🗞️ What is open, what is closed, and when the trash runs

🗞️ The club for people who just got here

🗞️ Eating out Wednesday sends money to teachers

🗞️ Where our schools landed in the new state report

⛅ Mostly sunny, afternoon storms | High: 96°F | Low: 70°F

Saturday is the last hot one, and it does not go quietly. Mostly sunny to start with a high near 96 and a northwest wind of 3 to 8 miles an hour, then a 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms arriving between 2 and 5 in the afternoon and hanging around into the evening. Rain totals look modest, a tenth to a quarter inch. The low goes to 70. Sunday is the turn everyone has been waiting on: a high of only 83 with showers and thunderstorms likely, 60 percent. Labor Day itself looks like the payoff, mostly sunny and 82 with almost no rain in the forecast. If you have outdoor plans this weekend, take the morning.

Labor Day is Monday. Here is the weekend in practical terms.

Trash and recycling. This is the one people get wrong. There is no collection Monday, and Monday's routes run Tuesday, Sept. 8 instead. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday routes are not delayed at all, which is the part that surprises people who assume the whole week slides. There is no yard waste collection anywhere in town that week, carts or bulk piles, and it picks back up the week of Sept. 14. Recycling runs every other week by zone, so look up your own address at toknc.com/public-services rather than going by a neighbor's cart.

The convenience site. The drop-off at 720 McKaughan St. is closed both Saturday the 5th and Monday the 7th. The Public Services office on Michael Street is closed Monday.

Closed Monday. Paddison Memorial Branch and every Forsyth County library; Forsyth County government offices, reopening Tuesday at 8 a.m.; the post office, with no regular mail delivery until Tuesday; the Kernersville Recreation and Event Center on Shields Road. Schools are out. Körner's Folly and Little Brother are closed, though both are closed Mondays anyway.

Open Monday. The outdoor pool at the community pool and water park, which the YMCA runs, is open 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. — and Monday is the last day of the outdoor season, so that is your final swim. The Y itself is open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The grounds at Ciener Botanical Garden are open dawn to dusk as always, though the Welcome Center is closed, as it is every Monday.

One we could not nail down: the Town's holiday closing calendar has nothing posted for 2026, so we cannot tell you with confidence whether Town Hall itself is open. If you have business there Monday, call first.

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Yesterday we ran a decoder for newcomers. As it turns out, there has been a club for that since the 1980s.

The Kernersville Newcomers and Neighbors Club has roughly 60 members and dues of $25 a year. President Wanda Sampson, originally from Pennsylvania and later Florida, moved here four years ago, and she describes a club with two jobs at once.

"The purpose is for men and women to get together, play games, make arrangements to go out to dinner," she said, "and what we strive to do is to help the community."

The second half of that is not decorative. The club tries to donate about $2,000 to $3,000 to community organizations, including summer programs run by the fire department and support for the library. It supplies Crisis Control Ministries, holds a luncheon at the senior center, and runs bingo open to the public twice a year. The dues go back out the door to those groups.

If you have moved here recently and have been looking for the on-ramp, this is a fairly gentle one. The club keeps a Facebook page under Newcomers & Neighbors Club of Kernersville NC, which is the easiest way to reach someone. We could not confirm a standing meeting day and time from any published source, so ask when you write.

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This is the rare fundraiser that asks you to do something you were probably going to do anyway.

Wednesday, Sept. 9 is Eating for Education, the last one of the year. Restaurants around Kernersville participate from 7:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night, and up to 10 percent of your bill goes back to teachers through the Chamber of Commerce's Education Grants program.

The grants go to classroom teachers for the things budgets do not cover. The state accountability numbers further down this issue are a fair argument for why that matters.

There is a companion running alongside it. Shopping for Education runs Sept. 8 through 12 at participating retailers on the same principle.

The Kernersville News describes a record number of restaurants signed up this year. We could not get the exact count from the portion of the article available to us, so check the Chamber's event page for the current list before you pick a place.

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The state put out its school accountability data this week. Nobody localized it to Kernersville, so we went into the files ourselves.

The hardest number is Glenn. Robert B. Glenn High School drew a D, did not meet its growth target, and now appears on North Carolina's low-performing list for the third consecutive year. Southeast Middle and East Forsyth Middle each drew an F, also missed growth, and are also on the list for a third straight year. Union Cross Traditional Academy drew a D and missed growth, its first year on the list.

Proficiency is the plainest way to read the rest. Across all subjects and all students, the statewide figure is 59.2 percent working at grade level. Glenn is at 30.3 percent. East Forsyth Middle is at 33.1. East Forsyth High is at 45.1, Kernersville Elementary 51.8, Union Cross 53.6, Kernersville Middle 57.4, Caleb's Creek 57.8. Every one of those sits under the state number.

Two schools deserve a fuller accounting than a single percentage gives them. Kernersville Middle looks respectable at 57.4 percent, but it missed its growth target by a wider margin than Union Cross did, and it avoids the low-performing label only because its letter grade is high enough. And Piney Grove Elementary, the top scorer in town at 77.5 percent overall and 80.9 percent in fifth grade, also did not meet growth. High scores and improvement are not the same measurement, and around here they are not landing on the same schools.

The school that did both is Sedge Garden Elementary, which posted 71.3 percent proficiency and exceeded its growth target outright. Caleb's Creek, Cash and Kernersville Elementary all met growth. None of those four is on the low-performing list.

Just up the road, Walkertown Middle recorded the highest academic growth of any school in the district, and Walkertown High came off the low-performing list this year after two years on it. Those are the two brightest results anywhere near us.

District-wide, 28 of the 71 graded schools in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County are low-performing, about 39 percent. To be precise about what that does and does not mean: the state designates a district as low-performing only when more than half its schools are, and WS/FCS is below that line. Ten North Carolina districts crossed it this year. Ours is not one of them.

The figures above come from the Department of Public Instruction's own accountability files rather than from a summary of them. The files do not publish letter grades for schools that are not designated low-performing, so we are not printing one for any school that is not on the list.

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