled into the hallway.

Jenkins’ repeated assurance that the decision was about buildings, not programs, seemed to do little to calm fears. Parent after parent lined up to testify to their decision to relocate to Chapel Hill-Carrboro for a particular school or a particular program. 

Longtime local residents testified to the quality education the district had built its reputation on. Prospective parents shared their hopes. Several current students offered their testimony in Spanish or Mandarin. 

With parents wearing T-shirts representing their schools, the room split into color blocks.

Data Driven, But Decisive

The escalating division prompted four PTA leaders to give a joint statement at the board’s March 5 meeting: “We all love our school communities, and of course, do not want them to close. We are speaking together tonight to show that we are also a larger community.”

The representatives of Ephesus, Estes Hills, FPG, and Glenwood asked the board to stick to the timeline district staff had proposed, with a decision by the end of this school year.

“We know this is a financial decision—none of our schools are failing, and each is so special for its own reasons. Please use financially grounded data and criteria that align with the financial strain on the district as a large community. This will help us to support the decision and move forward together in good faith.”

The board had debated 64 potential criteria for selecting the one or two schools to be closed. To move forward, it needed to take a formal vote authorizing district staff to prepare a state-mandated “study” of each possibly closed school.

Board member Barbara Fedders proposed including only the three schools named as candidates for closure in January. 

Unraveling the bond plan “introduces instability and uncertainty” and complicates construction logistics, she said. “I think we as a board need to be data driven, but we also need to be decisive.”

Board member Rani Dasi recapped her arguments for expanding the pool of closure candidates. “The capital improvement plan also made commitments to Ephesus, Glenwood, and Seawell,” she said. “And if our objective is to maximize financial benefits, why would we as a board limit the options that we can even consider that are available to us?”

The decisive vote came from Meredith Ballew, who had been in both camps over the course of the debate. “I know that this process has been deeply hurtful,” she said, reading a prepared statement. Her voice wavered. “These schools are not just buildings. They are all communities with long histories and deep relationships.”

She ultimately favored limiting the candidates to the three on the original list: Ephesus, Glenwood, and Seawell.

“During our bond discussions, we engaged in a robust process that considered facility condition, long-range capital planning, and fiscal sustainability,” she said. “I believe that those factors remain relevant here. If we move away from those principles without clear justification, we risk undermining both public trust and long-term stability.”

Board members settled on the criteria to be included in the report, noting that they still had a final vote ahead of them, likely in June, based on updated demographic projections, followed by a process to determine new enrollment zones, affecting every last school.

The once-boisterous crowd listened in stunned silence.

A long-awaited farming education and outdoor recreation site in Durham County has received funding for its first three years. 

The Farm Campus, a 129-acre lot the county purchased in 2024, has been in the works for more than a decade. But on Monday, county commissioners put the project in motion, approving $475,000 in funding from Golden LEAF, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that funds projects in the state’s rural and tobacco-dependent communities. The money will go toward hiring a farm manager and building basic infrastructure. 

Donna Rewalt, the county’s cooperative extension director, said the Farm Campus is “a wonderful opportunity to preserve land” inside the county’s urban growth boundary. The site has 40 cleared acres that could be suitable for farming, in addition to four ponds and a wooded area, she said. Eventually, Rewalt said the campus will have public use spaces, such as trails. 

“The Farm Campus, conceptually, is the idea that we’re going to have an opportunity to provide a more robust opportunity for education and practice for farmers and growers in our community, and that is an exciting opportunity,” Rewalt said. 

The site reached its first milestone in May 2025, when the county completed its feasibility study that determined the project was viable. The study broke the next steps for the project into three phases, planned over several years. The first phase involves building infrastructure and transforming the farmland into incubator plots. The second phase will involve additional capital upgrades and expansions; a final phase will see the construction of a food facility, a healing garden, a trail system, and other recreational areas.

While the farm campus works through its first phase, planned for three years, Rewalt said the county is creating a capital improvement process to help plan for the entirety of the property for its 10-year timespan. The Farm Campus is the first of its kind for Durham County, she said. 

“We do have a lot of pressures from urbanization, and we want to see our county develop and our city develop, but we also want to, at the same time, make sure we have land available because having land is also healthy and good for our community in so many ways,” Rewalt said. 

Ashley Troth, a county extension agent who specializes in horticulture, has been part of the Farm Campus project since she started her position in 2018. In the first phase, Troth said the hope is to “get everything growing and have all the tools and all the infrastructure you need to be able to teach classes and really engage with people.” 

First on the list is hiring a farm manager, which will likely happen this summer. 

“When you have a farm manager, and you have this dedicated person and these dedicated funds to do the work, you can just move so much more quickly and so much more efficiently, which is really what Golden LEAF has kind of allowed us to start moving toward,” Troth said. 

Troth said the first phase will also be about developing “market garden crops”—produce you might find at a farmer’s market. 

Raina Bunnag, the county’s food security program coordinator, said the Farm Campus has been “a vision of many departments in Durham County and community members” over the years, and added that the ability to teach farming techniques on site will also help increase the amount of food produced locally—which became evident to county residents when food was harder to access during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Farm Campus is simultaneously taking off as the county is creating a 10-year food security plan. 

“This will really be a place where… our established farmers, and then new farmers, as well as food producers, can come together to learn technique, together, learn from each other, and have that peer support,” Bunnag said. 

That is particularly important for the county because it has an aging population of farmers and is losing traditional farm land, she said. The Farm Campus will be able to help raise a younger generation of farmers, she said, as well as provide educational programming. 

“I think often there is a gap in understanding just what it takes to produce food,” Bunnag said. “Being a farmer is a really tough job, and so—beyond training and offering that training and support for our farmers and food producers—we’re also really excited about Farm Campus being a place where food eaters can learn more about the people that work so hard to make their food.”

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Last November, Ben Clapsaddle unseated 24-year incumbent Wake Forest Mayor Vivian Jones, receiving over 70% of the vote. He ran on a platform of sustainable growth, fiscal responsibility, social inclusivity, and community engagement. Under state law, the mayoralty is largely symbolic, with the mayor all but limited to presiding over meetings, issuing proclamations, and casting the occasional tie-breaking vote. But there is one mayoral power the North Carolina General Assembly cannot take away: the bully pulpit. And Clapsaddle intends to use it. At his inauguralState of the Town Address last month, he devoted particular concern to food insecurity and veterans’ issues.

Clapsaddle’s victory marks a sea change in this town. His strongest precinct was 19-09, which comprises the town’s rapidly expanding eastern frontier. Oddly enough, this was the same part of town where Donald Trump performed best in 2024. But unlike Trump, Clapsaddle is a Democrat—the first in decades to lead Wake Forest.

Despite the town’s growing diversity and professed ideals, there is an abiding conservatism about the place—its elegant homes, its gnarled oaks. It is Wake Forest, after all, that birthed prominent segregationist I. Beverly Lake Sr. The Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, which maintains influence over town affairs, has inculcated leaders such as megachurch pastor Mark Harris, who now sits in Congress on a solidly MAGA basis.Ventilation tycoon and free-market ideologue Robert Luddy lives in Wake Forest and operates several places of learning throughout the Triangle. The Human Rights Campaign calls one of his schools, Thales Academy, “horribly anti-LGBTQ.” Thales’ Wake Forest campus is situated in the labyrinthine club community ominously named Heritage. 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are personal for Ben Clapsaddle. He’s the first person of color (his mother was Korean) to lead Wake Forest and may well even be the first Asian American mayor in state history.

Clapsaddle grew up a self-proclaimed “half-breed” kid in segregated Cumberland County. The local white school would not accept him and his sister, nor would the Black school. The two were whisked off to the school for other races. This ordeal, in addition to moving frequently due to his father’s military service, no doubt left young Clapsaddle with some sense of rootlessness. He joined the Army, which offered him a clear sense of direction.

That driving need for belonging led Clapsaddle to Wake Forest in 2005. Clapsaddle’s first election bid was in 2011, when he came in sixth among a crowded field vying for a seat on the Wake Forest Board of Commissioners. His ambitions on hold, he focused on his children and his military career.  There were few other military families in town, yet the Desert Storm veteran felt welcomed. He says, “Wake Forest, especially schoolteachers, reached out to help military kids.” Whether his son Nathan, who is gay, would also be welcomed was another matter.

In June 2024, Wake Forest was one of the last municipalities in Wake County to sign onto an interlocal nondiscrimination agreement—nearly three years after its initial passage. Wake Forest’s change of heart likely would not have been possible without the vote of Clapsaddle. One among many factors in his support was an act of vandalism that occurred weeks before his swearing-in as commissioner in December 2023. A Little Free Library dedicated to the LGBT community and built by a local Girl Scout troop was stolen. It had been ripped from its post. The next day, Clapsaddle visited the scene “to personally apologize on behalf of the town.” 

Tensions only mounted as Wake Forest prepared to host its first-ever Pride festival that October. The Main Street-friendly event was ultimately a success, with the somber protests of evangelicals all but ignored. 

But that changed last September. Facing mounting pressure from seminary leadership and the North Carolina Values Coalition, then-Mayor Jones chose not to issue a proclamation recognizing LGBTQ+ History Month. In a redacted email obtained by citizen journalist Tom Baker IV, seminary executive Ryan Hutchinson issued an apparent veiled threat to the town manager. The seminary controls hundreds of acres in town and has lent its weight to several development projects, including plans for a UNC Health hospital. Such plans might have been jeopardized if the seminary’s line in the sand was crossed. Jones reversed course later that same day. 

After first sidestepping the subject in an interview, Clapsaddle conceded, “I really believe that [Mayor Jones] tried to do what was the right thing, but I just wish she would have stuck with her guns.” However, he does not believe the about-face played a role in Jones’ loss. “I think I ran a much better campaign,” he said. Clapsaddle was swept into office by the same anti-incumbent wave that overtook several Triangle suburbs and, indeed, the nation’s largest city. But make no mistake—Clapsaddle is no Zohran Mamdani (although the two did both receive campaign contributions from supposed progressive billionaire Liz Simons). 

Clapsaddle, despite his blue-collar sensibilities, does not position himself as a disruptor a la hizzoner. On the contrary, he appears cautious, deferential, and even camera-shy. But he will fight when necessary. Evidenced by his office bookshelf, Clapsaddle is a student of one Lyndon Baines Johnson. Whereas the latter perfected “the Johnson Treatment”—a means of persuasion characterized by emotional and physical smothering—the former opts for a folksier method he calls “[the] fuss and cuss.”

In his two years on the board of commissioners, Clapsaddle distinguished himself as something of a maverick—perhaps in the mold of fellow serviceman John McCain. He demonstrated on a number of occasions his willingness to vote strategically. For instance, in December 2024, he joined conservative Commissioner Faith Cross in opposing a measure to move forward with the creation of a Wake Forest social district. But unlike Cross, his opposition was not so much moral as it was technical. Clapsaddle alleged that some downtown establishments, like Over the Falls and Norse Brewery (a favorite haunt), were initially left out of the scheme. “I thought it was unfair,” he said. For reasons that are less clear, Clapsaddle also voted against a fee on developers that would fund needed infrastructure improvements. Clapsaddle’s political maneuvering has not endeared him to everyone at Town Hall—though he certainly seems to be popular with the ladies at the front desk. But behind chamber doors, Clapsaddle readily admitted, “I can be the most arrogant, hard-headed person around.” 

That said, there is a softer side to the man. His daughter, Ranie, was adopted from Guatemala. When deportations first ramped up under the Obama administration, “I insisted, because I was her father, that she carry all the proper IDs with her,” he said. Clapsaddle recalled that under former Sheriff Donnie Harrison, an immigration hardliner, there was “a lot of profiling” of Hispanic residents in Wake County. Now, with the Supreme Court’s approval, such tactics have only expanded in use. 

Ranie is a U.S. citizen, but that is no guarantee of her safety. Hundreds of citizens have been caught up in ICE raids, including one in Cary. Clapsaddle fears for his daughter, now grown and married. “I’m always afraid of the phone call from her husband, saying, ‘Did Ranie stop at your house?’” he said. 

The mayor has a message for federal agents: Get a warrant. Amid the government’s bloody occupation of Minneapolis, Clapsaddle appeals for calm and the rule of law. “I would ask that [agents] respect our schools, they respect our churches, they respect our private homes, and private businesses,” he said.

Clapsaddle proudly draws attention to the fact that his mayoral campaign was almost entirely self-funded, albeit with no reported expenditures, aside from a $500 penalty paid to the state Board of Elections by his son. Clapsaddle smiles, a twinkle in his eye. “We always sent our paperwork in late.” His unsuccessful 2022 run for the Wake County Board of Education, however, drew considerably more attention from the donor class. Top contributors that cycle were Raleigh power couple Dean and Sesha Debnam, as well as Simons, the previously mentioned California kingmaker. Clapsaddle suspects it was the Debnams who put him on Simons’ radar. 

Clapsaddle had come of age in Fayetteville, an Army brat. He and his family lived in a trailer, to which he ascribed a sensitivity to “all walks of life.” He expressed his regret over former Wake Forest Mayor George Mackie’s sale of a mobile home community in 2021, which displaced almost 50 families. He mused, “Is it right by the law? Perhaps. Is it right by the people? And is it right for the future generations?” 

Boosters prefer to market Wake Forest as an affluent bedroom community, but the town’s roots are inescapably working-class. Manual labor, free or enslaved, built its cherished historic properties. One such property, the Royall Cotton Mill, was the site of a violent strike in 1951 that made national headlines. The mill closed in 1976 and took about 230 jobs with it. Today, heirs to the mill workers’ legacy—cashiers, trash collectors, housekeepers, and delivery drivers—still live in town, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to do so.

Wake Forest’s housing market predominantly serves an upwardly mobile, tech-savvy clientele (disposable income, 1.9 kids, maybe a golden retriever). Poorer families, like those in Wellington Park, are being squeezed out. Cuts in SNAP and Medicaid funding haven’t helped. In the wake of these cuts (courtesy of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act), civil society stepped in. Clapsaddle marveled, “It was amazing, the amount of food [donated]. … The Tri-Area Ministry, the various churches, the various social groups that work hard to bring more food for people.” The mayor is planning a food insecurity summit for August. 

The poorest part of Wake Forest, according to the American Community Survey, is a section of the traditionally Black “Northeast” neighborhood, where the average per capita income sits at around $24,000. Clapsaddle conceded that gentrification is a growing problem. Reflecting on the significance of Black History Month, Clapsaddle added, “I’m trying to honor not just what the Northeast community is today, but what it has been in the past.” Starting in 2027, the town plans to make improvements to the local Ailey Young Park. 

Clapsaddle also plans to revive the town’s Youth in Government Advisory Board, which commissioners abolished in 2020. Clapsaddle laments, “Right now, besides through some other community activities, we don’t have a voice for our young people. Our high school-age kids,” he said. His campaign even hired a youth advisor, with whom Clapsaddle shared his ideas for a “Spring Future Fest” that would “ensure that the voices of Gen Z are not only heard but truly valued and celebrated.”

The mayor recalled a meaningful conversation he had with a stranger not too long ago. The young man told Clapsaddle he was “struggling with his identity.” He vowed never to return to Wake Forest after high school, “because he didn’t feel that he could live the life he wanted to [there].” In 2024, he came home for the inaugural Wake Forest Pride festival.

Brooks Street convulsed with color. Artisans peddled their wares, children squealed, and hands intertwined—all in full view of the town chapel’s spire. Nathan Clapsaddle, taking a break from a dance with his fiancé, embraced his father: “Dad, who would have ever thunk? That Wake Forest, North Carolina, would do this?”

Times have changed. 

Ben Clapsaddle inherits a town in transition. The population almost quintupled between 2000 and 2025, out-of-staters fueling much of this growth. They brought with them their foreign, godless ways—their BlackBerrys, their MBAs, their jazz CDs bought at Starbucks. Now, multistory apartment buildings and longleaf pines jostle for prominence. A cluster of old silos off the state Route 98 bypass stands besieged by charming three-beds. Traffic is getting worse. Wake Forest, and countless places like it across the South, is more diverse than ever before. And the “good ole days” are, well, gone with the wind.

In the game of thrones that is suburbia, the realtors’ association, the chamber of commerce, the rotary club, the PTA, and the HOA all wield considerable power—but can the mayor match it? 

Clapsaddle, like a Lincoln or a Bush Sr., plays the long game. Betraying a well-camouflaged ego, he declared, “The mark I’ll make on this town is something that’s 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road. Because that’s what’s important.” 

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The specter of school closures is haunting Durham Public Schools. By 2030, the district could begin to close some smaller and older elementary school buildings and relocate those students to newer buildings.

The issue, according to administration, is that the district needs nearly $1 billion to deal with basic maintenance and repair needs across its 57 schools and various other holdings.

“That [$1 billion] does not even include a coat of paint. That is simply taking care of what’s broken,” director of school planning Devan Mitchell told the school board and county commission at a joint meeting on Tuesday.

Administrators have assessed that some of the district’s oldest buildings would cost more to repair than to simply demolish and rebuild, and see consolidation as an opportunity to lower that $1 billion price tag. Sixteen schools are on the district’s “watch list.” 

Many are roughly 400-student elementary schools that were constructed especially close to each other as parts of the then-separate city and county school systems that merged in 1992. By consolidating students into larger elementary schools, the district could also save money on the personnel and operating costs that come with having separate buildings.

Students from schools that are closed could be relocated to existing schools in better shape, or to newly built schools. Plans are still in the draft phase, and the district likely wouldn’t break ground on any projects until the end of the decade. But the process is sure to be messy.

“Those are the least palatable conversations to ever have in education spaces,” board member Natalie Beyer said about school closures at the meeting. “Those are going to be nearly impossible conversations for this board, and future boards, to wrestle with on behalf of families and the community impact.”

One need only look back to 2024 to see the tension that Beyer is forecasting—community members were outraged over the decision to close the downtown Durham School of the Arts campus, and that’s despite the district’s breaking ground on a $250 million campus to replace it. In nearby Chapel Hill-Carrboro, which is also looking at closing schools, the school board tried to broach the conversation early, but parents were still shocked and dismayed when plans became more tangible and they learned that their own child’s school could be at risk.

The conversation is kicking off during an already tense time for the district (see: a school board election that threw out the incumbent chairwoman, a mounting workers’ union push for pay raises to match city and county wages, and, of course, “Anthony”-gate)

The schools up for closure are on the watch list due to condition, not lack of students. Recent declines in enrollment mean that the school certainly isn’t considering any expansion projects, though the corresponding dip in per-pupil funding isn’t helping the district foot the maintenance bill. On Tuesday, board member Jessica Carda-Auten pointed out that having students “in classrooms that are over 80 degrees or at 55 degrees,” referring to stories about malfunctioning climate control systems, is probably not helping to attract new students to fix that enrollment crisis.

At the top of the administration’s watch list is the 1950s Club Boulevard Elementary, which has been the subject of a consistent drip of news about failing HVAC systems and children and staff sitting in too hot or too cold temperatures.

The early draft of the plan, which includes Club Elementary, reads a bit like that old rivercrossing riddle with a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain.

In one option, the district could close and demolish both Club Elementary and George Watts Elementary School (both of which have about 400 students and are only 1.5 miles apart), and move those students to a new school on the Durham School of the Arts downtown site, which will be vacant once the district finishes construction on the new Durham School of the Arts site north of downtown. In another example, the district could demolish YE Smith Elementary and move those 400 students to Eastway Elementary, which would require new construction to house them.

Superintendent Anthony Lewis didn’t explicitly say that this impending maintenance crisis is a result of past poor management. But he noted that the district has historically been “reactive,” rather than “proactive,” in operating. If the lifespan of an HVAC is 7-10 years, Lewis said, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the district when a school that got a new HVAC 7-10 years ago now needs another new one.

The DPS repair list is not just a DPS problem. Under North Carolina law, the county is responsible for local school buildings and Durham County funds a whole slew of other school services. About a quarter of the county’s $1 billion budget went to DPS’s operating budget last year, with an additional $61 million going to service debt related to the schools.

In the joint schools-county meeting on Tuesday, school board members seemed ready to push for a general obligation bond for this November’s ballot. Under a general obligation bond, the county asks for voter approval to raise taxes as necessary to take on the debt for a project. Durham, in 2022, approved a $425 million bond referendum that was supposed to pay for a whole list of projects, including improvements at Club Elementary, but the higher priority Durham School of the Arts and Murray-Massenburg Elementary School ate through those funds.

“We can’t continue to defer maintenance,” Beyer said, urging county manager Claudia Hager to move ahead with a bond so that buildings “don’t fall down around” students.

Hager gently pushed back, noting that the county was “not ready for a bond” because not enough projects are “shovel ready” with designs and the proper approvals. She said the county is exploring other options, like limited obligation bonds, which do not require voter approval. The county commissioners will need to decide by July if they want to place a bond referendum on the November ballot.

“We all know the importance of addressing these pent up needs,” said Hager. “And we will do our part to help us get there in a way that’s affordable, in a way that we know that we can get across all the finish lines when it comes to actually getting approved for those things.”

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Before City of Durham officials even draft the upcoming fiscal year’s budget, it’s already shaping up to be a challenging process.

Federal and state funding for local government is uncertain, with the Trump administration cutting money for social support programs and North Carolina legislators unable to reach agreement on a state budget. The costs of doing business change with inflation and new, unpredictable tariffs. More than $50 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds the city received from the federal government in 2021 to help offset economic impacts of the pandemic is set to expire at the end of this year. And the city is facing what could be a major hike in personnel costs in the fiscal year that begins this summer.

On March 16, the Durham city council will host its first public hearing for the 2026-2027 fiscal year budget process at its regular council meeting. The public hearing will give residents an opportunity to express their hopes, dreams, and concerns about the upcoming budget. City council members and city staff have already held two retreats to discuss budget priorities and limitations.

“We don’t really have the same ability to dream big,” said city councilor Carl Rist. “We just don’t have quite as much room as we’ve had in the past several years to keep thinking about expanding things. It’s more like we’re keeping the house in order, but it’s still a budget we can all be proud of.”

A major point of tension is striking a balance between maintaining or increasing services and raising personnel wages without overburdening residents with property tax bills.

In 2019, Durham city council adopted the Durham Minimum Livable Wage (DMLW) ordinance, which uses a detailed formula to prescribe an appropriate salary threshold for most city employees based on housing costs. The wage rate has grown modestly each year, typically no more than a dollar. For the current fiscal year, the rate was set at $21.90.

But as the cost of living rises, the city is staring down a spike in personnel costs next fiscal year as the livable wage grows close to $25 per hour, a per-year increase roughly four times higher than normal.

“We’re at war with our own values,” said Mayor Leonardo Williams. “While it’s a strong statement of values for us, there are so many things that we can’t control right now. We can’t control the markets. We can’t control the president taking us to war and causing everything to inflate. And so what’s happening is all of the components or areas that we cannot control are running us into a bit of a quagmire.”

The City of Durham employs around 2,862 full-time positions. Only a fraction of employees—roughly 200—make below the $25 per hour threshold, but city staff are concerned that raising the floor will cause compression, which occurs when there is little difference in wages between an organization’s lowest-paid workers and more experienced or senior staff. That means raising wages for the relatively small number of employees at the bottom of the payscale could result in having to raise pay for a lot of other workers—or losing staff morale.

Senior staff, many of whom spent years building their résumés by getting graduate degrees and certifications, and working to gain valuable experience, are partly incentivized by the salary that comes with the job. New hires or more junior staff getting pay bumps that move their salaries close to, or above, senior staff feels like a disservice, Williams said.

Employee wages were a major point of contention after salary freezes following the COVID-19 pandemic; the 2023 city council election was largely a referendum on whether solid waste workers, who went on strike with support from a swath of residents, would receive pay increases. Worker wages have continued to grow, which has meant fewer public calls from staff and the community for better pay.

But that could come to a head this year. It’s hard to say how much all of this would cost the city because officials still need to decide whose pay to increase and by how much next fiscal year. At the bottom end, simply getting the 204 employees up to the new livable wage is estimated to cost $1.5 million. Adjusting everyone else’s pay accordingly would add another $44 million, though to be clear, the city is not considering that significant of an across-the-board increase, according to Durham Budget Director Christina Riordan.  

“In just two years, we went from a nice, pretty, clean, shiny new step plan to something that looks like it got hit by a meteor,” Jim Reingruber, assistant director of Human Resources said at the February 13 budget retreat meeting, “and honestly, we’re glad to be at a point where it’s time to do another pay study and figure out how we want to move forward in a smart and sustainable way.”

During the retreat, Riordan said that since 2023, personnel costs have grown 35%, outpacing revenue which grew only 22%, meaning staff salaries are also becoming a larger share of the budget overall.

Along with its population, Durham’s budget has grown. Since 2020, the budget has swelled about 51.1%, from $477.8 million to $722.1 million last year. City staff has also grown by 211 total positions in the same timeframe. 

Last year, a countywide property revaluation increased assessed property values in Durham County by 72% on average; for comparison, the last revaluation in 2020 raised assessed values by only 21%. The surge in values increased revenue—roughly $54 million (8%) over FY2025—which helped fund popular services like fare-free public buses and HEART expansion, as well as 42 new staff positions, Riordan said.

Another property tax increase, on top of the additional tax burden from the 2024 bond referendum, would be a hard sell to the public. But sales tax, another important revenue stream, has stagnated in the last few years. Early projections put the city at a $10 million dollar deficit, taking into account new budget requests from city departments and city council.

“While you are seeing your state and federal government failing you on the regular,” city councilor Javiera Caballero said during last year’s budget vote, “please know that your local government is trying really hard to meet the needs of this community with a much more constrained pool of resources.”

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In late February, I attended QuiltCon in Raleigh. Afterward, I posted a series of pictures to Instagram of quilts, taken across the four-day event, that highlighted messages of social activism and cultural awareness that resonated deeply with me. Within a few short hours, the post went viral.

The carousel of photos opened with a quilt by Carey Petersen that demonstrates the dichotomy of seeing an item associated with comfort disrupted by a disheartening reality: In bold black block letters, Petersen’s quilt reads, “OUR GOVERNMENT ABDUCTED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE BASED ON RACE WHILE I MADE THIS.” From there, the other quilts I posted expressed fear and rage, while also offering messages of hope and sharp calls to action. These weren’t comfy coverlets—they were a window into a collective consciousness. 

And gauging by the reaction to these works, both in person and online, they seemed to strike a very specific chord, tapping into a shared sense of anger and discontent. As one commenter noted on my post, “Resistance is strong in the quilt world.” Quilting, and the many forms of expression it inspires, draws on deep material and historical textile traditions in North Carolina. These contemporary interpretations of the craft are exposing new audiences to the possibilities of quilting as a medium for expression. 

Raleigh is an ideal location for QuiltCon, which broke attendance records this year, welcoming over 29,000 visitors to see the 600 selected quilts and two specially curated exhibits, including one that featured quilts from the Gee’s Bend Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy. While preparing for my Sunday visit to QuiltCon, I recalled someone online who said quilt conventions are “the best environment to restore your faith in humanity.”

The enthusiasm and camaraderie I found in the exhibition hall was contagious—many of the selected quilters were on hand to talk about their quilts as they handed out stickers and shared specific elements of their work. I quickly learned there is no such thing as a stranger at QuiltCon. As I continued to walk through the maze of quilts, I began to notice the political statements increase in both number and moral imperative.

In one piece by Florida quilter Bridget Pasternak titled “He’s Eating the Dogs, He’s Eating the Cats,” the 1980s video game Pac-Man gets a rebrand, with the board maze replaced by a large American flag, replete with thin blue lines. Pac-Man has become a carnivorous, power-hungry despot wearing a distinctly familiar toupee and an unusually long red tie. As his victims line up to feed his ravenous ego, a sole dissenter refuses to go with the flow, simply saying: “No!” 

This sentiment was echoed nearby in a quilt by Raleigh-based quilter Ann Whitehurst, which featured 24 quilted gold crowns, lined in gold-threaded chain stitches and bejeweled with blue, pink, and green fabric. Its quilt surface includes a reverse raw edge appliquéd “NO” emblazoned across the piece, appearing as if tagged in graffiti.

I saw messages on quilts that contained quotes from James Baldwin and Fannie Lou Hamer about liberation and justice; others called for the protection and preservation of transgender rights; many questioned the censorship and erasure of culture, inclusive language, and equity; while a few quilts delved into vulnerable terrain with raw explorations of mental health and body image. 

This was not your average quilt show. QuiltCon is presented by the Modern Quilt Guild, an organization founded in 2009 and comprising artists and makers who push the boundaries of traditional quilt making by combining time-honored technical craft traditions with contemporary interpretations of design and approach. The juried exhibition presents several categories of quilts representing an array of sizes, styles, and techniques, from small quilts to large quilting bee quilts, minimalist styles, modern traditional forms, improvisational designs, and piecing and appliqué methods. 

Within each of these categories, many of the works spoke truth to power by confronting uncomfortable topics. One quilt in the Modern Traditionalism category, titled “Gerrymander” by Apex-based quilter Karen Kepley, featured a classic quilt block pattern called Courthouse Steps. She turned the series of squares into a pixelated, gerrymandered map of voting districts. The piece is a sharp rebuke of ongoing partisan policies used by North Carolina’s Republican-led General Assembly to redraw district maps.

Of course, the political nature of these quilts is not without precedent. American quilting traditions have historical ties to subversion and resilience. Quilts are believed to have been used to help the enslaved escape slavery via the Underground Railroad, using hidden messages that provided the enslaved with important information to help them escape north to freedom.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is considered to be the world’s largest community art project, which brought increased awareness to scores of lives lost to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the National AIDS Memorial, the quilt now contains over 50,000 panels that honor 110,000 individuals.  

Past iterations of QuiltCon have featured equally galvanizing material: During the 2024 event,  a sobering piece by Ginny Robinson, “What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies,” stood out in particular. Robinson, a Triangle-based schoolteacher, asked colleagues across the country what objects they would use to fend off a school shooter and then rendered their answers in a series of black, appliquéd images placed against a yellow background.

On the reverse side of the quilt, a large, red semiautomatic rifle lies at the center of a white background, which includes the faint silhouette of a man as a shooting target. The work was a Best in Show quilt, chosen among the winners of each of the juried categories. 

At the time, the piece received praise for its raw, unabashed candor, while also drawing ire from critics who bristled at its shocking motifs. But perhaps the work’s biggest impact was to serve as inspiration for quilters like Whitehurst, who began creating and submitting their own protest quilts. 

“I love how quilting is used to express ideas that are controversial, painful, or relatable,” said Whitehurst. After her “No Kings” quilt was selected for QuiltCon 2026, the modern quilter attended the convention as a white-glove volunteer, discussing the selected quilts with visitors while revealing details on their workmanship. 

“I only felt positivity when I was there,” Whitehurst said. “But it’s not surprising that you would get some people that come into a quilt show expecting just pretty quilts—for me, the protest quilts represent support, humanity, fairness, and human rights.” 

The quilters’ written statements presented alongside their work were as powerful as the quilts themselves.

Many offered words of encouragement alongside their empowering quilts: Nyota, a character created and quilted by Brooke Veale, is a Black woman dressed as a superhero, in a cape with a star on her chest.

In her artist statement, Veale noted that her subject is meant “to inspire strength and unwavering grace.” 

Next to “Nyota,” quilter Ethylene Ziegler’s piece titled “Resistance” featured a small hidden note of encouragement in the corner of the quilt, using a quote from actor and trans ally Pedro Pascal that says, “Keep Fighting to Be Who You Are.” In bold black block letters, Ziegler quoted a transgender UCLA student who proclaimed, “Just Living is an Act of Resistance.” 

The text in Cindy Sherman’s “Words Matter” quilt reminded viewers, “You are enough.” Sherman’s statement for the quilt was equally affirming: “We live in a time when divisive words and narrowcast content combine to polarize our experiences from those of others. Words can be weapons, or they can unify and heal. We must remember that the louder the world around us becomes, the more what we say matters.” 

From Gee’s Bend to an embodied Black superhero, I felt seen as I stood among these quilts—and as I read the messages stitched in the quilts, I felt heard. QuiltCon reminded me of art’s ability to seize a moment of collective outrage and turn that angst into resonating, urgent work.

These quilts dare us to open our eyes. And while they left me energized and hopeful, they also made many QuiltCon visitors uncomfortable—that was the point. These brave quilters took familiar items of comfort and protection and forced us to see them through a different lens, disrupting that which we hold dear, with the hope that their message will inspire us to use our own voices to speak up and take action.

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The external law firm hired to investigate the School of Civic Life and Leadership has concluded its work. But UNC-Chapel Hill wouldn’t say what it learned about the months of faculty tension that boiled over into public view, or what steps it took in response.

UNC-Chapel Hill General Counsel Paul Newton said in a statement that K&L Gates spent seven months interviewing dozens of people and reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents relating to “allegations and concerns” about the school, which is also known as SCiLL. The resulting report is more than 400 pages long, a professor who helped with the investigation said in an update to faculty in January.

“The University has unwavering confidence in the comprehensiveness, integrity and objectivity of that review,” Newton said. 

The estimated cost of the review is $1.2 million, a university spokesperson said. But the university did not disclose specific findings nor any actions resulting from it, citing privacy laws. Nor did it specify which allegations and concerns K&L Gates investigated.

“The University is committed to taking all steps appropriate to ensure that any necessary corrective actions are taken,” Newton added. “Among the issues under review were a series of allegations that implicate sensitive and confidential personnel information that is protected by state law and University policy. In accordance with applicable law and policy, the University does not plan to offer any further public statements about the details of the Review.”

But Amanda Martin, supervising attorney of Duke University’s First Amendment Clinic, said there is likely much the university could legally release.

“Even if it contains personnel information, that does not mean the entirety of the report is exempt from the public records law,” she said. “The statute is clear that an agency has an obligation to produce nonconfidential information even when it is co-mingled with confidential information. In this case that likely means there is a significant amount of information related to process and policy that needs to be released. I can’t believe out of 400 pages there’s no information that can be shared.” 

Newton said that the university is “fully confident in the continued strength and success of SCiLL” under the leadership of its current dean, Jed Atkins.

The Board of Trustees also provided a joint statement expressing its “strong confidence” in Atkins, saying his “stewardship has helped establish the school as one of the most promising and distinctive new initiatives in civic education at a major public university.”

SCiLL has been controversial since it was first proposed. Trustees described it as an effort to bring conservative viewpoints to campus, and faculty have made allegations of bias and improper hiring against Atkins since he was hired as the school’s dean in 2024. A scholar of classical political philosophy, Atkins joined UNC-CH from Duke after advising on the creation of SCiLL. He has consistently denied allegations and said all hiring followed university policy.

But conflict reached an apogee last spring.

It centered around a SCiLL hiring search early last year, which then-Provost Chris Clemens attempted to cancel after the school’s two associate deans, Inger Brodey and David Decosimo, raised concerns about the process. Chancellor Lee Roberts overruled his decision.

Brodey resigned from SCiLL, telling The Daily Tar Heel the school was marked by “improprieties, slander, vindictiveness and manipulation,” and Decosimo was fired from his administrative position in June. (He remains on faculty.) In an X post in February 2026, Decosimo noted that his firing came weeks after he publicly argued at a conference that “the greatest threat to civic schools was internal: a strand marked by will-to-power & scornful of just means, free speech, & civic virtue.”

SCiLL professor Dustin Sebell, on the other hand, wrote in an internal email that Atkins’ critics were improperly seeking jobs for their friends. He also accused Clemens of trying to cancel the job search in an effort “to demoralize and defame the Dean, a man of singular goodness and integrity.”

Roberts announced in a September faculty meeting that the university would investigate the drama around the school after widespread media reports about the issues.

At the time, Newton said the review began at Atkins’s request and the university hired outside counsel to “conduct a thorough process and policy review.” The Assembly reported in October that the attorney leading the investigation, Nathan Huff, represented General Assembly leaders in at least 10 cases, including three in which an Atkins associate who advised SCiLL served as expert witness.

University officials emphasized that Huff and his team investigated every claim related to the school.

“K&L Gates met with anyone who expressed a desire to share a perspective—positive or negative—about SCiLL, often meeting with individuals multiple times,” Newton wrote in his statement.

Now that it’s complete, the university aims to move forward with SCiLL, which has continued hiring and recently received a $10 million matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It has hired 20 faculty in the past two years and launched a residential community.

“The completion of this process provides clarity,” Atkins wrote in a statement. “I am thankful for the care with which it was undertaken and for the University’s commitment to due process and institutional integrity.”

The INDY’s Chase Pellegrini de Paur has been closely following the 4th Congressional District Democratic primary, which culminated last week in Rep. Valerie Foushee’s narrow victory over challenger Nida Allam. Readers shared their reactions to his reporting on the more than $4.4 million in outside spending poured into the race and to our coverage of the election results. 

From reader David Potenziani by email:

Your story naturally included an extended discussion of campaign spending and financing. I consider that a loss for democratic representation. It reminds me of the Cold War when we routinely counted the [intercontinental ballistic missiles] in the respective armories as some sort of contest that could be won. Ever since Citizens United, money has corroded our elections with dark money flowing from mysterious sources. 

Perhaps if we started moving away from horserace stories and towards issues our political discussions might be more fruitful. 

From Facebook user Shantell Bingham:

Congrats Foushee and good run Allam! I would’ve been happy with either. But Foushee has been consistent to responding to our needs and I’m sure she’ll lean in harder and do the work more effectively having that two years under her belt. Lord knows we don’t have time to spend on whatever learning curve junior congress folks experience. And I have no doubt the next two years, congress reps will face more pressure by hate groups and right wing activists looking to silence or stall. I have all faith that Foushee will not break or bend. It’s in all the history, culture, and ways of being for a Black woman.

From Facebook user Nick Christie:

I’m a Wake County voter. I was genuinely on the fence until I started receiving nasty attack ads against Foushee by Allam. In print. And targeted when watching streaming. I do not want to vote for ‘new’ Democrats who fight viciously against Democrats (who are constantly having to navigate attempting bipartisanship and all its compromises) on the grounds that the ‘new’ Democrat is more angry or more dedicated but otherwise have no solutions. So I voted for Foushee again.

From Facebook user Daniel Brenner:

Either way it is a win for progressives and progressive values. Mainstream Dems and Corporate Dems are finally seeing the writing on the wall, the workers want their party back!

From Bluesky user jeighdbee.bsky.social:

I was really hoping for Allam, but Foushee is fine. (I’m so tired of ‘fine’ being the best I can get for representation.) I’ll be curious to see what kind of AI regulation she proposes/supports after seeing the list of her campaign donors.

From Facebook user Frances Starn:

I am loving Chase Pellegrini de Paur’s reporting! Please give him a raise. Excellent!

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s 2026 schedule is now live, with ​​49 films from 31 countries slated to play at the annual event. 

Now in its 28th year, the festival runs April 16-19 in downtown Durham. On Tuesday, festival organizers announced the full lineup, thematic program within the lineup, and curator.

Robert Greene will curate the thematic program, titled “Extremely Rich Theater: Staging, Performance, and Elasticity in American Nonfiction Film.” 

The program engages the question—a rich one, with documentary filmmaking—of authenticity, artistic choices, and the way that “artifice can encourage a deeper examination of true stories,” as Full Frame Festival co-director and artistic director Sadie Tillery wrote in the release.

Alongside six features and eight short films, the thematic program includes a screening of season two of Nathan Fielder’s unclassifiable series, The Rehearsal. (Docu-comedy? Self-help? Reality show? All of the above?). The Rehearsal features a fictionalized version of Fielder helping people “rehearse” for life events, blurring fiction and reality to reliably unsettling but thought-provoking effect. Fans of the show—or newcomers looking to jump into Fielder’s deadpan deep-end right away—can immerse themselves in the second season’s six episodes, which will screen as one three-hour festival block. 

“There are all these questions about what authenticity is and what authenticity means,” Greene, a Charlotte native and graduate of North Carolina State University, wrote in the press release. “But those questions misunderstand documentary cinema. Documentary has never been about what is true and what is false—documentary is about using the tools of filmmaking to get at something deeper. This is nothing new.”

Five films that screened at last year’s festival are contenders at the Oscars this year, which takes place on March 15. 

One buzzy award contender, The Perfect Neighbor, weaves police body camera footage into a grim look at Florida’s “stand your ground law” and its application in the 2023 murder of a Black woman by a white neighbor. It is currently available to stream on Netflix. Other films nominated in the best documentary feature film category include Come See Me in the Good Light, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, perfectly a strangeness, and The Devil Is Busy. 

This year’s full lineup of films features thirteen premieres, including a world premiere of The Grandfather Puzzle, co-produced by UNC-Chapel Hill graduate Ora DeKornfield, and the U.S. premiere of Chilean documentary Mother Lidia. Other films explore timely topics like medical aid in Gaza, fraught recent political chapters in United States history (in the case of documentary The Great Experiment, the years 2017-2020), and the 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, a Kansas-based newspaper. Other documentaries on tap explore wars past and present, as well as stories of communities contending with global warming and threats to the environment. 

The weekend’s opening and closing night films take a chronological-ish approach in reverse: Thursday night opens with Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World, which follows those holding the ever-changing title of oldest person alive. (Currently, that title is held by 116-year-old Ethel Caterham of Surrey, England.) Full Frame’s weekend will close with I Was Born This Way, directed by Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard, which tells the story of Archbishop Carl Bean, his titular gay disco anthem, and lifelong motto: “Love is for everyone.” 

“These are films that take us around the world, reflect deeply personal relationships, and reveal nuanced perspectives,” Tillery wrote in the release. “There is grace and tenacity on display at every turn. It is inspiring to watch these films, and even more inspiring to be a part of sharing them with audiences this spring.”

Festival passes are now on sale, and tickets for individual films will be available beginning April 9. Free public panels and community screenings will also be announced closer to the date.

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