P & C Ignores Inequities of EdFirstSC Salary Expose

Teachers get less money under the new salary system; educrats get more. P & C, cheerleader for "Bring McGinley Back," chooses to ignore reality that CCSD did not follow recommendations of its expensive salary study.

See the following:

Losing Ground

CCSD School Board Cowed into Raiding "Rainy Day" Fund

What is a "rainy day"? Well, really, it's an emergency fund, so why not call it that?

Because the emergency in the case of the Charleston County School District came about through a consultant's study of administrative salaries that the CCSD Board of Trustees approved on Superintendent Nancy McGinley's recommendation.

The emergency? the bloated bureaucracy at the Taj Mahal needs to be paid more.

McGinley and Chief Financial Officer Michael Bobby have cloaked this raid on the emergency fund by allowing the ordinary step increase in teacher pay! Imagine that! What an innovation!

Still, 75 percent of the pay increases will accrue to administrative staff in the Taj.

You can't make this stuff up. In fact, the $7.4 million taken from the emergency fund (It's an emergency! These bureacrats might leave!) doesn't fully cover the $8.5 million for denizens of the Taj. And these are ongoing salary increases that only partially meet the recommendations of the consultant's study for salary increases.

Instead, dollars for low-income middle schools get the ax.

To complete the farce that purports to be a responsible school budget, the Board, again at McGinley's recommendation, voted to forgo taxes from two TIF districts, no doubt in order to please Mayor Riley. Certainly it is not in the best interest of CCSD to forgo tax dollars when it must raid emergency funds for ongoing salaries.

You can see where this is headed. Time for an outside audit.

Stop CCSD Administrators' Bloated Pay Packages

The Charleston County School District remains topheavy with too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Neverless, Superintendent McGinley is determined to increase pay for administrators at a higher rate than that for those teachers who are on the front line everyday.

Who doesn't believe that those from "off" would take a lower salary just to live in the Lowcountry? Talk to medical students at MUSC and see the truth of that statement. The same undoubtedly holds true for incoming educrats. However, McGinley (and her school board of lackeys) commissioned a study several years back to justify having CCSD's administrative salaries equal to those of less desirable cities. 

Now, the chickens come home to roost: over $11.6 million in rising costs in the district is tied to employee pay raises, but only a quarter of that rise is due to increasing teachers' pay; nearly 75 percent ($8.5 million) is "partial implementation of a new salary study that will boost pay for some employees [i.e., not teachers!] based on market pay for similar positions." The district will dip into the "rainy day fund" so that taxes need not be raised.

Nice work if you are a friend of McGinley's--live in the Lowcountry and get paid as though you live in Podunk.

CCSD Values Form over Substance with June Make-up Day

Just when you thought the Charleston County School District couldn't get any sillier, it proves you an optimist!

This school year, students used up all extra school days built in for bad weather, not for hurricanes or tropical storms but for ice. Then ice forced CCSD into further closure. In order to compensate for those instructional days, the Board of Trustees, acting upon the superintendent's recommendation, changed June 6, which had originally been a "teacher workday," to a make-up day.  The action seems sensible until you realize what it means.

On June 6, CCSD will run its full bus contingent, feed students, and cool all its buildings for a fraction of enrolled students. How can I predict rampant absenteeism so far in advance?

By June 6, CCSD will have held its graduation ceremonies. Testing will be completed. Textbooks will be packed away.

So, what will the expense of running the schools on that day accomplish?

Babysitting.

Common Core Testing: Edublob at the Trough

Proponents of the Common Core standards initiated by the states and adopted by most of them are fond of stating that the federal government isn't imposing its standards on anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The education "establishment," or edublob, is practically salivating at the funds and promises coming out of Washington. Entire school districts and entire states (except Texas!) are trashing their own standards and textbooks in jockeying for position at the OPM trough.The Charleston County School District is a case in point. South Carolina's adoption of Common Core under the aegis of Democrat State Superintendent Jim Rex allowed the district to receive funds to finance its ill-advised teacher evaluation metrics. The edublob gets a big chunk of the money to devise ways in which student results can be calibrated to factors such as poverty (i.e., expecting the children of the poor to learn less!).

The latest sally in controlling content to issue from the U.S. Department of Education is grants to two edublob entities, Smarter Balanced (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/) and PARCC (http://www.parcconline.org/), to use OPM to develop testing appropriate to the Common Core standards. Out go the tests developed over the years that match previous standards.

Do you realize how many millions, if not billions, of OPM are now being thrown into the trash?

Look at the opportunities for earnings: new curriculum and teacher-training sessions for that curriculum; printing all those documents; developing evaluation standards for teachers and students; selling all those new textbooks. . . . Everybody gets his.

You would suppose that at some point they would exhaust their reservoir of OPM, but that will never happen. After all, all they need is to raise taxes.

Common Core: What Were Sanford and Republicans Thinking?

How did we get into this mess?

In Friday's op-ed, Dillon Jones, policy analyst at the South Carolina Policy Council, a conservative think-tank in Columbia, makes the same points regarding Common Core that I enumerated in previous posts. His most salient point, and mine, is that federal money arrives with strings attached--and right now one of those strings is adoption of the Common Core. He correctly points out that the Charleston County School District has received Race-to-the-Top millions with that string attached.

Jones points out that in 1998 in the waning days of Governor Beasley's term, the state legislature handed policy-making power to the Education Oversight Committee and the State Board of Education. In South Carolina, education bureaucrats represent the last bastion of the Democrat Party, repository of liberalism and centralization of power. Until Mick Zais's election in 2010, the Democrats had a hammer-lock on the SC Superintendent of Education's job, so why did that ill-advised power transfer occur?

No qualms would have vibrated from Education Superintendent Jim Rex. However, then-Governor Mark Sanford had to sign off on these standards before the bureaucrats could adopt them. Of course, they did.

As it stands, South Carolina school districts are rushing willy-nilly ahead with implementation.

School Bureaucrats Compile Meaningless Statistics, Again

The State of South Carolina is touting that its Class of  2012 broke the record in "scholarship" money awarded by a total rising above $ 1 billion.

If you want to know why the statistic is meaningless, read the article carefully or go back to some of my previous postings. This craziness goes on every fall.

How much time and effort that could be directed productively is wasted on such drivel?

Thinking Outside the Box on Stall and Greg Mathis

Sadly, both Stall High School and Greg Mathis Charter are on the list of Palmetto Priority Schools, those South Carolina schools that are failing so badly that the state has taken a special interest in them. The Charleston County School District now has nine out of the 35 schools on the list. Is that the most of any school district in the state? Probably.

The administration and boards of trustees of CCSD have brought us to this sorry place over many decades of problems. No one has any reason to believe that somehow Charleston County lacks the resources that other districts have to be successful. Perhaps we go to the top of the list in our excellent facilities, but we go to the bottom in academics.

The upcoming school board election is another chance to fix the problem by electing trustees that actually know how the district works and can hold administration accountable.

Principals at Stall and Greg Mathis have their hands full, but tweaking the lessons taught by teachers, as one suggests, is not the answer. Greg Mathis is a charter school; therefore, why should its charter be renewed if it is failing? Stall has a beautiful new state-of-the-art building. Now, if Superintendent McGinley allows its administrators and teachers to use experience and common sense to address its problems, perhaps they will arrive at solutions that state "experts" couldn't possibly imagine. One might be to throw out edublob thinking.

McGinley-Meyers Candidates for CCSD Seat

Pay attention.

The P&C has not only put forward the obvious candidates--Seabrook, Moody, Miller, Copeland--for the recently-vacated seat on the Charleston County School Board. It has leaked the plans of the McGinley-Meyers nexus.

The long arm of former Board member Gregg Meyers has reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out the name of William L. "Sam" Hiott, who the reporter mentions formerly served on the District 23 constituent board.

And now the rest of the story.

Meyers recruited Hiott to run against Sandi Engelman in the 2006 school board elections. After all, Hiott thought Engelman was "too divisive."

We all know those code words.

He had difficulty finding enough signatures for his petition to be valid, so the Taj Mahal found some more for him. Despite Meyers's plans, Ruth Jordan won that election.

No doubt Hiott has the common touch, since he made over $18 million dollars in 2009 in his last year as executive vice president of the Bank of South Carolina. He won't need to worry about this "salary" business. Now that he's semi-retired, he can mingle with the hoi polloi.

At least he's from the Low Country's "front porch."

Such cannot be said for McGinley's choice, Rew A. "Skip" Godow, whose Facebook page sports a 25-year-old picture, reveals no family, and states his interest in women.

The College of Charleston and Trident Technical Center employ this native of Chicago (well, Oak Brook, its tony suburb) in various administrative capacities. Who better to take McGinley's side than another member of the edublob? His Ph.D. in the Psychology of Philosophy (or is it the Philosophy of Psychology?) should come in handy on the Board.

Godow has served and continues to serve on multiple boards of directors--the Chamber of Commerce, the United Way, the Charleston Education Network, the Education Foundation, and even the Community Advisory Committee to CCSD.

You get the picture. Just the type of bureaucrat McGinley wants--can be counted on to show up for meetings and not ask too many questions.

Let's see if the Charleston legislative delegation has any common sense.

CCSD Board Member Training Expenses

Regarding the yearly training expenses for the Charleston County School Board [See District Critic Is Board's Top Travel Spender]:

• Kudos to those who are so wealthy that they need not be reimbursed;

• If the reporter had taken the trouble to provide a table showing each of the Board members' total expenses for the past three years, the public would have a clearer picture.
  

• In that case, the article would have displeased the Superintendent, who wishes to discredit her most vocal critic.
  

In fact, since the district didn't provide them, that would have meant that the reporter needed to find the reports for the previous two years by herself.

How hard could that be?

Wouldn't you like to see the training expenses for all of our associate superintendents year by year?

Coup for Charter School for Math and Science

It's great news for supporters of CCSD's Charter School for Math and Science and public charter schools everywhere!

David Cowell, who was driven to North Carolina by the edublob's representatives at 75 Calhoun, has agreed to return to Charleston County to head CSMS. He is quoted as saying, "[Its offer] represented an opportunity to come back and work in Charleston but not have to work in the box that I call the Charleston County School District. [The district] became a very, very cumbersome bureaucracy." [See Colwell to Lead Math, Science School in Tuesday's P & C.]

Described as "the most recent principal who had success in leading North Charleston High School," Colwell is too much a gentleman to point out the obvious to the reporter: he was never one of the favored ones at 75 Calhoun. After his years as a teacher and athletic director at North Charleston High School, he had to fight tooth and nail to get the principal's position there before disagreements with Superintendent McGinley sent him over the line to North Carolina, his home state.

Colwell provides a perfect example of an effective leader whom the bureaucracy just couldn't let alone: "under Colwell's leadership, the school became orderly. The number of students arrested and suspended dropped and test scores improved." And we all know what happened after he left, what the reporter euphemistically calls "continually changing leadership."

Meanwhile, new principal Middleton, scrambling to keep abreast of the myriad changes to NCHS's staff and curriculum, must now cope with additional problems of the high school's using a middle-school building for half of the next school year [See Brentwood to House School Part of Year]. Let's hope she's not being set up for failure.

Way to go with facilities' planning, Lewis!

CCSD Budget Opaque as Usual

Transparency refers to an environment in which the objectives of policy, its legal, institutional, and economic framework, policy decisions and their rationale, data and information related to monetary and financial policies, and the terms of agencies’ accountability, are provided to the public in a comprehensible, accessible, and timely manner.

That's the definition posted on line by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). As you can see, by this measure the Charleston County Schools Superintendent, her policy-making and budget, and the CCSD School Board share an obvious lack of transparency in virtually every way!

Of course, the opacity of CCSD's budget process and result is hardly new, as anyone attempting to follow the process has already discovered. Despite promises to the contrary, including promises from new board members, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."[the more things change, the more they stay the same.]

The budget about to be unveiled to the public does not include the school level breakout requested (and promised!) for many years. Neither School Board members nor others can see to compare utility costs, administrative positions and transportation costs between comparable schools. There is also no coherent representation of these figures from previous years for each school.

Now we have a line item identified as "parochial, private and charter school" distribution. No doubt the new Catholic Bishop will be puzzling over that one, not to speak of the headmaster at Porter-Gaud! CCSD's charter schools are public schools; they are not parochial or private. If charter schools are so different from "regular" public schools, let's be consistent and use a similar breakout for magnet schools in Charleston County.

To add insult to injury, apparently Superintendent McGinley will ask the board to support creating an additional senior administrative position with this budget. Yes, you read that correctly. Another $100,000-per-year in salary and benefits for an educrat. In light of all the cuts to the classrooms countywide, is it wise to be adding administrative staff?

Finally, the combined millage being requested for the General Operating Fund and Capital Fund is the largest figure ever proposed in the history of CCSD. Further, as CCSD nears the end of its five-year capital fund cycle, its actual budget's exceeding $600 million represents a nearly 20 percent cost overrun from the original budget of $508 million.

Fed up yet? Call your School Board members to complain.

Bureaucratic Idiocy of the Day

We wouldn't want to wear out the snow plows!

When it snows at beach, use a plow

Saturday, November 8, 2008

MYRTLE BEACH — It doesn't snow much in Myrtle Beach and the federal government has warned the local airport not to use its snow plows until it does.

The Federal Aviation Administration recently warned the Myrtle Beach International Airport that a dump truck, two pickups, snow plows and other equipment the agency provided two years ago must be used for clearing snow.

The Sun News of Myrtle Beach reports the airport had told the FAA it was using the vehicles for other jobs, such as general maintenance.

But the FAA told the airport that snow removal equipment must only be used for snow removal. But the FAA did say that a sweeper, included in the other equipment, could be used to clear airport grounds.