Roses to the Carrboro High School students who have raised more than $30,000 this month to benefit community health and development work in Mali, West Africa.

The students gathered pledges and donations and walked 20 miles on the Pumpkin Loop in the Carolina North Forest to raise the funds.

Thirty thousand dollars can help 2,000 Malian children with life-threatening illnesses get the health care they need.

The effort was led by the Carrboro High School Global Health Club, led by history teacher Matthew Cone.

The students spent a month canvassing neighborhoods and soliciting donations. They also made good use of social media such as Facebook.

The money raised will go to Project Muso, a nonprofit that partners with communities in Yirimadjo, Mali.

Roses to the parents, teachers and students who participated in the 14th annual Frank Porter Graham Read-a-thon recently.

From Jan. 20 to Feb. 3, all FPG students were asked to read as much as they could and record their efforts. The goal for the entire student body was to read more than 680,000 minutes during the two-week period.

The students logged more 942,000 minutes. The students who read the most minutes in each class were honored with Lion’s Paw Awards, and students who showed outstanding effort took home Best Paw Forward Awards.

On average, each student read 1,877 minutes, or more than 31 hours, during the 14 days of Read-a-thon.

The Read-a-Thon also raises money for the school, as participating students secured pledges from friends and family.This year’s event is expected to bring in more than $14,500.

Roses to Dwight Bassett, Chapel Hill’s economic development director. We won’t be able to call him that much longer; Bassett has accepted a job of economic development manager for the City of Raleigh. His last day will be March 23.

He will be, as Town Manager Roger Stancil said, hard to replace. Bassett has helped focus attention and effort on building the commercial tax base in Chapel Hill.

That’s a long, slow project – Chapel Hill is famous for exerting tight oversight over the development process, which tends to be slower and more expensive than many developers would like. And there remains a great deal to do on that front; commercial property taxes comprise just 16 percent of the town’s tax base.

But Bassett has helped shift the course of the town in a direction that will lead to a more balanced revenue chart. He alaso recognizes Chapel Hill’s creative bent, and he’s been a champion the arts as an economic driver. We wish him well over there in the big city.