Click on image to view video on WCNC.com.

With shows like 'The Voice' and 'American Idol,' these days being able to sing can mean big bucks. But you don't often hear a lot about young people singing opera. Charlotte's Opera Carolina is working with teens to try to change that.

Taylor Isaac is one of a handful of Charlotte area teens singing in Opera Carolinas Christmas concert. A junior at Northwestern High School in Rock Hill, she started singing in church when she was just seven years old.

Per-pupil spending among Mecklenburg-area charter schools varied widely last year, with a handful reporting that they spent significantly less in local money than Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools forwarded to them.
Total spending ranged from $6,194 at Queens Grant, a Mint Hill school run by a for-profit chain, to $15,157 at Kennedy Charter in south Charlotte, run by the nonprofit Elon Homes, according to 2010-11 state report cards.

Occupy Columbia protesters on the SC statehouse grounds.

Per-pupil spending among Mecklenburg-area charter schools varied widely last year, with a handful reporting that they spent significantly less in local money than Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools forwarded to them.
Total spending ranged from $6,194 at Queens Grant, a Mint Hill school run by a for-profit chain, to $15,157 at Kennedy Charter in south Charlotte, run by the nonprofit Elon Homes, according to 2010-11 state report cards.

Occupy Columbia protesters on the SC statehouse grounds.

The Charlotte Area Transit System hopes a few years from now it will be able to increase capacity on the Lynx light rail by adding an extra car on each of its trains. An $18 million federal grant is helping CATS begin work on that. The Federal Transit Administrator was in town Tuesday to tout the gift.

The grant was announced last week, but the celebration happened Tuesday complete with a White House official at a Lynx station. Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff presented one of those huge, over-sized checks for photo-ops.

Charlotte's top business leaders say 2011 turned out far worse than expected and they don't see things getting much better in 2012. At the Charlotte Chamber's annual economic outlook conference, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan again used what lately seems to be his favorite adjective for the economy: "grinding."

"2012 will be another year that's a grinding economy," said Moynihan. "We'll have slow growth, we'll have to keep working on it. The rest of the world will grow faster, the U.S. will grow slower and Europe will grow slower than the U.S."

Per-pupil spending among Mecklenburg-area charter schools varied widely last year, with a handful reporting that they spent significantly less in local money than Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools forwarded to them.
Total spending ranged from $6,194 at Queens Grant, a Mint Hill school run by a for-profit chain, to $15,157 at Kennedy Charter in south Charlotte, run by the nonprofit Elon Homes, according to 2010-11 state report cards.

Occupy Columbia protesters on the SC statehouse grounds.