🗞️ A school board candidate is facing two felony charges

🗞️ The plan that shapes the next decade of Kernersville goes to the aldermen

🗞️ The Home Grown Arts Festival fills Harmon Park on Saturday

🗞️ The busiest free room in town is one nobody talks about

☀️ Mostly sunny, storms after dark | High: 93°F | Low: 70°F

Thursday is the hottest day of the week and the last mostly dry one for a while. Expect sunshine into the afternoon, a high near 93 and a southwest breeze under 8 mph. Rain chances stay low until about 4 PM, then climb through the evening, roughly one in three by 7 PM, which is worth a glance at the radar if you are headed to the Kernersville Cup at Glenn. Storms become likely overnight with a low around 70, and Friday is the washout of the week at 88 degrees and an 80 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Saturday settles back down to 86 with a 30 percent chance, so the Home Grown Arts Festival should be workable. Carry water Thursday and an umbrella Friday.

This one is on the ballot, which is why we are telling you about it.

Ronald Jason Lucero, 49, of Rural Hall, is one of two Republican candidates for an at-large seat on the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education. He was arrested July 15 by Greensboro police on two counts of felony obtaining property by false pretenses, and he posted bond the same day.

According to the warrants, Lucero is accused of using a Bain Oil Company credit card to buy tires for his 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe last Sept. 30 and a cellphone on Jan. 6 of this year. Separately, Bain won a small claims judgment against him for $827.11 on July 15. He paid that judgment in full on Aug. 14.

A hearing is set for today in Guilford County District Court. We would note the obvious: these are accusations, not convictions, and Lucero is entitled to the presumption of innocence like anyone else. But the board he is running for sets policy for tens of thousands of students, so it is the sort of thing voters generally want to know before November rather than after.

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If you filled out a survey at Spring Folly or Juneteenth or the Honeybee Festival this year, this is where that went.

Kernersville's new Comprehensive Plan has cleared the Planning Board and goes to the Board of Aldermen on Aug. 26. It is a roughly ten-year roadmap that folds land use, transportation, housing, economic development, downtown, the environment and parks into a single document, and it is more consequential than the dry name suggests.

"State law requires that we have a comprehensive plan in order to have zoning," Community Development Director Catherine Garner said. In other words, this is the document that decides what can be built where, and it is the thing the town will point to for the next decade every time somebody asks why a project was approved or turned down.

Asked about the tension between growing and staying recognizably Kernersville, Garner was direct: "It's all a balance and a trade-off." The draft is posted publicly at plankernersville.com, and the Aug. 26 meeting at Town Hall is open to anyone who wants to sit in.

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Twelve years in, this one has quietly become one of the better mornings on the Kernersville calendar.

The Kernersville Arts and Crafts Guild brings the 12th annual Home Grown Arts Festival to Harmon Park on Saturday, Aug. 22, from 9 AM to 3 PM. Admission is free. More than 40 vendors set up under the trees with pottery, jewelry, woodworking, fused glass and fiber arts, and there are food trucks on site if you want to make a morning of it.

The appeal of a guild show is that you are mostly buying from the person who made the thing, standing at the table, happy to tell you how it was made. That is a different afternoon than a big-tent craft fair, and it is the reason this one has kept growing.

The festival sets up in the part of Harmon Park closest to Cherry Street, which is also where the shade is. The forecast is cooperating, mostly: Saturday looks like a high near 86 with a 30 percent chance of an afternoon storm, so the morning is the safer bet. Harmon Park is at 152 S. Main St.

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We kept running into the same address while building this week's calendar, so here it is on its own.

Paddison Memorial Branch Library sits at 248 Harmon Lane, and in the next two weeks alone it is hosting seven free programs. Not story time and nothing else. Seven.

Mondays bring Triad Sip & Stitch, a drop-in knitting and crochet group from 9:30 AM to noon in the auditorium. Bring whatever you are already working on. Tuesdays, a Forsyth County DSS caseworker is on site from 9 AM to 6 PM in the conference room, which means you can ask questions and apply for county services without driving into Winston-Salem. Both are free and neither requires an appointment.

Then there is the quieter stuff. Paddison Technology Hour on Aug. 26 at 11 AM is an hour of no-judgment help with e-books, email, tablets and the library's online resources. Makerspace Open Lab on Aug. 31 from 1 to 4 PM opens up the 3D printer and the worktables, first come first served, teens and adults. The Voices of Change Book Club meets Saturday at noon on The Atlas of Beauty, and Books & Brews meets Aug. 29 at Gypsy Road Brewing on The Queen of Dirt Island. And on Sept. 2, Preschool Storytime starts back up Wednesdays at 10 AM and runs into November.

Every one of those costs nothing. If you have driven past that building for years without going in, this is the fortnight to fix that.

See the full library calendar