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.

CCSD School Board Steps In It

Remember all those promises you made? It turns out some people want to hold the Charleston County School District to its promises. What a thought!

As a result, after foisting a 500-student building on a barrier island (Sullivans Island Elementary) because no school building could be built smaller, at a hurried last-minute meeting the school board voted to build a new school for fewer than 200 students in McClellanville. 

You can't make this stuff up.

A Letter to the Editor sums up this nightmare best:

Costly call

The 11th-hour decision by certain members of the Charleston County School Board to vote for a new $35 million Lincoln High School for, at best count, 170 kids, is an unmitigated folly of epic portions. 

Using fourth-grade math with second-grade logic should make it clear to anyone that this is a total misappropriation of public funds. 

When questioning the failures of the South Carolina education system, we should start with the failures of our local elected leaders. 

Joseph Wren
Carolina Isle
Mount Pleasant

Let's hear from our school board candidates on this decision! 

CCSD to Sullivans Island

"Damn the lawsuits! Full speed ahead!" quipped Superintendent Nancy McGinley as the Charleston County School District broke ground Monday on its controversial hulking version of the Sullivans Island Elementary School.

CCSD Manipulating Lines In Mt. Pleasant

Watch out, Mt. Pleasant parents. The Charleston County School District's administration at 75 Calhoun continues to fudge the numbers.

Word has it that the numbers provided by the more expensive Ohio firm for new attendance lines vastly differ from those provided by the Council of Governments (COG). Remember that the Board of Trustees voted to spend $20,000 to use the local COG report while district officials without Board approval signed a contract for $90,000 with Cropper (and for a $160,000 extension).

Can you smell "kickback"? These officials agreed without Board approval to a single bid contract that might as well have been a no bid contract. Your tax dollars at work.

More importantly, the two reports show different numbers, one of the reasons that the district postponed a decision on attendance lines.

But wait. There's more.

The COG report shows as many as 100 out-of-county (that's county, not district) students attending Wando, Sullivans Island, Academic Magnet, and School of the Arts.

No wonder the Superintendent wishes to use the out-of-state report.

J. Sanford's Plan for SIES

Jenny Sanford (and her fellow signers of her P&C letter) does make a few good points about the acrimony surrounding the building of the new Sullivan's Island Elementary.

• "For elected leaders of a community roughly the size of a high school to be engaged in serious legal battles on two important issues surely something is amiss."
• "The school [at Stith Park] would be west of Middle Street in the center of town, keeping related traffic in the business district and out of the more residential areas."
• "Because of the better flood zoning for Stith Park, the school would not have to be as elevated, thereby saving significant taxpayer monies and alleviating residential concerns on scale and aesthetics." Not to mention what might not happen when the next major hurricane hits.
• "We would ask our elected officials specifically and friends on all sides of this debate, including the Charleston County School Board, to please thoroughly consider this alternative with an open mind before moving forward."

Poor Jenny. There she goes, being naive again. The CCSD Board isn't going to consider anything that goes against the superintendent "with an open mind."

Lawsuits it is.

Kusmider on Small Schools Points to Buist Academy

Funny how the Charleston County School Board of Trustees can't see its own irony and hypocrisy as shown in the following letter from Ted Kusmider, a District 20 parent, that appeared in last week's P&C:

      "Charleston County School District says they can’t rebuild an elementary school at Sullivan’s Island with a capacity of less than 500 students.
      "Funny. CCSD is rebuilding Buist Academy, serving kindergarten through eighth grade, in my backyard with a maximum capacity of 410 students.
      "To date, it is still not filled to capacity, despite hundreds on the waiting list. Yet there’s still no plan for expansion. When are the parents of Charleston County going to unite and say “enough of this nonsense”?

Maybe a few more lawsuits will focus its attention.

CCSD's Sullivan's Question Not Going Quietly

How big should the new Sullivan's Island elementary school be?

The Charleston County School Board of Trustees (slavishly following the lead of Superintendent Nancy McGinley) has ordained that the school as it exists is too small to be viable; therefore, CCSD plans to bus in hundreds of students from the Isle of Palms and Mount Pleasant to create the standard 500-student elementary school that it finds so desirable.

The Sullivan's Town Council was snookered into going along with this plan before really considering the wishes of residents of the island; hence, unrest among the natives, threats (and realities) of lawsuits, and bad tempers all around.

Never mind the undeniable fact that spending millions on a school on a barrier island subject to the vagaries of hurricanes remains a quixotic idea.  CCSD and the Sullivan's Town Council have a tiger by the tail.

It's hard to drum up sympathy for them in their war on neighborhood schools.

Inmates Running Amuck in CCSD Again

What ever happened to common sense? Cowardice.

Cowardice on the part of Charleston County School Superintendent Nancy McGinley and the Town Council of Sullivans Island.

You see, the one-size-fits-all elementary school of 500 students adopted by a previous CCSD Board of Trustees enables Superintendent McGinley to avoid making decisions about size on the basis of common sense. She merely points to the Board's decision (which she initiated, by the way). Even the scintilla of common sense that might justify the policy, saving money by using the same architectural plans for each school, is nonexistent.

What will Sullivans Island become when its most salient landmark is an large, elevated elementary school?

How can a school district defend a $24.6 million building on a barrier island subject to hurricanes? Can anyone say "Hugo"? Don't you wonder what the yearly insurance will cost the district?

Then, there's the fact that only 85 students actually live on Sullivans Island. Let's think. Which is more cost effective: to bus 85 students to Mount Pleasant twice daily or to bus 415 students to Sullivans Island twice a day? Duh.

That said, why not please the folks on Sullivans and simply repair the building now being used. Why? Because McGinley can't take the heat of other parts of the county complaining that their smaller schools were closed because, McGinley claimed, they weren't large enough to be cost effective. Of course, we know other criteria entered into McGinley's school redesign as well--her statistics as superintendent.

In addition, not to put too fine a point on it, the Town Council of Sullivans Island needs to be voted out of office for agreeing to lease the land to CCSD before using its collective brains. Now, because it is too cowardly to call the citizens' petition too-little-too-late, the Council has chosen to pass the hot potato to a judge

As I said previously, the inmates are running amuck in the asylum that is CCSD. Where are the grown-ups?

Sullivans residents: Can you say "charter"?

Hicks's Column Shills for CCSD's McGinley

What ever happened to independent criticial thinking among newspaper columnists? It still can occasionally be found on the op-ed pages of the P&C, but certainly is missing from columnist Brian Hicks's ruminations on the discontent about the proposed new elementary school among residents of Sullivans Island.

Friday's entire column reads as though emailed by Superintendent Nancy McGinley's minions at 75 Calhoun. Hicks seems to swallow even the canard that Sullivans Island taxpayers shirked their duties when the new school was first proposed. Clearly he hasn't attended one of these dog-and-pony shows where McGinley allows the public to breathe minor objections (rarely answered) after all major decisions have been made.

Wrong-headed and stupid. That's Hicks, not the residents of Sullivans Island, who object to McGinley's one-size-fits-all approach to Charleston County schools. This same non-discriminating approach gets us to the child expelled for bringing a butter knife in his lunch. But maybe Hicks believes that's appropriate.

Sullivans to CCSD: We're Not Happy

Imagine! Those pesky residents of Sullivans Island don't want to go in lockstep with Superintendent McGinley and the Charleston County School District Board of Trustees. It seems that its former mayor and more than 200 petition-signing residents think that one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter schools don't fit the island.

Never mind that CCSD plans to build a 500-student school on a barrier island prone to hurricanes, or that the island is served by a swing bridge that will interrupt the busses traveling daily bringing more than half of the student body onto the island.  The major complaint is that the school will be out of scale for island life and change the character of its surroundings.

Funny. That's exactly what Superintendent McGinley has planned for all of Charleston County, and, thanks to her toady majority on the Board of Trustees, she's well on her way to accomplishing it.

The petition drive for a referendum of island residents is well meant but too late. Better to focus on the next school board election and getting the sycophants off the Board. Better yet to contact your legislative delegation this week and tell them that they should appoint someone to fill Mary Ann Taylor's vacant seat who will not be a rubber stamp.

That's what caused this problem in the first place.

FOIA Reveals McGinley's Duplicity--Too Late

While the five Charleston County School Board Trustees celebrate their narrow victory extending the superintendent's tenure, the natives continue to be restless, especially on Sullivan's Island.

After a five-and-a-half month delay (gee, we wonder why) smaller-school proponents on Sullivan's Island got a look at the "supposed '1000 Signatures'" held up for show and tell by Superintendent McGinley at a recent school board meeting.

Are you ready? Can you guess what's about to come?

Of the "just Sullivans Island signatures" (McGinley's words) only 372, a bit more than one third actually had Sullivans Island addresses, some of those addresses being island restaurants.

Checked against current voter registration lists for SI, the number dropped to 265. Of those, 71 later signed the petition for a town referendum for a smaller school.

That leaves potentially only 194 signatures in favor of McGinley and Lewis's plan--and 277 registered voters have signed the petition for a referendum.

No wonder the district sat on the FOIA request for so long. It needed to get past the superintendent's evaluation before releasing it. Nuff said.

Wrong Referendum on Sullivan's

Those who want a smaller elementary school built on Sullivan's Island have the sympathy of many others who have been steam-rollered by Charleston County Schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley and her hand-chosen Board of bootlickers.

We have no difficulty understanding why a referendum has been organized to put the community on record as supporting the smaller outcome.

Problem is, the Sullivan's Island town council has signed off on the larger school, having been bamboozled by McGinley and Bill Lewis. Furthermore, the hoodwinked voters in the last election validated the McGinley-Lewis plans for a larger school (and no second high school in Mt. Pleasant) despite community opposition.

You see, you've been had. Even if the parents and staff of Sullivan's Island Elementary decide at this point to take the school the charter route, you're going to end up with the monster building.

What to do? Can you remember this debacle long enough to vote out the town council members who approved the plan? Will your memories stretch long enough to throw out the CCSD Board of Trustees members who jump as high as McGinley and Lewis ask?

History says you won't, and McGinley and Lewis are counting on your faulty memories.

Prove them wrong.