Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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MAY 10-16, 2017 UCW 29 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Does your advertising leave you feeling this way? Advertising can be pretty complex. You may not know which way to turn. ere is a sign you can rely on — ours. Call us today so that our professionals can make the most of your advertising investment. Free Papers Working For You Another sign we're working for you. 484-6200 wwwupandcomingweekly.com 16 UCW MARCH 22-28, 2017 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM DR. SHANESSA FENNER, Principal WT Brown Elementary School. Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. 910.484.6200. PWC will host its third Annual Power and Water Conservation Expo Friday, March 24, from 10 a.m. – 9 p.m. and Saturday, March 25, from 9 a.m. – 2 p.m. at SkyView on Hay Street in downtown Fayetteville. "This event does focus on conservation, and we have employees and conservation specialists that will be there," said Carolyn Justice-Hinson, communications and community relations officer at PWC. "We have information about our incentive programs, conservation tools and basic information to help people understand their utility services." Justice-Hinson added that they will be handing out items and helping people understand how to use them. The educational mascots, Willy Water Drop and Wally Watt Watcher, will be on site for the expo. "Willy Water Drop is a water drop, and Wally Watt Watcher is a plug, and sometimes people confuse him with an old-timey cell phone," said Justice-Hinson. "The kids and adults like them and everybody likes to take a selfie with them." Participants will learn ways to save on their energy and water bill, meet PWC linemen and receive a complimentary reusable tote bag with items like LED bulbs and tree seedlings. "Our linemen will have a miniature utility pole, and they will show you how they restore power," said Justice-Hinson. "You can touch it, and they will let you help them so you can see what their job is all about," Justice-Hinson added that there will also be information about PWC's major projects such as the change out of street lights to the LED streetlight and their advanced meters which they started putting in three years ago. It gives people an opportunity to see this stuff up close and to ask questions from the employees that do this every day. Another educational tool that will be distributed and discussed is the fat trapper. "The fat trappers are one of our most popular items," said Justice-Hinson. "We run regular campaigns trying to make people aware that they should not pour grease and oil down the sewer system because once it gets there, it clogs up and causes backups which are bad for everybody." PWC is the largest electric municipal utility in the state of North Carolina. "While people sometimes do not always believe this, our rates are among the lowest in the area," said Justice-Hinson. "We can show you some information on rates and how we compare to other local and regional providers." The expo is free and open to the public. Participants are encouraged to pay it forward and consider bringing nonperishable food items to donate to Second Harvest Food Bank. For more information visit www. faypwc.com or call 223-4009. EVENTS PWC Hosts Power and Water Conservation Expo by DR. SHANESSA FENNER The Annual Power and Water Conservation Expo is free and open to the public. On March 24, Givens Performing Arts Center will be joining the national conversation about social justice. At 7:30 p.m. GPAC presents How We Got Here: Songwriters on Social Justice featuring Scott Ainslie and Reggie Harris. For Scott Ainslie music is an integral part of social change. "Every social change is accompanied by music. Songs are perfect vehicles for inhabiting someone else's shoes for three or four minutes and feeling what that might be like. As such, it's a short cut through the thicket of defenses we all have that tend to keep people who are different from us at bay," he says. Music and social justice have both also played an integral part in Ainslie's personal development. In fact, his interest in the Civil Rights movement is what led him to music. "I grew up outside DC in Alexandria VA during the Civil Rights struggle and readily fell in with those who were fighting against the injustice of that. I went into my first black church with a high school teacher I played music with, Winfield Pate – a marvelous soul who played anything he heard without reading a note. Win opened a door for me, and I just went on through it" he says, "Gospel and blues have always been tied up with my own personal as well as my personal sense of fairness. To cross into another culture, one has to find ways to open the doors separating us. The key to that is respect and love, for the people, the music, the culture, and each other." Ainslie has been playing music for 50 years or as he describes it, "half a century living at the edge of American pop culture, but in the heart of her traditional culture." He was first inspired to learn guitar when he was introduced to roots music by a local gravedigger in Alexandria. Since then he has marrying his passion of music and activism. He also worked for four years at the NC Visiting Artist Program, which is a collaboration between the NC Arts Council and NC Department of Community Colleges. He used this platform to reach people of all social, economic, educational, religious and racial/cultural backgrounds. For Ainslie his role as an artist is to question society, which in his opinion is vital for growth. This role is particularly important in times like today that he describes as, "… polluted with verifiable, persistent, knee-jerk, self-serving lies emanating from the highest offices in the land," that poses a distinct threat to democracy. The performance on March 24th is intended to directly counter the issues of today. "The importance of sharing any experience rests in its power to reinforce our sense of community. We take a room full of strangers and, leading them through a course of stories and songs, turn them into a group. And, for that, we all feel better. This is more important for our nation now than it has possibly ever been. The remedy to polarization, to state the obvious, is for us to come together and get to know each other," he says. Their shared passion for activism, music and teaching are what brought Ainslie and Harris together. "Reggie and I have been circling each other for years, admiring each other's work both as musicians and as activists. Reggie has done with the surviving Civil Rights movement veterans what I did with surviving Blues and gospel musicians," Ainslie says. A love of music started very early for Harris as well. "Well, music has been an integral part of my life since I was about 3 years old I grew up hearing it and then singing, for as long as I can remember. There was music in my home early on. My mom and sister and I would gather around the piano, maybe on a Friday night, and sing for hours. And the music in my church and at school were very formative influences in helping me to see and connect to issues in the world and to my self-image," Harris says. Like Ainslie, Harris also combines his passion for music and social movements with education. "I am also the Music Educator for an organization, the Living Legacy Project, that leads journeys to sites of the Modern Civil Rights Movement throughout the south and two years ago, I was made a fellow in the Woodrow Wilson Scholars program, where I visit college campuses to lecture and perform on a variety of topics, related to the role of music and art in society," he says. Harris also believes that music and social movements are inherently linked. It dates back to the use of music by African American slaves "My primary focus over the years, however, has been about sharing how my ancestors, African Americans in slavery, used music and its remarkable power to create and sustain community and inspire action, to shape and change the condition of their lives," Harris explains, "It is again becoming the vehicle for self and group expression of emotion, for the expression of a dissatisfaction with social and political conditions and as a means, once again, of gathering people around a common sense of purpose. Within the current political and social climate, there is, obviously, much a deep sense of unrest and of people feeling disconnected and unrepresented." These two friends sharing a stage together is a magical thing. Their different specialties complement each other in a unique and beautiful way. "I am not as connected to the blues, as Scott is. My background and focus has been more connected to folk music, gospel, classical and pop music and my performing style reflects that synergy," Harris explains, "That is one of the cool things about the collaboration between us, in that we cross at very interesting musical points that, in some ways, defy the 'norm' or the 'expected'." How We Got Here: Songs on Social Justice by ERINN CRIDER Scholar Athletes of the Week CHAPEL HILL – As expected, the N.C. High School Athletic Association pared down its state playoff field in response to a major change in the classification of its schools. The action was taken at last week's spring meeting of the NCHSAA Board of Directors. Beginning this fall, 20 percent of the association's schools will be in the 4-A class and another 20 percent in 1-A. Both 3-A and 2-A will have 30 percent each. Since there are fewer teams in the top and bottom classes, it made sense to reduce the number of teams in the playoffs. There will now be 48 each in 4-A and 1-A, with 64 each in 3-A and 2-A. In football, the NCHSAA will still split classes and offer eight state titles. The new playoff numbers are for baseball, basketball, football, soccer, softball and volleyball. One controversial point was that MaxPreps state rankings will be used to seed the teams on a one-year experiment. Some members of the NCHSAA Board of Directors, including Patty Evers of East Bladen, oppose that idea. "I'm not for a ranking system in high school,'' Evers said. "How do you know who's good and who's not? You just don't know and who's going to do all that research?" Que Tucker, commissioner of the NCHSAA, said the board got a lot of input from athletic directors at their recent conference in Wilmington, along with recommendations from an ad hoc committee on the playoffs. "I think what the board did was good and we'll see how it works,'' she said. One important issue the board took no action on was the future of home school athletes playing for NCHSAA member schools. It has been a hot topic in other states and Evers said the NCHSAA knows the subject is coming to North Carolina. "We are ready to move forward with it,'' she said. "There are still some things going on with the legislature we don't know about.'' Tucker said the NCHSAA doesn't want to have a knee jerk reaction to the issue and just blindly put a policy in place. "We'll continue to monitor it and what our strategies will be as we move forward,'' she said. Other news from the meeting: • Dual team wrestling, the last sport to still hold its state championship in a high school gym, will be moved to a neutral championship site. • The NCHSAA will look into developing a separate championship for girls' wrestling. • Accepting money or an illegal award will cause an NCHSAA athlete to lose eligibility for the semester it was accepted and the semester to follow. • Cheerleading coaches and tennis coaches, girls and boys, must attend the annual rules clinic for their sport. • Cumberland County will get its own officials' association for lacrosse. • The NCHSAA can require host schools for the playoffs to get a venue suitable to the expected crowd that is of sufficient quality. • In-season dead periods were cut from six to three weeks. The May dead period was eliminated for girls' sports and for boys at schools without football. A 10-day dead period was added at the end of the school year. • Guidelines were set to have mandatory breaks during a game when wet bulb thermometer readings are at 90 or above. Prep Notebook by EARL VAUGHAN JR. HIGH SCHOOL HIGHLIGHTS Sidney Gronowski Cape Fear • Softball •Junior Through May 2, Gronowski was batting .418 for the state playoff-bound Cape Fear softball team. She has a grade point average of 3.95 and is a member of the Student Government Association at Cape Fear. Payton Short Seventy-First • Softball • Sophomore Short has compiled a 4.17 grade point average for the Falcons.