Editors' Campaign to Rehire CCSD's McGinley Falters on Moffly's Facts

Saturday's op-ed by outgoing Charleston County School Board member Elizabeth Moffly sums up the former superintendent's disdain for what communities want:

Building program at heart of district-board dispute
BY ELIZABETH MOFFLY
Nov 15 2014 12:01 am
I want to share with my community lessons learned as your representative over the past four years serving as a Charleston County School Board trustee. This position allowed me a greater perspective to understand how decisions were made.

The elected school board employs the superintendent. The superintendent is accountable to the board and responsible for day-to-day decisions and upholding policy.

One would think that the board's and the district's primary focus would be student achievement, instructional quality and graduation rates. With the passage of the one-cent sales tax referendum in 2010, however, we functioned more like a "Board of Construction" rather than a "Board of Education," overseeing a $500 million building program.

This action is where the problems began. Whole communities were divided and thousands of students displaced.

The first divide started when the district told the Sullivan's Island community, with only 268 students in its attendance zone, that it had to accept a 500-student school or nothing.

All the while the district was building smaller schools on the peninsula. James Simons Elementary had 110 students, but the district built a 400-student school. Memminger Elementary had only 70 students from its attendance zone, but its new building was designed for 400 as well.

The island remains divided on the issue.

While Sullivan's Island was getting more than it needed, we knew North Mount Pleasant was bursting at the seams with over 2,200 students in its K-5 elementary schools. I thought the $27 million should be spent to address a more pressing issue of overcrowding. Sullivan's Island Elementary enrollment was secured in the old Whitesides campus, with plenty of room for enrollment expansion. A front-beach school, elevated 10 feet on stilts and the size of the Yorktown, just didn't seem like a smart decision when real overcrowding in north Mount Pleasant was being ignored.

Then there was the second East Cooper high school debacle. Wando had grown past capacity with over 3,600 students in a building designed for only 3,100 students. The town and the citizens had expected another stand-alone high school since 2005. The district hired a consultant and held a community engagement where three district options were presented and voted on by the community.

Option A, a middle college aka center for advanced studies (a longtime vision of the superintendent), received 25 percent. Option B, a ninth grade academy, received 24 percent. Option C, a second East Cooper high school, received 49 percent, the highest score.

The district decided this community would get the center for advanced studies, overriding the community's will. Wando is now the largest (and only) high school in the state's fourth largest city.

The most recent fiasco, Lowcountry Tech (LCT), has created more community division. The district hired a consultant in 2007 to a hold a community engagement at Burke High School. Approximately 300 citizens from downtown participated.

There were five options. The overall majority voted for the new Charleston Charter School for Math and Science (CCSMS) to occupy the entire Rivers facility.

Incidentally, in 2010 with the first sales tax referendum, voters countywide approved LCT (now called Lowcountry Tech Academy) to be constructed on the Burke High School campus. The superintendent then wrote a column for The Post and Courier in 2012 telling the public the community voted for her vision in 2007, with LTA and CCSMS sharing the Rivers campus.

The board has since directed the district to allow Charleston Math and Science to have complete occupancy of the Rivers campus so 260 children can move out of existing trailers. Lowcountry Tech would be expanded and moved to Burke where there is plenty of room. That campus was built for 1,700 students, yet it now has fewer than 400.

The district has continued to push back on this decision leaving perpetual discontent in the community. District 20's board is in complete support of the county board's decision. The administration needs to complete the directive and not subvert it.

The public recently questioned the board's integrity for holding an 11th-hour special called board vote last August to add Lincoln to the 2014 referendum. That was necessary to honor the board's original commitment to this rural community.

The board voted 5-2 on Feb. 24, 2014, to identify funding for a new Lincoln facility. The district failed to include this school on the referendum despite the board's directive.

The board was exposed to public humiliation for seemingly having acted rashly on Lincoln's behalf. Other communities were told that if the board included this project, the referendum would fail and their special projects would be lost. That was completely unfounded and disregarded the county board's explicit promise to this community.

At the superintendent's request, the district simply closed several failing schools. This policy allowed her to claim to have reduced the number of low-performing schools.

Students have been shuffled, but the achievement gap for low-performing students has grown. By closing or renaming failing schools, the district fostered an illusion that failing schools were fixed.

In reality, that posture only reset the scorecard with a clean, new start, a free pass for three years. These schools and children have not made appropriate progress.

These are just a few of the issues that the Charleston County School Board dealt with over the last four years.

I know there have been lingering questions, but I hope I have answered a few of them here.

Elizabeth Moffly is a former member of the Charleston County School Board.

Lincoln High: See the USA in Your High School Day!

Superintendent McGinley of the Charleston County School District has a vision for Lincoln High School, quite a vision indeed! Apart from moving middle grades around without first consulting its very supportive community, she has plans to gut the courses offered at the school to include "core subjects" only.

But wait! It gets better. Lincoln High students will get to ride practically the length of Charleston County each morning and afternoon to Wando High School to take the rest of their required courses for a diploma. Golly, what fun! Perhaps someone could estimate the time involved: will these students need to rise at 4 or 5 a.m.? Will they return before 6 p.m.? Does McGinley even care?

Of course she does, or as she puts it, "Let me entertain you." These "special" coach buses will be equipped with Wi Fi. That means those with laptops can play games the whole way! Or sleep. Brilliant.

It seems that she envisions quite a marvelous future for Lincoln: several years of this cavalcade and Lincoln will disappear. That is the goal.

CCSD's Underutilized Schools: Why?

While Sunday's editorial in the P & C [see School Pride, Tough Choices] seeks to be the voice of reason in an emotional climate, the writer glosses over both the qualities of and reasons for the proposed closings of schools such as St. Johns and Lincoln High Schools as well as elementary schools both downtown and on the islands.

Not one of these schools is in an area of declining population. In fact, the opposite is true. Logic tells us that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

Can we cut to the chase? Hundreds of students in these attendance areas have been allowed to transfer to schools in other constituent districts, most recently under NCLB, but most for years under various cooked-up personal reasons. These are the mostly apartheid schools, resegregated through artifice with the full cooperation of the School Board. These facts explain why CCSD refuses to provide numbers to the public on students attending schools other than in their attendance area.

Faced with sanctions under NCLB for years of failing [read "loss of federal funds"], Superintendent Nancy McGinley and the Charleston County School Board coterie urge these closures. After all, how would NCLB sanctions look on McGinley's record when she interviews for her next position?

This analysis holds no water for Lincoln High School, which is not failing. McGinley must be really annoyed at how bad this small, community-supported school makes her ideas of mega-high-schools look. Could it be that smaller high schools can be more successful?

And what about the closings of Charlestown Academy in North Charleston and Charleston Progressive Academy downtown? Close down the schools that are succeeding so that scores will rise at other schools?

Under cover of a bad recession McGinley and Gregg Meyers mean to remake CCSD in their own image. That means mega-schools instead of neighborhood ones. That means using earthquake scares to tear down every building not built by Bill Lewis.

When they get through with the Charleston County School District, it will have no history or traditions, this in an area settled in 1670.

Stand Up for McClellanville! Democracy at Work

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage at the dying of the light.

Maybe Dylan Thomas wrote about dying in this villanelle, yet it gladdens the heart to see that residents of McClellanville have chosen not to file meekly away into classrooms to fill out yet one more form to be ignored by CCSD. Instead on Wednesday night they attempted to create the actual public discourse that CCSD, and Superintendent McGinley in particular, dread and avoid at all costs in public meetings, school board meetings, and the like. [See School Officials Get an Earful in Thursday's P & C.]

"People wondered aloud when they would be able to talk in an open forum about the proposals that would close their schools. They walked up to the front of the room and asked to be heard, and [the paid facilitator] Robertson relinquished the microphone.

"Some questioned how they could give feedback now when they still didn't know the results of a previous community forum on the criteria that would be used to rank schools for closure."

Open forum! Imagine that.

What did McGinley learn at the Broad Institute? Apparently not that small communities take pride in their schools and see them as centering their communities. It certainly had not occurred to her that the black community in McClellanville first gave up its black schools for integration and is now being asked to give them up again--this time to melt into the woodwork at Wando and Cario. Trade a close-knit community for a number in a warehouse. Maybe 150 is too small for complete high school offerings, but 3300 is about three times too large!

The most closely-guarded secrets of 75 Calhoun include the number of high school students who live in the McClellanville district (District 1) and attend public high school elsewhere in CCSD. Even more top secret would be the racial mix of students that CCSD's School Board has allowed to transfer out of the district for "convenience." It stinks.

Despite the rantings in the P & C article's comments section, Lincoln High School is not a failing school; in fact, this year it earned a Good rating overall and in improvement. Does anyone seriously believe these students will be better off if they go to Wando?

On the other hand, land in McClellanville has rapidly risen in value in the last few years. Why, only a couple of blocks away from this school are million-dollar homes for sale. Why not tear down the school and build more of them? Maybe McClellanville can attract some more millionaires from New York. That seems to be the CCSD mindset.

Let's be practical. If it's all about saving money, Option 3 should be Option 1, the only option. It is the only one that makes any sense from every point of view. Middle schools, such as McClellanville and Cario too, are sinkholes of academics, regardless of the best efforts of all concerned.

A high school with Grades 7 through 12 is not unreasonable; such structures exist everywhere, in most cases to the benefit of students. More advanced eighth graders are able to take their "high school" credits such as Algebra 1 in high school. Doesn't that make sense? And why not put sixth graders in elementary school?

This option leaves McClellanville Middle School vacant. Selling it would be short-sighted. That would assume that Charleston County is not expanding in its direction. Look at its picture above. This should be torn down? And then in a few years, probably before today's middle-schoolers have graduated from high school, Bill Lewis or his replacement will come to the taxpayers with a proposal to build another multi-million-dollar school.

Still left unaddressed is the overcrowding at Wando and Cario. Golly gee, what about redrawing district lines? Given the number of students who cross them every day, at this point they exist for purposes of segregation only.

I wonder how much money has been spent renovating these schools in McClellanville over the last decade. Plenty, I'll bet. Got to keep those cronies busy.