Stopped Clock Right Again: Wando High School

Brian Hicks is right about a second high school for Mt. Pleasant. How did we get to such a stage that even Hicks can see what needs to be done?

Poor planning, plain and simple. Within a year of its opening, Wando High School was adding trailers for additional classrooms. Imagine: millions of dollars spent on a high school that was immediately too small. You would think the lunatics have been running the asylum. Well, in a sense, they have.

Superintendent McGinley (and Goodloe-Johnson before her) persuaded her lackeys on the Charleston County School Board of Trustees that Mt. Pleasant should have only one high school. Never mind that the school would be twice (and now three and one-half times) the size of the optimal climate for students. Never mind that the monster school would create monster traffic jams. The fiat came down. In fact, McGinley is planning to add to the traffic with another 600-student installation at the same location.

The result is the largest high school in the state (not something to brag about, by the way) that has twenty-five trailers, practically another school in itself, coping with the overflow. Of course, no one could have predicted the growth of Mt. Pleasant, or, to put it another way, no one could have predicted that the sun rose today.

Swails says, "You build the schools where the kids are."

Actually, McGinley has never considered that. She builds hubs so that thousands of students can be bused out of their neighborhoods to larger schools. Old Wando High School has been there all along, used by CCSD as "swing" space. Heaven forbid they should use it as a high school. Why, it might divide the town!