Looking to ourselves for some of the answers to problems.

We don’t always have to look to Raleigh or Chapel Hill or Washington to know how to do a job properly.

We can just look to places like Ashe County High School and Ashe Memorial Hospital and the local GE plant.

In fact, considering recent decisions made in Washington and the financial centers of the nation, we need to make sure to check the facts of the people in charge of running things there.

We have gotten the idea that we need to look to governmental centers of leadership as the source of all knowledge and proper procedure.

Maybe they need to be looking at places like Ashe County High School where the SAT score of the average senior is above the national and state average.

In recently released figures from the Department of Public Instruction combined mean reading and math scores for Ashe students was 1023 in 2007. For the current year that has jumped to 1032.

Or the keepers of the flame of knowledge in Raleigh and Washington might look to the achievements of Polly Sexton Jones.

She is the Ashe County teacher named on of 25 in the nation as a teacher of excellence by the secondary section of the National Council of Teachers of English.

There are a lot of English teachers in this country. Polly Sexton Jones stands near the top of the heap.

Her students are not really surprised by that. They understand her demands and what she has helped them achieve.

Ashe Memorial Hospital, fighting a health care battle in this economically depressed section of rural North Carolina, is finding a way to pull together dollars to provide the best care in the areas of healthcare it can best serve.

Health care is a tough and competitive business financially and technically these days. Just look down the road to Winston-Salem and see how the Novant and Baptist Hospital systems are throwing punches at one another.

Ashe Memorial Hospital was named an Outstanding Rural Healthcare organization in the nation.

In the face of challenging times all over for manufacturers, our GE plant that makes parts for the aerospace industry announced several months ago that it is expanding its operation.

GE will be sending more work to the workers in Ashe County. Now would that be happening if Ashe County workers didn’t know what they were doing?

We think not.

For sure we need to be careful to learn all that we can to make ourselves better. We need to understand what our problems are. We do have some things that most of us don’t like n children that go to bed hungry or sleep in frigid houses in the winter, neighbors who fall into the darkness of depression and substance abuse and can’t find their way out, hard economic times.

We need to devise ways to improve those problems and others.

We prove every day that we can figure out solutions. We just need to put to ideas to action.