Read Between the Lines on CCSD's Rivers Building

Friday's P & C contained yet another CCSD apologetic from its award-winning education reporter, Diette Courrege. As usual, the reporter parrots CCSD's absurd decisions and assertions regarding the old Rivers High School with nary a second opinion from the community. [See Rivers Middle School Sits Vacant.] You would think that Rivers dropped from the sky in 2005 in order to become "racially divisive and political."

Here's a bit of reading between the lines:

"The Rivers building and its use has been a racially divisive and political issue since the district closed the school"--only because the administration at 75 Calhoun and the CCSD Board of Trustees have made it so.

"and moved its students to the Burke High campus in the fall of 2005."-- a move desired by no one in the community except the bigwigs in CCSD. And just look at how those transfers have benefitted former Rivers students--not.

"The community fought for months about what should fill the space"--that would be years, actually. The reporter can't subtract properly. CCSD had no use for the building, but it didn't want a public charter school to use it either. During the almost two-year hiatus CCSD's official vandals wrecked the inside of what had been a usable building [see previous damning pictures on this blog].

"and the board agreed in the fall of 2007 to allow the charter school to share space with a new, yet-to-be-created school, Lowcountry Tech High"--practically over their dead bodies, actually. Of course, no progress has been made on this chimera, nor is there likely to be any in the first half of this century.

"Later that fall, the board received an engineering report that showed the building would collapse in a serious earthquake."--A ha ha ha ha ha. Excuse me, I was just caught by a paroxysm of laughter. The timing of this doomsday report was purely coincidental, of course.

"District leaders decided that no one should occupy the building until its seismic problems are addressed."--I want to see the seismic report on 75 Calhoun. I'll bet it too would collapse in a serious earthquake. When are the offices moving into trailers?

And so we have more red herrings thrown before the taxpayers of Charleston County. The Charter School for Math and Science would have been perfectly willing to accept the building at 2005 condition. Problem is, the Board plans that CSMS will occupy that building on a cold day in hell.

It's all about power, not academics.