🗞️ Medicaid changes Oct. 1, and again Jan. 1

🗞️ A Bishop McGuinness senior is a National Merit semifinalist

🗞️ Fake Forsyth County letters are asking homeowners for $98

🗞️ Seventy feet of concrete came out at Körner's Folly

☀️ Sunny | High: 87°F | Low: 66°F

Wednesday is the warm side of the cool stretch. Sunny, a high of 87, and a calm morning that turns into a southwest breeze of 5 to 7 miles an hour by afternoon, with nothing in the forecast that qualifies as rain. Tonight only gets down to 66, so the crisp mornings are over for now. Thursday is sunny and 91, the hottest day of the week, and then the pattern turns: Friday brings a 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after 2 in the afternoon with a high near 89, the same odds hold Saturday, and Sunday clears back out around 88. If Friday night football is on your calendar, keep an eye on the radar before kickoff. Wednesday itself is as easy as it gets, which is convenient on a day sixteen restaurants would like you to eat out.

If anyone in your house is on Medicaid, there are two dates to write down, and the first one is three weeks out.

Starting Oct. 1, new federal rules narrow which non-citizens can qualify. After that date, eligibility for non-citizens is limited to lawful permanent residents, children under 19 and pregnant or postpartum women who are lawfully present, Cuban and Haitian entrants, and citizens of the Freely Associated States. Anyone outside those groups who is covered today will not be.

The bigger change lands Jan. 1, 2027, and it reaches a lot more people. Adults 19 to 64 without a disability who are covered through Medicaid Expansion will have to show, every six months, that they are earning at least $580 a month per household or putting in 80 hours a month of work, school or volunteering. Miss it and you can lose full coverage. There are exceptions: parents and caregivers of children under 14, people with disabilities and pregnant women do not have to meet the requirement. Renewals change too. Most adults will renew every six months instead of once a year, which doubles the number of envelopes you cannot afford to ignore.

Forsyth County's Department of Social Services is asking people to do five things now, while there is still time. Check your own situation at medicaid.nc.gov/changes. Make sure DSS has your current address and phone number. Answer every notice promptly. Start keeping records of work, school or volunteer hours. And set up an enhanced ePASS account so you can upload proof online instead of standing in a line. The county DSS number is 336-703-3800.

To be plain about who this touches: Medicaid Expansion is the coverage North Carolina opened in December 2023 to working adults who earn too much for regular Medicaid and too little for anything else, and it is how a good many people in Kernersville got insured for the first time. The people most likely to lose coverage in January are not the ones who do not work. They are the ones who work irregular hours, or do not keep paperwork, or miss a letter. That is the reason to get the ePASS account set up this month rather than in December.

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Evelyn Gonzalez, a senior at Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School, was named Tuesday as one of more than 16,000 semifinalists in the 72nd National Merit Scholarship Program.

The list is drawn from the more than a million juniors who entered by taking the PSAT last fall, so semifinalist means roughly the top 1 percent of test-takers, with the cutoff set state by state. It is not the finish line. About 90 percent of semifinalists advance to finalist standing after submitting an application with an essay, a full academic record and a recommendation from the school, and about 7,500 finalists will be offered a National Merit scholarship. Winners are announced in stages from April through July.

Bishop sits on N.C. 66 with a graduating class that is small enough for everyone to know everyone, so this is a big deal on that campus. Congratulations to Evelyn. We will pass along the finalist news when it comes in February.

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A letter is showing up in Forsyth County mailboxes that looks official, names the county, and asks for $98 for a copy of your property deed. The county did not send it.

The Forsyth County Sheriff's Office put out the warning Monday. The letters claim to be from Forsyth County and request payment for a copy of a deed transfer record. There are two tells: the return address is not in Winston-Salem, and the payment goes to Tampa, Florida. The county's records office has confirmed it has nothing to do with them.

The real thing costs a fraction of that. Your deed is a public record at the Forsyth County Register of Deeds, 201 N. Chestnut St., and you can look it up yourself online at forsythdeeds.com or call the office at 336-703-2700 if you actually need a certified copy. The sheriff's advice covers more than this one letter: "If you receive an unexpected letter, email, text, or phone call asking for money, stop and verify before you pay." Look up the agency's number yourself rather than using the one printed in the letter.

One more thing worth doing while you are on the subject. The Register of Deeds runs a free Property Fraud Alert that emails or texts you any time a document is recorded in your name. It takes about two minutes to sign up, and it is the difference between finding out about a forged deed the same day and finding out a year later.

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The pergola restoration at Körner's Folly has reached the stage where progress is mostly visible in what is gone.

Preservation contractor Dan Ledbetter spent late summer removing about 70 feet of concrete walkway that ran from the historic privy past the pergola. It was broken into sections by hand, carried off the property and taken to a recycling center, and the ground under it has been raked and prepared. Temporary supports are still holding the pergola up while that happens.

Next comes the path itself. Project leader David Gall is writing the specifications for slate stepping stones that will replace the concrete under the approved preservation plan. Once those are in, materials get staged for the structural repairs to the pergola, which is the part the campaign was really for. The Folly's update describes the concrete as outdated material the plan called for removing, and makes the point that in preservation work, taking the wrong thing out carefully counts as progress.

This is the project readers helped pay for. In June the Folly hit its $20,000 goal for the pergola campaign, and this week's update credits those contributors with making the work possible. If you want to see it for yourself, the Fall Vintage Market is on the grounds Saturday from 9 to 3, and the pergola is right there behind the house.

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