Duncan honored as Teacher of the Year

Damon Howell / Photo

Clean-up crews were on the scene Tuesday afternoon, dismantling fixtures and building new walls on the interior of the building at Mary Ann’s. No completion date has been released.

        Investigators have ruled a fire that destroyed the interior of Mary Ann’s Country Cooking was arson. Investigation is underway. 

“There’s no doubt,” said Jasper’s Assistant Fire Chief Von Headrick. “We knew within the hour the night of the fire it was an arson, we just weren’t ready to release the information at that time.”

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The Pickens school district released the below statement this morning following a called board meeting last evening.

       The Creative Writing Contest for Youth is now in full swing. The competition put on by the Sassafras Literary Exchange is in its 38th year. It is designed for students from grade six through 12 who live in and are educated in Pickens County. It matters not whether these students are in Public schools or in an alternate study program, they are eligible to enter.

There are three categories in the high school and also three for the middle grades. Those categories are fiction, non-fiction and poetry. There is a maximum limit of 1,500 words in the fiction and non-fiction categories with a 50 line limit for poetry. The deadline for entries is Friday, November 1st.

     Pickens Schools Supt. Dr. Carlton Wilson at a heated meeting on transgender students. The town hall forum drew a large and passionate crowd. Due to safety concerns, including death threats, student harassment, and vandalism, the district has announced they will return to bathroom procedures that were in place at the beginning of this school year until they can address safety issues. 

        Roughly 850 people turned outfor a tense town hall meeting regarding transgender bathrooms in Pickens schools, a topic that has caused public uproar and division in Pickens County over the last week.  

No issue in recent history has captured the attention of local residents as strongly as this has. The town hall meeting, which was standing room only at one of the county’s largest venues, was the biggest anyone could recall in many years. The issue has aroused much anger and confusion, spurring on death threats to top school officials.    

In anticipation of a tense meeting, enflamed by heated social media posts and comments leading up to the event, the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office had over 20 deputies on duty at the Pickens High School Performing Art Center Monday, Oct. 14. 

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