🗞️ The sheriff counts 10 to 15 coyotes along one Winston-Salem road

🗞️ The county fair wants your cake, and entries close Sept. 8

🗞️ A community choir on South Main is looking for voices

🗞️ How to actually follow a Board of Aldermen meeting

☀️ Sunny | High: 95°F | Low: 73°F

September opens hot and cloudless. Tuesday runs sunny with a high near 95, a northwest wind around 3 miles an hour, and a rain chance of about 2 percent. Overnight stays mostly clear with a low around 73. The rest of the week leans harder into it: sunny and 97 on Wednesday, sunny and 97 again on Thursday, then 95 on Friday with a 30 percent chance of showers and storms arriving after lunch. That Friday front is the first hint of a break in a while. Until then, early morning is the only comfortable window for outdoor work, and it is worth checking on neighbors who do not have good air conditioning.

This one did not happen here, but the advice inside it travels.

The Forsyth County Sheriff's Office put out an alert on increased coyote activity after deputies were called Friday to the Forsyth Technical Community College campus, where a coyote had gotten itself caught in a fence. Deputies freed the animal and it ran off into nearby woods.

The number in the alert is the part that stops you. The sheriff's office estimates 10 to 15 coyotes live in or regularly pass through the wooded stretch along Silas Creek Parkway, and says some of them have started approaching people and animals rather than keeping their distance.

The first piece of advice is the most specific: do not walk dogs on the Forsyth Tech campus. The rest is countywide, which is why we are passing it along. Secure your trash, feeding stations and any other potential food sources, keep pets current on their rabies vaccination, and do not approach a wild animal that shows no fear of people, acts aggressively or seems disoriented. If you meet an aggressive coyote, move yourself, your children and your pets to safety and call law enforcement.

Forsyth County Animal Services takes calls at 336-727-2112.

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If someone in your house has been told their cookies are competition grade, here is the week to find out.

Entries for the Carolina Classic Fair's Community Showcase competitions are due Sept. 8. The fair itself runs Oct. 2 through Oct. 11 at the Winston-Salem Fairgrounds, and the Showcase is the part where regular people put their work on a table and let a judge walk past it.

There is real money in it. Entrants compete for a share of $225,000 in prize money across categories that run from apple decorating to cookie and cake baking to collections and Legos. This year's competition theme is Patriotic, which ties into the fair's Red, White and Moo theme for the country's 250th.

New this year is a Holiday Cheer Card competition. The winning design becomes the Fairgrounds' 2026 holiday card, which is a nice thing to have on somebody's refrigerator in December.

Christian Baucum, the fair's events and branding manager, laid out the categories for WXII. The deadline is the thing to write down: Sept. 8, one week from tomorrow.

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No audition, no experience requirement, no long commitment before you know whether you like it.

The Heart of the Triad Choral Society holds its first rehearsal of the season Thursday, Sept. 3, from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Chorus Room at Main Street United Methodist Church, 306 S. Main Street. The group is a non-profit, non-auditioned community choir, and it is welcoming new members.

Non-auditioned is the word worth pausing on. It means nobody is going to ask you to sight-read in front of a stranger. If you sang in high school and have not sung since, or if you have only ever sung in the car, Thursday is an ordinary night to walk in.

The season has a destination, too. The choir's first concert is set for Friday, Dec. 18 at 7 p.m. at Wesleyan Memorial Methodist Church in High Point, which gives the fall about fifteen weeks of rehearsals to build toward something.

To ask questions first, Dr. Carol Earnhardt can be reached at 336-816-4982 or [email protected], and the group is online at heartofthemusic.com.

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The board meets tonight, and nearly everything you need to follow along is already sitting online.

The regular meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. in the Municipal Council Chambers at 134 East Mountain Street. If you would rather not drive over, the town streams it at toknc.com/youtube, and past meetings stay up on that same channel afterward. That short link is the one to bookmark, because it survives any change to the channel address.

Here is who you are watching. Mayor Dawn H. Morgan presides and votes only to break a tie. The five aldermen, all elected at large, are Mayor Pro Tem J.R. Gorham, Bill Apple, Randall Pegram, Sarah Sabanis and Chris Thompson. Curtis Swisher is the town manager and Keith Hooker is the town clerk.

Agendas and minutes live on the town's CivicWeb portal, and the genuinely useful thing buried there is the E-Updates page, where you can check a box for Board of Aldermen meetings, hand over an email address, and get a note every time an agenda is posted. Questions about an agenda item go to the clerk at 336-992-0404.

If you want to speak, know that there are two different situations. Every regular agenda carries a standing item called Speakers from the Floor, though the town does not publish a sign-up procedure or a time limit for it, so call the clerk to ask. Public hearings work differently, under a policy the board adopted last December: those in favor speak first and those opposed speak second, and each side gets twenty minutes total to divide among however many speakers it has. That is twenty minutes per side, not per person, which surprises people.

Tonight's agenda is a full one. Three public hearings: two rezonings, one on Old Winston Road at South Main and one on Rosewater Avenue, plus the voluntary annexation of about 54.7 acres east and west of NC 66 South, north of Interstate 40. After that comes a development allocation request near Union Cross Road and Glennview Drive, and a notice to proceed on a feasibility study for a BMX bicycle facility. The evening opens with a proclamation declaring September as Suicide Prevention Month.

The board meets twice a month, but the days move around, so the town calendar is the only reliable way to know when the next one lands.

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