🗞️ Forsyth's school board starts looking for an interim superintendent

🗞️ Kernersville's Knights of Columbus earn a top honor again

🗞️ Glenn's Ladycats are off to their best start in years

🗞️ One street: a walk down South Main

☀️ Partly Sunny | High: 88°F | Low: 68°F

Thursday is the pick of the next three days. Partly sunny, a high near 88, a southwest wind at 2 to 6 miles an hour, and only a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after 5 PM — 20 percent, with any rainfall staying under a tenth of an inch. The chance climbs to 30 percent overnight before tapering off toward dawn, with a low around 68. Friday is the wet one: a 50 percent chance of showers and storms and a high near 87. Saturday settles back to 85 and mostly dry. If you have something outdoors to do this week, Thursday and Saturday are where to put it.

The chair at the front of the room comes open at the end of September.

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools Board of Education decided Tuesday to move ahead with a search for an interim superintendent. Superintendent Don Phipps told the board in a specially called closed meeting on Aug. 6 that he is retiring at the end of September, and he has said publicly that he is leaving to help his brothers care for their 88-year-old mother.

The board hopes to name someone by Oct. 1. The job posting says the person selected must be available by that date and willing to serve through June 30, 2027, which would carry the district through the end of the next school year.

The posting is also worth reading for what it does not require. The board says it wants “experience managing the complex operations of a public school system or similarly large organization” — wording that leaves the door open to someone from outside education.

Phipps started with the district on Dec. 1, as it worked to close a $46 million budget deficit. On Aug. 3 he announced the deficit had been fully closed. The district still has no permanent chief financial officer, having run through a series of interims since Tony Kranz resigned in May 2025.

Glenn, East Forsyth and every public elementary and middle school in town sit inside this district. Whoever the board settles on by Oct. 1 is the person running our schools for the year.

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Pancakes, a fish fry and a golf tournament add up to more than you would think.

Knights of Columbus Holy Cross Council 8509 in Kernersville has been awarded Star Council, the international organization's top honor for a local council.

The award covers the 2025-26 fraternal year. In that stretch the council ran its annual golf tournament, pancake breakfasts, a fish fry, taco and spaghetti dinners, a booth at the Honeybee Festival, the Coats for Kids drive and concessions at DASH games.

All of it added up to over $41,000 donated to local charities, among them LAMB, Veterans Helping Veterans Heal, Room at the Inn, Shop with a Cop, Birthright, Next Step Ministries, the Sheperd's Center, the Staddon-Cain Catholic Education Scholarship, Crisis Control and Samaritan Ministries.

Grand Knight Mike Reynolds, who says it is the second year running for Council 8509, put it this way: “In achieving this award for the second year in a row, the Knights of Council 8509 have demonstrated outstanding collaborative effort to bring Jesus to the people and places that need Him most.”

If you have eaten a pancake in a parish hall in this town in the past year, you were part of that $41,000.

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Six and two, and the home crowd gets a look at it tonight.

Glenn High's varsity volleyball team is 6-2, the best start the program has had in several years, even after dropping a 3-0 road match at Reynolds on Tuesday night.

Head coach Robert Horn has had a long runway with this group. He coached at Southwest Middle School before Glenn, which means five years with a number of these players.

“Savanna Parsons is probably our top player, and she has already committed to Pfeiffer University,” Horn said. “Junior Saniya Bracey is second on stats on our team, and Riley Stewart is our other outside hitter. Our setter, Mackenzie Cheatham, is like a quick dart on the floor.”

Last season the Ladycats came up one match short of the playoffs, in Horn's words. Conference play in the Piedmont Triad 5A/6A opens Sept. 8 at Atkins, so the next two weeks are the last of the tune-up games.

Tonight Glenn hosts Eastern Guilford at 1600 Union Cross Rd. The Kernersville News puts first serve at about 6:15 PM, with the exact time depending on when the 5 PM JV match ends. MaxPreps lists it at 6 PM, so plan to be early rather than late.

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You have driven it a thousand times. Here is what you have been driving past.

The 100 through 600 blocks of South Main are a National Register historic district — forty-five acres, fifty-three contributing buildings, listed on Feb. 25, 1988. The oldest of them go back to about 1834. It is worth doing on foot once.

Start at the top. The old Bank of Kernersville at 100 S. Main went up in 1903 and still carries some of the most ornate brickwork left in town. A little further down at 150 sits a small three-by-two-bay office where DeWitt Harmon kept the town's records for years. When he died in 1948 he left the office and the land around it to Kernersville. That land is Harmon Park.

At 215 is the Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, which opened to the public on April 9, 2011. The outdoor displays are open daily from dawn until dusk, and the Welcome Center and Garden Shop keep Tuesday through Friday hours, 10 AM to 4 PM, though those can shift when the garden has a rental. There is no admission charge, though a four-dollar donation per adult is suggested. Paul Ciener himself never saw any of it. He bought Grubbs Ford here in 1975, later started a nursery and a building company, and after a terminal diagnosis worked with attorney John Wolfe to set up the foundation that built the garden. He died on Oct. 1, 1998.

Two churches anchor the blocks below that, and the same man gave the land for both. John Frederick Kerner donated the ground at 306 S. Main in 1837, where Main Street United Methodist Church still stands. The current sanctuary, with its four Ionic columns, went up in the mid-1920s. Thirty years after that first gift he gave land again, and Kernersville Moravian Church at 504 S. Main built its core in 1867. The steeple came around 1888.

And then there is the Folly. Körner's Folly, on the 400 block, was built between 1878 and 1880 for Jule Gilmer Körner, who used his own house as a walking showroom for his decorating work. Twenty-two rooms across seven levels, and a theatre tucked under the roof — Cupid's Park Theatre, which the Folly describes as believed to be the first private little theater in America. It was listed on the National Register on March 20, 1973, three years after twenty-six local families kept it from being torn down. Also on that block, at 402, stands the Kerner & Greenfield Tobacco Factory of 1884, one of only two of the town's five tobacco factories to survive. It was converted to condominiums in 1986.

Six blocks, and nearly two hundred years. Go slow.

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