"Let them eat cake" is what Marie-Antoinette is reported to have said when told peasants rioted because they had no bread. Though today's historians claim she never made such a callous statement, we can now imagine its coming from the mouth of Principal Sallie Ballard of Buist Academy.How else to explain the presence of 15 vacancies this fall in the upper grades? Isn't Buist's arcane, mysterious, and closely-guarded waiting list purported to contain thousands of names?
Oh, wait! Those parents have all been contacted by Ballard and have turned down Buist admission because they realize their present schools are so much better academically than Buist!
No, of course not.
I know! All students in the appropriate grades for these vacancies have been tested and found wanting in the brains department.
Yeah, right.
Wait! Maybe . . . the list has been misplaced and Ballard has been frantically searching all fall.
Sickening, isn't it? Fifteen motivated and deserving students in CCSD are being cheated out of a better education at this very moment. How would you feel if your child were one of them?
How many eighth-grade parents at Burke would like to know that their top-scoring PACT-test-qualified child is eligible and possibly has as many as eight empty seats waiting at Buist if they should choose for their child to take advantage of one? Has any one told these parents that these vacancies exist? Do Buist and CCSD officials plan to explain these vacancies to the parents of students on the tightly-held waiting lists?
To those able to take action on behalf of those in District 20, a few suggestions from supporters:
- Ask the Superintendent's office to supply a complete list by grade of what constituent districts are represented in each class or grade level at Buist. It has this data, we know, because it was provided in 2004.
- Find out how many current Buist students show a legally verifiable primary residence in District 20. Ask that McGinley "certify in writing." She is the one ultimately held accountable.
- If the figures are remotely believable, then it will become obvious to what extent District 20 children have been cheated. A statistician from the College of Charleston could verify the probabilities.
- The current Buist kindergarten should show at least 35% District 20 residents (25% from the District 20 list plus at least 10% from names announced at the lottery from the three remaining lists). That would be a breakdown of 10 plus 4, for a total of 14.
- If the number of verifiable District 20 children in this year's kindergarten is significantly less than 14 out of a class total of 40, the parents of District 20 children have been cheated (with administrative approval) once again.
- As for Buist grades one through eight, CCSD would have a hard time justifying to the public an enrollment that shows less than 10 verifiable District 20 children in each of grades one through three and at least 12 or 13 verifiable from District 20 in each of grades four through eight.
- Hillery Douglas has already let slip that last year's numbers at Buist show less than 20% of Buist's students come from District 20. Coincidentally, the Buist student body now contains less than 22% African-Americans. . . even though grades 5 through 8 were admitted before the policy change, using the 40/60 quotas for minority/white.
- If Hillery Douglas's figures are correct, as a conservative estimate, more than 60 living, breathing, verifiable District 20 children and their families are currently being kept out of Buist with the approval of the Superintendent's office.
- District 20 children wait for openings in every grade. The Chronicle might like to run a story on the 15 vacancies as a public service announcement.
- In the unlikely chance that any one of the four Buist lists (such as the one for District 20) is vacant, the public has a right to know. The principal at Buist has no right to withhold this information nor use it as proprietary information to recruit the favored. If she has done so, her actions should become the subject of a professional ethics complaint.
- If McGinley is serious about resolving the Buist admissions issue as it relates to District 20, she should immediately declare that all 15 vacancies be filled and filled first with qualified District 20 applicants. Anything less than filling current vacancies with qualified District 20 children (at least until each grade reaches 25% of its enrollment with real District 20 residents) capitulates to past mismanagement. It also can be interpreted as an admission that her administration has become a party to fraud.
Without an explanation for these Buist vacancies, Ballard is just stalling with McGinley's support. And maybe the Office of Civil Rights needs to revisit its opinion of the desegregation of downtown Charleston, a purpose for which Buist was invented.
Posts
12 comments:
Not only should the OCR be contacted regarding this information, the US Justice Dept. should be contacted as well.
You sum it up so well, we should just forward them your posting. Thank you for continuing to be a voice for the students of District 20 schools.
I'd like to believe McGinley IS serious about rectifying the problems at Buist. I also know McGinley is fully aware of Dist. 20 students who would like to receive an education at Buist and fill those current vacancies. Unfortunately, McGinley may also realize taking a stand in favor of our Dist. 20 students may cost her her job.
Where is this information coming from? Where did you get this information? If there are vacanies, then they need to be fill. Those slots should be open to all students not just district 20.
Is Buist countywide? Like academic magnet?
What did Sallie Ballard teach and where? I heard she used to be at First Baptist.
What is she doing with her time besides raising funds for the Buist Foundation? How hard could it be to go down a list, call the parents and check the scores to see if the kid has the grades? Do they keep all of those Buist slots open for the children of well connected people should they suddenly choose to attend?
It appears to be a favor to other principals to keep high-scoring students at those schools so that overall testing scores will look better.
What gives Sallie Ballard the right to decide which student is invited and which student gets to stay in a certain school as a "favor" to that principal? Who determines which high performing student "needs" to be kept on a low performing school's rolls? Who's watching this? To answer Anonymous 9:02 PM, I know of parents with kids on the county list for grades 6, 7 & 8 who've never been called. They say Buist is county-wide but like Academic Magnet, but who's seen the written policy for any of this? Like someone said, they must make it up as they go along.
Not filling those spots means even SMALLER class sizes for the lucky ones at Buist. Someone should do an audit and find out how many black students at Buist actually live downtown. I bet you won't find more than 3-including the child of Toya Green. This goes on at Buist while Fraser, Charleston Progressive, Sanders Clyde, Memminger, Mitchell, and James Simmons are all black. This is really fishy. It looks like black downtown kids are being shut out of Buist. Why Mrs. Ballard?
I can verify where this information comes from. It can be found on CCSD's official 10-day attendance report which shows what schools have how many students after the 1st ten days. That’s why they made such a big deal about knocking on doors for truants. Obviously they were looking for Buist truants. This is also not a first of the year fluke because Buist showed a similar number of vacancies in the official 135-day report for the second semester last year which can be found on the SC Dept. of Educ. web site. That’s the figure that the state uses to measure how much CCSD will get from the state for the following year, so that’s a really important number.
The 10-day report is really to determine how many teachers and administrators are assigned at each school…which may explain the real reason Ms. Gadsden was moved from Burke to Brentwood and Mr. Cannon was moved from one assistant principal’s position at Burke to another. The enrollment at Burke is down, not surprisingly. CCSD is still staffing its schools on student numbers, not student needs…that is, except for Buist which has no such restrictions. See how all this dirty stuff is tied together.
Another question that should be asked is if Buist can have 15 vacant seats, why then must St. Andrews Math & Science be over booked? Keep in mind that the last Superintendent (prior to McGinley) & the County Board Chairman (Nancy Cook) also decided they would "place" certain D20 students in that school, bypassing the St. Andrews lottery and waiting list completely. (Who knows how many got bumped at that school?) These “administrative transfers” to St. Andrews were done in order to stop certain parents from appealing further…mostly because their children had been turned away from Buist because of address cheats or testing inconsistencies.
There’s a smoking gun for almost everything CCSD has done wrong. You just have to look hard enough, compare notes with others and see where the puzzle pieces fit together. It’s not a pretty picture.
I think you meant "Obviously they WEREN'T looking for Buist truants."
Those in power at CCSD want to rewrite history and will tell you that Buist's founding had nothing to do with the segregated schools downtown. They also forget that Buist was a school that had only black students for many decades. Phillip Simmons in fact went to Buist. When was the last time a black child that lives anywhere near Mr. Simmons (a couple of miles from Buist)was admitted? The school likes to boast of the Phillip Simmons work in front of the building-so ironic.
Mr. Simmons lives a over a mile from Buist. You're right, no child in his neighborhood can attend Buist, because they are not recruited and because CCSD cripples their ability to compete by limiting the opportunities of inner city kids from the outset. To listen to Sallie Ballard you'd think Philip Simmons was the only person who ever attended Buist before 1986 when it became Buist Academy. That's why they had this big event in 2006 to mark the 20th Anniversary of the founding of Buist...complete with Mayor Riley and others headlining the event...but they never once mentioned the previous 65 years of the "other" Buist that existed from the 1920's to the 1980's. Based on how some at Buist Academy would have us view its history you'd think that magnet school was firmly rooted in George Orwell's 1984 instead.
So if Buist was a failing school like 90% of the District 20 no one would want to go there. Most of the kids of black teachers get into Buist but hate the fact that there aren't as many black teachers as white teachers. I believe the District will do exactly what they have successfully done for the past 30 years. Proving that publci education is doomed to failure because the public is so intimately involved.
Post a Comment