Councilman Gilliard Stokes Mean-Spirited Rumors About Burke's Closing

Wendell Gilliard has the floor, or at least the op-ed page, Saturday to respond to ideas proposed by the District 20 (downtown) constituent board. Most of his ideas mimic the usual platitudes emanating from Superintendent McGinley. However, one vitriolic section reads as though NAACP President Dot Scott thought it up. 

"My constituents are saying that there is a faction in the community that wants Burke closed so that it can be reopened as an exclusive academic magnet school for a select few. This group has already suggested the name of “Academic Magnet-South.” Group meetings are being held with handpicked special interest groups that want to close the school, change the school’s name and re-open anew. 

"The general community feels that the school is being neglected — that so-called advocates appear to be involved, but that movement on any real plans is running at a snail’s pace. This actually would allow for a further drop in enrollment and therefore the school’s closing.

"Such actions are unfair and cater to those who wish to exclude children who have every right to be at Burke.

Conspiracy theories, anyone? Gilliard uses the classic "straw man" strategy: set up a false premise and then demolish it.

• "so-called advocates" are unnamed because Gilliard didn't want to publicize Arthur Lawrence's support;
• "exclusive magnet school" and "select few" suggest that any change is meant to exclude the present students;
• "handpicked special interest groups" translates as community members not selected by Superintendent McGinley
• "change the school's name" slops over into the "red herring" category, since no one has suggested doing that.

The "snail's pace" Gilliard complains about can be laid squarely at the doorstep of the very administration he claims is doing so well for the school as it is.

Nowhere does Gilliard state what he really wants: an all-black high school. 

Well-Meant Meeting on NCHS Goes Awry

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.

Swimming Great but Reading Better for Graduates

His heart is in the right place, but his solution isn't. That's the proper response to State Representative Wendell Gilliard's proposal that all public school students must learn to swim in order to graduate from high school. See Gilliard: Require Swim Lessons to Graduate. The lessons would be free, naturally. However, Gilliard has not proposed a way for school districts to pay for them.

Here is a perfect example of why students graduate from high school without learning to read well enough to fill out a job application. What should be the role of the public school in our society? If the schools have too many responsibilities to fulfill, none of them will be accomplished properly.

My heart aches for those who have lost loved ones, especially children, to drowning. Somehow, the community should provide for those unable to afford swimming lessons. After all, water is all around us.

Just don't put another straw on the camel's back.

Update: Even the editors of the P & C agree: Swimming Beyond Schools' Reach in Saturday's edition.

It All Begins to Make Sense: Segregated Schools

"Burke in takeover cross hairs: State verges on taking control from district," by Diette Courrege, The Post and Courier, July 13, 2006 AND

"Equality: A difficult lesson," by Steve Reeves, The Post and Courier, January 10, 2005

As a teacher I should have learned long ago never to take anything for granted. Silly me, I thought that, while I was living elsewhere in the late 1960s, the Charleston County School District had been desegregated! And, in fact, in January of 2005, the Newsless Courier ran an article about the 50th anniversity of Brown v. Board of Education "that outlawed segregation in public schools" and mentioned City Councilman Wendell Gilliard's transferring in 1969 from formerly "all-black Burke" to "all-white Rivers High."

Was Gilliard being facetious when he said, "Even today, you go into public schools and look around, you see that we still have a long way to go"? Yes, Mr. Gilliard, we've gone backwards. In 1969 Rivers still had some white students.

Since they were sitting in all-black classrooms, what went through the minds of students at Burke High School and Rivers Middle School on that January 2005 day when, exactly at the time the ruling was handed down, "the landmark court decision was read aloud by local schoolchildren"?

Part of the article mentioned interviews with those who "never got the opportunity to attend a desegregated school." Do you think the reporter saw the irony of his words? Probably not.

Today's article on Burke continues the dismal record of the CCSD and probably did not surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Courrege writes,

The trigger for Burke . . . was that the school failed to act on improvement recommendations from an External Review Team.

Teams visited 56 schools statewide, including nine locally, that rated unsatisfactory within the past two years. The team assessing Burke found that the same problems cited in December 2005 still were ignored in May of [2006]. It was the only school where that happened [italics mine].

Goodloe-Johnson, the CCSD Superintendent, points out that the school has had six principals in the last seven years, and she posits that the NEW and seventh principal will fix its problems. No one envies him his job.

Marvin Stewart, of the District 20 constituent school board (yes, the same one who made all the fuss about Buist) "attributed the school's failure to years of neglect from the county school board and previous superintendents as well as inadequate resources and a lack of parent involvement." Yes, and I'll bet the neglect dates to when Burke became a majority black school. Goodloe-Johnson calls it "high-minority," the understatement of the article! As far as I could determine, Burke has had no more than 1 or 2 white students in the ENTIRE school per year in the last five years. Same goes for Rivers. These ARE segregated schools.

As the earlier article states, equality IS a difficult lesson. Goodloe-Johnson is confident all can be "fixed" when she meets with the State Board in August. She may be correct, since Tennenbaum is the lame duck State Supertendent (she who thinks that Wisconsin requires only 13 credits for a high school diploma).

You would think that a black superintendent would take the problems faced by Burke and Rivers more seriously. On second thought, I guess not when she's a liberal bureaucrat.

Maybe being the first individual school in South Carolina to be declared in "a state of emergency" is just what IS needed.

That's assuming that in November a Republican wins as State Superintendent, of course.