What can community members do to improve North Charleston High School? Apparently, local politicians and religious leaders decided that holding a meeting of parents would help. See Sunday's P & C for Forum Draws Few Parents.
That was the first mistake. It may have been compounded by confusion about the meeting place (old North Charleston City Hall versus new North Charleston City Hall), but I doubt it. Those who showed up at the wrong place could have easily driven to the correct one.
No, parents who care have been worn out by the Charleston County School District's version of community meetings. Those are the ones where Superintendent McGinley speaks, answers no questions from the floor, and breaks up attendees into groups to share their "concerns" with CCSD-appointed leaders who report their findings, they trust, to McGinley once the meeting is over. Attempts by parents to take over CCSD meetings about restructuring of schools earlier this year are symptomatic of the cynicism born of such tactics.
Never mind that the meeting wasn't sponsored by CCSD. According to the article, "State Rep. Wendell Gilliard, D-Charleston, said the forum was a way that he and fellow organizer state Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, decided to try to help parents concerned about what is going on at the school where 26 students were arrested in one day." In fact, the majority in attendance were invited by the organizers, including "Three school district officials [. . .]to provide an outline of their work in North Charleston schools." They had no names that the reporter could provide.
Parents with children at NCHS know perfectly well that one more meeting with politicians and school district officials will not change the system. No, parents at NCHS aren't perfect; parents aren't perfect anywhere else either.
If the instigators of the Sep. 2 brawl are classified as special education students, as suggested by readers, not much can be done to them.
It's the system, stupid, not the parents.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
It is unfortunate to have to read the comments following this article in the Post and Courier on-line edition. Most don't get it at all which may explain how CCSD has gotten away with their gross misdirection for so long. It's not the parents fault when this parent has clearly complained that her child is receiving grades that reflect an educational skill level her son hasn't achieved. She gets it. Her son appears to have gotten it. MUSC has measured it. The only people who don't seem to want to discuss this are the people in charge of a system that is continuing to scam the rest of us.
These are not dumb kids. They have been prejudged by a system that isn't of a mind to not accept responsibility for the failure of an entire bureaucracy that is growing fat as our kids fail.
Unless the lead content in our children is a lot higher than we know, there is no logical reason for so many students being registered as functionally illiterate in high school. The public educational system isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing and the people running it are criminally incompetent.
Find out the parent attendance rate at parent conferences, open houses and IEP meetings at NCHS. Find out how many students work full time to support their families at great risk to academic success.
Parenting is lacking. The community is spending time organizing toward no goal with great fanfare. The district seems unable to commit to any credible program for NCHS.
Maybe a charter school would fix it?
Yeah, right.
I would agree with the first post. North Charleston High School students are so very deserving of an education. They want the same things most students do: A safe and secure school; Consistent and fair discipline; High expectations coupled with a belief that they will be suppported when they strive, and encouraged when they fall; Teachers who are committed to the belief that any student can learn; etc. These kids, many of them, are up (literally) until the wee hours of the morning working in fast food, not because this is what they want to do. It is what they must do. And then they somehow manage to drag themselves out of bed the next morning and come to school. North Charleston kids are among the very best kids in Charleston County...because they continue to believe that, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, they can succeed.
The trouble is CCSD administrators don't believe North Charleston kids can succeed. That's why social promotion currently rule among the county school district's academic policies. Nothing is more demeaning than for CCSD officials to sell a child short without even trying to challenge them. Why else would so many of our high school students have reading problems? CCSD didn't bother to place much value in early childhood education and basic reading programs in the elementary schools when both the issues and the solutions were presented to Dr. McGinley in her capasity as CAO five years ago. As Mike Tolley, Nancy McGinley and Maria Goodloe all said at the time, their goals for these kids were just to keep them in school. They treated them as loosers before they reached first grade just because it was presumed they would fail. They couldn't have been more bigoted toward kids they didn't bother to know.
I've watched CCSD administrators do this on a regular basis and it began long before McGinley arrived, but she's happily reading from the same old play book. It's part of a bad attitude the county school board has tolerated at least if not openly endorsed. As for the bigots who would sell students short before they actually fail, some of the worst offenders are mid to upper level African-American administrators working directly under McGinley or her appointees. What an irony. Their victims are most often African-American students and their parents.
No need for parents to expect McGinley or others from her office to listen or consider parent concerns. She's not given serious consideration to any one of them yet.
Why are children and parents who show disrespect toward teachers, and rules for safe and secure behavior, victims?
Post a Comment