No Laughing Matter to Some in CCSD

If a CEO of a private company handled her duties as poorly as Superintendent Nancy McGinley has over the seismic upgrades to schools in the Charleston County School District, she would be fired so fast it would make her head swim. Wednesday's P&C has a Letter to the Editor that lays out the dimensions of her mistakes. The letter is posted below for those of you who don't subscribe.

County school trustees face tough financial decisions to make students safer from earthquakes. They're in the hot seat, and they deserve competent support from the CCSD staff to help them make the right decisions. The staff has failed them miserably.

The superintendent should have given them FEMA's "Incremental Seismic Rehabilitation of School Buildings" report, which provides a reliable guide for prioritizing seismic safety funding decisions. It recommends starting with a seismic screening of all buildings in the system, followed by engineering assessments of those found to be most vulnerable. The staff skipped the seismic screening step altogether and squandered public funds on engineering assessments of schools they picked arbitrarily.

Bill Lewis, head of capital projects and an engineer with seismic hazards experience, should have told them about SCDOT's seismic hazards management program designed to ensure the seismic engineering safety of roads and bridges. It's based on the Virginia Tech database of seismic hazards, the most complete and advanced seismic data available for the state. If given this data, the trustees would know which schools are actually the most vulnerable to earthquakes.

Now Mr. Lewis and Dr. McGinley have convinced the trustees to commit to fund the evacuation of four downtown schools this year with no credible justification. Mr. Lewis claims the downtown schools are built on landfill, but any competent geologist can confirm they are built on the spine of the peninsula. He discounts the importance of location as a hazard factor, but the FEMA report states, "Geographic location is the most significant factor of seismic hazard."

The Virginia Tech data show that several un-reinforced masonry schools in North Charleston and Hollywood are much closer to Ground Zero, making them more hazardous than any others in the system. Mr. Lewis and Dr. McGinley aren't telling the trustees any of that.

The school board's responsibility is to reject any funding proposal that would result in gross inequities. Failure to do so can expose a school district to expensive and counterproductive legal liabilities. The board also has a responsibility to insist that public funds be spent according to a prudent plan, not tossed around arbitrarily.

It's time to step back and adopt an intelligent approach to this critical issue. What's needed is a comprehensive, system-wide planning process that first identifies the most hazardous schools and then allocates scarce public funds accordingly.

To help the trustees perform their public duty to ensure the safety of students, the CCSD staff owes them nothing less than immediate access to the best and most relevant information available.

Edwin Gardner

President

Harleston Village

Neighborhood Association

Gadsden Street

Charleston