Raleigh North Carolina: Fill & Download for Free

Twenty years ago, we signed my son up for kindergarten in a public elementary school in Raleigh, North Carolina. During his year of kindergarten, I didn’t hear much from his school (by the way, a highly rated school in an affluent area) except fundraiser requests. Near the end of the school year, we were asked to go to a parent-teacher conference. The teacher said she wanted to hold my son back (in kindergarten, for Christ sake) because, among other transgressions, he colored outside the lines. She kept calling him by another name — let’s say “Timmy” to protect the innocent. I kept saying he is “Tommy”, not “Timmy” but she ignored me.After the meeting, I took Tommy out for lunch at a restaurant that gave children coloring materials and he exhibited his excellent crayon control. I asked him how he was doing in class, looking for any clues to his alleged learning disabilities, but found none. I said, “The teacher kept calling you Timmy. Is there a Timmy in your class?”“Yes”, he answered, “Timmy is always cutting up and not paying attention.”Later, we got the official letter in the mail that he was being held back to serve a sentence of two years in bloody kindergarten for mistaken identity.All fired up, I wrote an admittedly sarcastic letter to the school principal, calling attention to the school’s lack of communication except for fund drives, employing teachers not able to keep the names of their students straight and my general doubts about his intelligence, parentage and manhood (no, I didn’t actually say the latter — but thought about it).Apparently, I got under his skin because he fired back an equally sarcastic (and unprofessional) letter saying that I had no recourse, the decision was made.I didn’t want to see my son penalized and lose one year of his life over a stupid mistake, so I thought of a drastic solution — move. We moved from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a different school system.Signing him up for the new school, I fraudulently stated on the application that he had not been to any other school. Kindergarten, after all, is not a requirement to enter first grade.So he entered the first grade in Chapel Hill as a stealth student, all evidence of his past career as “Timmy the Trouble Maker” erased. We were able to pull off the subterfuge — the school proved to be an excellent school and he was an excellent student.If that Raleigh principal is still around and reads this, he’ll probably seek to take some kind of action. Hopefully, the kindergarten statute of limitations has run out.UPDATE: The school was Lead Mine Elementary School in the Six Forks area of North Raleigh, North Carolina.

Generally the urban vote goes Democratic and the rural vote goes Republican. Georgia is dominated by metro Atlanta and that’s where the Biden support came from, as it also came from Columbus, Savannah and Augusta. You can see those urban clusters in this map:North Carolina doesn’t have a comparable powerhouse urban center like Atlanta, although the state capital, Raleigh went for Biden. The population isn’t dense enough in the northeast where Biden did well:With that said, the election was pretty close in both states with North Carolina having a difference of only 1.4% and 0.3% in Georgia.Charts from the Washington Post.

When my wife and I bought our first house, over 40 years ago, in a nice blue collar, Bible Belt neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina (the Five Points neighborhood), we were the first and only Jewish family in the neighborhood. The neighbors were nice, and most were religious Christians. They knew a little bit about Judaism from their Christian magazines. Anyway, we appointed ourselves local ambassadors of the Jewish people, though not missionaries, God forbid! We Jews do not proselytize. Before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, usually in September, we prepared little plates of apples and honey and took one to each neighbor, explaining that this was a Jewish custom for a sweet new year. They liked that. A little later, we built our first sukka for the Sukkot holiday. We went to the neighbors with a huge garden and asked if they could give us some vegetables to decorate it. They didn't quite understand what we were talking about, but they very generously gave us beautiful gourds of assorted colors and shapes. When the sukka was finished and decorated, we invited all the neighbors to it for a tea party. How they oohed and aahed! They had never seen such a thing.Our first sukka was much smaller and simpler than this one:Only one time, Cliff, the old man across the street, sounded like he was about to try to convert us. But his wife shut him up in a hurry. (Aw, hesh up, Cliff!)A few years later, after we had moved to Israel, the neighbors were worried about us during the first Gulf War there. They looked up my parents' phone number in Connecticut and called them to make sure we were okay.We still have warm feelings about those wonderful neighbors.