Not that again!
Problem is, 75 Calhoun has been dawdling over this verification since prior to Goodloe-Johnson's leaving in 2007. Mark Brandenburg's "February 2007" memo is "cover" meant to answer the documented cheating being perpetrated at that point. And the address-verification scam now being pulled by the district doesn't even address the sham lottery results. Further, is anyone asking if there are vacancies in the upper grades for 2008-09? Can Ballard avoid repeating those shameful 15 vacancies that were discovered last year?
Rather than bore all of us by rehashing old battles, I'm going to repost two blogs from 2007:
That was a year ago, folks.Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Oops, We Forgot! CCSD Address Verification Scandal
Address verification "fell between the tracks" during the transition from Goodloe-Johnson to McGinley, did it? Weren't we told one of the benefits of hiring McGinley was a seamless transition? Guess the seams leaked a little. An article on such printed in the P & C revealed that "District officials said they investigated the allegations [of false addresses used in the Buist lottery process] and didn't find any problems."
That means the district considered the following list of discrepancies for eight students in the 2006-07 kindergarten class provided to it by District 20 proponents in 2006:
- Used 83 Hester Street to enter the school. The house has been for sale and is now under contract.
- Used 22B Mary Street to enter the school, but parents claim 4% (primary residence for tax purposes) on Sullivan’s Island. Family never lived on Mary Street.
- Used 40 Bee Street #205 to enter the school, but parents claim 4% for a home on Johns Island. They own and rent out the Bee Street condo.
- Used 28A Addlestone Avenue to enter the school, but parents claim 4% on Folly Beach. The family never lived at this address.
- Used 33 Calhoun St Unit 236 to enter the school, but parents claim 4% in Mt Pleasant. Parents own this condo but do not claim at as a primary residence.
- Used 70A Church Street to enter the school, but lives with mother in Mt Pleasant. Father lives out of state.
- Used condo at 32 Vendue Range #300 to enter the school, but parents claim 4% residency on James Island.
- Lives in South Windermere according to records.
According to Courrege, "The address inconsistencies were never explained publicly." Or privately either, it seems.
These 8 (out of 40 members of the entering class) will be allowed to continue in the sham process instituted by CCSD and promulgated by Buist Principal Sallie Ballard. This list doesn't even include further class members who claim to be eligible on the failing schools list but whose addresses prove they are not!
Funny how when the seams leak, one verifiable item of major concern to residents of District 20 gets dropped, even though administrators in at least two other constituent districts have stated that additional verification would not be burdensome. These complaints, reported on the national TV news last year, were essentially brushed off by Goodloe-Johnson. Can we assume that McGinley will ignore new ones for the Class of 2007-08? Does anyone believe that all addresses used for THAT class will be kosher?
McGinley states the oh-so-very-complicated verification process will be phased in with magnet schools including Buist. She said it. Let's hold her to it.The cloud of suspicion that hangs over Buist needs to be cleared up NOW; otherwise, McGinley's "street cred" will evaporate.
And on the sham lottery process:
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Gambling by the Numbers: Magic Tuition Money
Let's have an education lottery using the methodology now used by CCSD for Buist applicants.
So, those players who pay careful attention to all gambling opportunies would sign up to buy lottery tickets. Exactly one month later CCSD would notify the winners that they had won.
Oh, I forgot.
The ticket holders would not pick their own numbers. No, CCSD would assign secret numbers. In fact, only CCSD would know the names associated with each ticket number.
But that's okay, because CCSD would save holders the trouble of checking their tickets to see if they had won.
Then CCSD could announce through the media that the winners selected by the computer had been notified and were being paid (that's $6000 to $15000 per year for the following nine years).
Of course, due to privacy issues the winners' names would not be made public. A few well-known names might leak out or be subject to rumor, but no one would ever question if the process were fair.
ANY MORE QUESTIONS?
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12 comments:
This is worth repeating. The P&C post is fleeting. This one sticks around.
Too many people are trying to confuse the issue by saying this is about lowering academic standards when no one is suggesting anything of the sort. The critics have clearly stated this is about fraud at the administrative level.
The P&C reporter says downtown residents have provided evidence that applicants on a regular basis have lied and misrepresented where they live in order to gain an advantage in the lottery "...but officials said they checked the allegations and found no problems. Further explanations never were produced."
The truth is that Sallie Ballard said "they checked the allegations and found no problems." She lied.
Maria Goodloe-Johnson said "they checked the allegations and found no problems." She lied.
Nancy McGinley said "they checked the allegations and found no problems." She lied.
Gregg Meyers said "they checked the allegations and found no problems." He lied.
Toya Green said she would look into it after she was elected and get back with us. She was given a complete file on the Buist cheaters with supporting evidence. Every newly elected member of the Board was given the same file in November 2006. Now Toya Green won't return phone calls to her constituents. She lied.
I'm with Hillery Douglas on this. The same rules that apply to St. Andrews M&S, and all the other magnets with waiting lists, should apply to Buist. The bottom line is we were promised that at least 20% of the seats at Buist would be reserved for legitimate residents of District 20 provided they meet the academic qualifications. All actions by school's principal and the superintendent that keep these seats from being filled by qualified District 20 applicants are unacceptable. Any failure to actively seek and recruit qualified District 20 students to fill vacancies at Buist will only confirm the suspicions that the admissions process at Buist was always designed to keep District 20 students out of the school, particularly students of color, even if they were academically qualified.
That's the raw truth. If it's not racism, it's at the very least the continuance of imbalanced, inequitable, reactionary and racially motivated policies. The written record of how and why Buist was formed in 1985 supports this conclusion. The superintendent is saying she needs "guidance from the board". No one said this wasn't political. She's thrown this hot potato right in their lap just before an election, too. Are we going to fix this issue finally or are we going to just dance around it for a fifth year?
And if they go through the motions, does it mean anything if they don't make it retroactive and remove the officials responsible for creating this problem in the first place? Anything less may well be seen as just election year posturing. Mr. Brandenburg’s woeful attempt to provide false cover to those who are being exposed is just that, a fig leaf.
The real key is the school board itself. If it acts at all, it looks like it's going to rest on one swing vote. Well, Ms. Green?
HUMMMMMM Maybe someone will file a complaint with the office of Civil Rights at the US Department of Education.... Oh wait someone DID!!!! This is what makes changes in the system. This is why MT P is now accepting No Child Left Behind transfers don't you think?
Keep filing people...Change will come it just takes time.
CCSD looked the other way when it came to false downtown addresses at Buist for 21 years for only one reason. If 25% of kids came from downtown the school would have been "too black" and they feared it would be full of 25% of students that qualify for free and reduced lunch.
The OCR should do an audit of who is at Buist and who goes to the other schools downtown. They would quickly discover that Buist has nearly no black downtown students. Students from the peninsula at the other downtown schools tend to be kids that qualify for free and reduced lunch. This is by design.
CCSD justified this years ago because it wanted to attract white families to Buist by making sure the school population did not look very different than their Mt Pleasant schools. Now Buist officials fear that if downtown residents get their way the school will change into what suburban parents have always been nervous about.
Give Dr. McGinley a break. She inherited a system that was full of corruption. I'm sure she is sickened by the school board and how they are all about self interest when it comes to Buist. She knows the history of Buist and who currently has children and nieces and nephews at the school. She is aware of board members and even former superintendents that helped get the children of political cronies and local "celebrities" into the school.
Dr. McGinley can't start a CCSD revolution overnight. Buist has been a very valuable commodity for board members and higher ups at CCSD. She knows that reform won't happen overnight. She has good intentions but she does not have the political clout to do anything about Buist unless she is shamed into it by the Post and Courier, Nightline or the Justice Department.
The laws of unintended consequences apply here. By not accepting qualified downtown applicants (i.e. rigging the admissions process to this end) CCSD has accelerated the flight of motivated and parent driven students from downtown public schools. Read this as both white and black applicants. This process has been geographically biased for exactly the reason the previous poster has said. The perception is that District 20 applicants will always be black. Fear and ignorance, especially among those who run CCSD, is turning out to be very dangerous and expensive. The Buist admissions mess is a good example.
The fact is, when you count its true legal residents, District 20 is about as racially and economically balanced as it gets in Charleston County. With over 5,000 school aged children living there it is slightly less than 55% black and slightly more than 45% white. It still has a core group of middle class families, black and white, but for how much longer when public schools are no longer an option for them. This may help explain why downtown schools only have 2,100 actual residents of District 20 enrolled in them.
Could it be that CCSD is the real cause of this flight from public education downtown? The unfair and biased manner in which CCSD has conducted the Buist admissions process is a symptom of a much bigger problem within CCSD, a problem that is now on the Board's agenda and one that has been on the Superintendent's desk for a long time.
BTW, do you think CCSD's absolute mismanagement of its downtown schools and the resulting failure of public education within District 20 have had a negative impact on City Hall's stated objectives of preserving livability and affordability for full time residents on the peninsula? You bet it has.
Don't get your hopes up people. With powerful Citadel attorney Mark Brandenburg leading the fight against peninsula children having priority at Buist your cause doesn't stand a chance.
In the interest of educating all of us, it would be helpful if writers, when speaking about "the school board," would name the specific school board members about whom you are speaking. We want to know who to vote for... and against.
How many black downtown students applied? I'm new here but there sure is a lot of gripe about Toya Green's daughter getting in.....yet she's black and lives downtown. Which is it?
She's the "right black." You missed the point.
To the poster above: Toya Green and David Engleman are the only current board members running in November. Cook and Douglas aren't running for reelection.
Vote for David. He's honest and cares how our money is spent.
Pick up the phone and call him. He'll talk to you. 795-8095.
Then try to get in touch with Toya and let me know how that works for you. Ask her about downtown schools (if you care) or any other schools for that matter, if you can get her to talk to you.
Call me crazy, but I think public servants should be accessible to the public.
Here's the real irony about keeping the number of real downtown residents down at Buist. CCSD records and documents associated with setting Buist up as a magnets school in the 1980's all point to the fear that many held on the county board then. If Buist were open to District 20, much more if it was given priority, the school would immediately become overwhelmingly minority and low income. I'm not supporting that viewpoint; I'm just stating it as it appears in the record. It would appear that fear still exists. You need only consider the arguments presented by Brandenburg, Meyers, Ballard and others who try to side step the issue by talking about "lowering standards" as if they were talking about academic standards or minimum scholastic admissions requirements. They are really afraid of letting in the downtown students as they have stereotyped them. This has little to do with academic standards and much more to do with appearances...yes, color.
This has been the underlying energy behind holding the status quo at Buist and especially the controls over its highly irregular and secretive admissions process. The District 20 Black community recognized this as a smoke screen and gave up on Buist a long time ago. The irony is that very few Blacks from downtown bother to apply. Why should they? It's a stacked deck. Only when this same roadblock began to become obvious to White downtowners did the current reaction become organized. Then the mother of all fears for any bureaucracy took hold. Downtown Whites and Blacks who were being discriminated against began to share information about the public schools as they knew them...and it was not just about the Buist scam.
Actually, if you could check the data, overall applications to attend Buist for real downtown residents is down. The real irony is that if every qualified applicant was accepted, I mean truly verified District 20 residents, the make up of Buist would be only slightly more inclusive of both minority students and downtown residents. The 25% mark isn't as scary as Brandenburg and Company would have us believe.
What matters now is who will control Buist and who will be able to retain control over who gets in. It all started with fear of what color those in control were. Now it's just about old fashioned power. It's never really been about education, improving schools or giving talented kids a fair chance at getting ahead. Shame on those still in control. The means they've used to get where they are have sullied much more than just the lofty goals they claim for the school.
No one should give McGInley a break. She can start a revolution she chooses not to. She chooses to keep the status quo.
There is just one more county school board meeting before Buist admits its returning students. Considering this day of reckoning has been put off for years, there may be a lot of students sent packing if the rules are finally enforced. I hope at least 2 school officials are sent packing, too, especially the ones who told so many parents they could break the rules. You can apply the names of Janet Beal and Sallie Ballard to the officials in question. Stay tuned.
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