Anyone who has been involved in teaching knows that teachers often have to dig into their own pockets to buy classroom supplies - and teachers, as we all know, tend not to have especially deep pockets.

The Teacher Supply Store is a community-driven program that provides funds for local teachers to buy those precious supplies at the beginning of the school year.

The supply store benefits teachers in all the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools. Each year the program focuses on a particular group or groups.

This year's store will focus on helping 330 teachers - 250 K-5 classroom teachers, 27 elementary novice teachers, 23 middle/high school novice teachers, 20 pre-K teachers, and 10 family specialists.

Each teacher will be given a $75 voucher to shop at the two-day Teacher Supply Store to coincide with the start of the new school year. The event will begin with a ribbon-cutting on Aug. 17 at 2 p.m. and will continue Aug. 18, at the American Legion Post on Legion Road.

Funding comes primarily from the East Chapel Hill Rotary Club, along with corporate partner Staples through the Staples Foundation, and with the support of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School Foundation.

Since its inception, the Teacher Supply Store has distributed nearly $100,000 worth of school supplies, free of charge, to teachers in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district.

The first program in January 2008 was for K-2 teachers, and an August 2008 supply store helped K-5 teachers. In August 2009, 450 teachers for grades 6-12 were served, and the August 2010, store focused on the 333 non-classroom teachers within the system.

Roses to two local artists who were among the 18 recipients of the 2011-2012 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship Awards in the categories of poetry, prose writers, songwriters, composers, playwrights and screenwriters.

Playwright Paul Baerman and songwriter Christy Smith, both of Chapel Hill, were named winners of Fellowship Awards.

Baerman, according to the Arts Council, "writes about the loss of innocence and what we do to recover it; about families, intentional or biological, and how their members in the end damage the fragile ecosystem of one another's relationships and dreams; and about grief, particularly from a comic point of view."

Smith was honored for her songwriting, which "strives for lyrical salience, reverence and playfulness as she channels the painful, confusing and wondrous things that go along with being human." Her group The Tender Fruit's debut LP, Flotsam & Krill, was named one of Shuffle Magazine's top 20 local albums of 2010.

Each recipient receives a $10,000 fellowship to support creative development and the creation of new work.