The May Rhino Times Schmoozefest is Thursday, May 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Greensboro Convention & Visitors Bureau at 2411 W. Gate City Blvd. Free snacks, beer and wine will be provided to all business professionals who sign in and wear a name tag while supplies last.

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Teachers closed down schools across the state to march on Raleigh and demand higher teacher salaries and more spending on education. Maybe that’s not the way to go.

New York City, which has the highest per pupil spending rate of the country’s 100 largest school districts at over $24,000, has dismal success in the classroom. In New York City Schools, 72 percent of eighth graders tested as not proficient in reading and 72 percent as not proficient in math. Boston which spends over $22,000 per student, the second highest in the nation, does a little better with 68 percent not proficient in reading and 67 percent not proficient in math.

It seems like it might be an indication that spending more money is not the answer.

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News & Record reporter Margaret Moffett, who has been covering the Greensboro City Council and, lately, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, attended her last City Council meeting as a News & Record reporter Tuesday. Moffett is moving a few blocks west on Market Street where she will be managing editor of the Triad Business Journal starting in June.

We wish her all the best in her new position but would like to mention to whoever takes her place at City Council meetings that according to a long standing tradition the News & Record is responsible for providing snacks for the press table and the Rhino Times is responsible for ice.

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A headline on the News & Record website that kept catching my eye was “Lake at Hanging Rock to open on Saturday.” I couldn’t remember ever seeing a notice of the Hanging Rock lake opening before and wondered if it had been closed for renovations, (can you renovate a lake?) or maybe the lake had been closed because of the sighting of a Hanging Rock Lake Monster like the Loch Ness Monster. So I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the lake was simply opening for the summer and it was a Winston-Salem story.

Although Hanging Rock State Park is only an hour from Greensboro, for some reason it’s never really caught on with Greensboro residents. So it’s another example of the two newspapers merging into one.

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School shootings are tragic events and everyone would like to see them stopped, but the mainstream media aren’t helping matters by continuing to report the fake news that there have been 16 school shootings this year. It’s sad that the News & Record is guilty of reporting this number.

Think about it for a moment. Everyone remembers the shooting in Parkland, Florida, and now the one in Santa Fe, Texas. How could we have forgotten the other 14 that according to the mainstream media have happened this year? They are easy to forget because they didn’t happen.

The number includes suicides on school property, two accidental gun discharges at schools that didn’t injure anyone and a robbery where one of the victims was shot on school property but it had nothing to do with the school or students.