A dozen bird species found at least part of the year in Southwest Virginia are among the 178 birds species two conservation groups called the “most imperiled” on the North American continent.
In a joint teleconference Wednesday, officials with the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy released their cooperatively compiled WatchList 2007 that includes birds in most immediate need of conservation efforts to slow and halt their flight into extinction.

Smyth County Community Hospital took its first public step toward relocating Thursday as it gained the county planning commission’s unanimous support for rezoning its proposed site from Agricultural/Rural to Commercial. The commission and the county supervisors held a joint public hearing on the requested rezoning in which speakers voiced no opposition to the hospital’s proposed location.

Bill Dennison uses two sentences to sum up the duties of a job that makes him the second-highest-paid public employee in Bristol, Va.

Tamara Neo will earn $109,385 per year and become Buchanan County’s highest-paid public employee when she takes over as commonwealth’s attorney Jan. 2.

At first glance, the position of Circuit Court clerk in Virginia seems a cushy job for veteran politicians as well as newcomers.

Phil Lineberry decided on a teaching career because a former teacher inspired him and served as a role model.

Gathering local government salaries from across Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee was not only an arduous exercise of fiscal oversight for this newspaper, but also showed that localities routinely fail to follow open records laws.

Glade Spring’s top cop manages raise, but still earns less than peers in region

For years, Sugar Grove residents and Smyth County leaders have wanted to expand cellular telephone service to the mountainous southern side of the county. According to officials familiar with the county’s telecommunications, talks with cell service providers continue, but no resolution appears imminent.

Under Virginia Standards of Learning for seventh-grade mathematics, standard 7.1 says, students “will compare, order, and determine equivalent relationships between fractions, decimals, and percents…” and 7.16 says they’ll “create and solve problems involving the measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and the range of a set of data.”
That means Marion Middle School students can say their school’s 2007 passing rate was more than 200 percent better than the state mean, or average, rate for seventh-grade SOL tests last spring, the first year for math testing in that grade. They can also say they earned the school a letter of commendation from Richmond.