CCSD's Delay, Linger, & Wait Policy Works

I should let Sunday's P & C article [Change Sought to Policy] speak for itself (with some added italics):

"Charleston County schools are supposed to verify the address of every student this year, but district leaders plan to ask the school board to change that requirement. The school board passed a policy in January of last year aimed at preventing parents from lying about their addresses to attend specific schools. District leaders failed to make plans to implement the policy until late last summer, so they decided to phase it in with five magnet schools."
[snip]

"The address verification policy was the board's response to downtown parents questioning addresses of certain students enrolled in Buist Academy, the only excellent-rated magnet school on the peninsula. Downtown residents accused some of the school's parents of lying about their addresses to better their children's chances of acceptance into the school."

Actually, downtown residents PROVED that some parents were lying about their addresses, but CCSD chose to ignore the facts!

"Buist Academy was one of the five schools required to do the address checks this past school year, and it was the only school that verified students' addresses in a different manner. The other four magnet schools checked students' addresses against the manner in which they came into the school." [Gee, how did that discrepancy creep in?]
[snip]
"McGinley said she would go back to the board July 21 to talk about the conflicting manner in which schools are verifying addresses to get feedback on what the board wanted to see happen."These questions are unique to Buist, and we have to investigate them," she said." [It doesn't take any imagination to guess what Gregg Meyers and his ilk want. She's hoping he has rounded up the votes.]

Too bad that Superintendent McGinley has decided to continue in lockstep with her predecessors. She could have begun a new era of trust in CCSD with a tough verification policy that would have put to rest the deserved reputation of cheaters at Buist. Think of the sham (i.e., unverifiable) lottery and inappropriately used test for entering kindergardeners as well as the address cheats. She's simply serving the interests of the "deserving" rich. Apparently, that's what "Charleston Achieving Excellence" means to her.

Al Parish's 24 Years Not Long Enough

Did you ever hear such nonsense as from those who have bought into Andy Savage's "I didn't really know what I was doing" defense of "economist" Al Parish? It's hard to explain why some folks are still making excuses for him. I've even heard some blame-the-victim comments! Why?

Let me guess.

• Charleston isn't accustomed to business fraud on such a scale;
• Parish's defenders, such as the Metro Chamber of Commerce, can't accept that they were bamboozled;
• Even though Parish was "investing" in $4000 suits and trips to Ireland, they still think he meant to make money for them;
• Parish used his religious connections (church and Baptist College--excuse me, Charleston Southern) to defraud while many others use religious connections to generate business;
• He's a white male who is non-violent;
• Bankrolling his flamboyant lifestyle was worth it for the entertainment value?

Brian Hicks said it rightly in Friday's P & C:

Parish's greatest asset was not his gnome collection but his air of respectability. He worked for a Baptist college, he was the toast of city officials and the chamber of commerce, he was in the newspaper. He fooled everybody in town. But really he was just a lowlife in a purple jacket, a man who would rob not only senior citizens but his own friends and neighbors.

Tom Ravenel Convicts Himself in Interview

Self-serving whining.

That's what greeted Sunday's readers of the P & C as they read its interview with former State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, smartly splashed all over the front page for maximum publicity.

Let Thomas speak for himself:

"Ravenel remains angry that he has to go to prison at all. If the case had been pursued in state court rather than at the federal level, he and his legal team contend he probably would have gotten a slap on the wrist and no incarceration time at all."

"I think what happened to me is that I went through a midlife crisis."

"[He] began running with the drug crowd because they were young."

"Contrary to public opinion, [cocaine]'s not that addictive," he said.

"He knows that he did wrong by using drugs while in elected office but says he deserved a break from federal Judge Joe Anderson."

"A first-time drug user should not go to prison," said Ravenel.

"His habit was mostly recreational, he says, buying sporadically and saving it for party times, although he said the frequency of his use increased."

A first-time user? Is he kidding? Not addictive? Really? Didn't get a break? Wasn't the amount he was charged with holding reduced from 400 to 100 grams?

Believe it or not, this whiner is so arrogant that he plans to run for office again in the future.

UPDATE:
Either The State's reporter asked more pointed questions in Columbia Wednesday than the P & C's, or The State was more interested in printing details (provided by Tom himself) of his usage:

He said the first time he used cocaine was during a trip to the Bahamas when he was 18 and a rising senior at St. Andrews High School.

At The Citadel, Ravenel used “a couple of times.”

Then, “I went 15 years without doing it” until a 1999 vacation in Aruba.

He told investigators he did not use again until a 2002 New Year’s Eve party.

By the spring of 2005, when he was in his downward spiral, Ravenel began hosting and attending parties in his Charleston mansion district where cocaine was common.

“Here, have a little bump,” he said other users would tell him. “Next thing you know, it’s ‘Do you have a bump?’ Then, ‘Let’s go buy a bump.’ That’s how it happened.

Does this mean we have the whole story now?

Riley's Golden Goose, or Running a City with Illegals

How many P & C readers got indigestion over Saturday morning's headline, Company's Goose Cooked After Bird Killing? Plenty, I'll bet. While our state legislators pass an immigration bill at a speed somewhere between dead slow and stop, let's look around.

Once your friendly neighborhood teenager had a nice income in the spring mowing lawns. Now those nicely manicured lawns are worked by illegal aliens employed by temporary services.

Once the City of Charleston employed workers to care for its parks. No longer. Now it employs illegal aliens procured by temp agencies. And they certainly cost less than any legal workers who might, after all, complain about their rights under the law. Sweet, isn't it? That allows Mayor Riley and his friends to state that they had "NO IDEA that gambling was going on in this establishment," to paraphrase Casablanca. Right.

Doesn't it make you wonder what other parts of city government are employing illegals? How about other cities? Other city contractors? Staffing 2000 isn't the only temp agency to use illegals and claim that they're all legal. The agency is only one step up from using slave labor.

Those poor workers probably thought they'd enjoy a nice roast goose. Does it make you angry to think that Charleston has knowingly exploited the evil situation this country now faces? Knowingly because South Carolina has one of the lowest percentages of legal Mexicans (and other Latin Americans) in the country, and Staffing 2000 has provided its so-called legals for nine years? What did they do, round up every poor but legal Mexican in the entire state?

To use the excuse that the City just noticed that Staffing 2000 is not on the list of state-approved contractors is just plain nonsense. We all know what's going on here.

CCSD's Bill Lewis: Pure as Caesar's Wife?

CCSD Superintendent Nancy McGinley began her series of budget meetings lamenting the projected shortfall in funding the district's yearly operating budget, while Bill Lewis, the executive director of its building program, had to explain his rejection of the low bid for the new North Charleston middle school.

Now, you and I know that the building fund and yearly budget for CCSD are separate from each other, but in the public mind it's all going down the same sinkhole. Lewis's action hardly was of assistance to McGinley's quest or fair to the taxpayers. According to the president of the Charleston Contractors' Association, "the way the system is set up . . . gives the appearance that something wrong is happening." Is it?

What did happen here? Well, according to the P & C's story of last Sunday, the low bid from Infinger Construction was never considered, since Lewis decided to "save time and enable the school to open in August 2009." Saving time, not dollars, was his highest priority. This arrogance led to a negotiated bid with the highest-rated company that will cost us $400,000 more.

"Highest-rated company" sounds good until you look into the details. According to the article, "The school board chose to spend the extra money so a company that it rated as higher quality would do the construction work." That WHO rated? Lewis stated that "contractors are evaluated on two criteria: the technical aspects of their plans — such as their approach, their team and prior performance — and their price." Notice the passive voice here--allowing Lewis to avoid saying who assigned the ratings.

One of two things happened here. Either Infinger was blackballed by Dorchester District 2 with no recourse, or a "few district-appointed people" made a subjective decision that the contractor's quality is not as it should be. The school board, in its usual fashion, followed Lewis's lead. Question: Can they show that Infinger's prior work for the district did not meet its standards? No mention of that.

Some of us might remember that the district no longer accepts kickbacks from contractors in the form of donations, parties, etc., such as last year's goodbye party to Goodloe-Johnson. Now I'm getting too cynical.

Speaking of which, what ever happened to the search for a qualified financial officer to replace Don Kennedy? Did I miss something here?

The Statistical Case Against Buist's Lottery

All but the most optimistic residents of District 20 of CCSD and their friends were unhappy but not surprised by Judge Scarborough's ruling concerning the lawsuit against Buist Academy's admissions policies. If he had ruled in their favor, it would be the first sign of a break in the wall. [See County Board Wins Buist Battle in Saturday's edition of the P & C].

However, if 75 Calhoun thinks that residents of District 20 will simply go quietly into the night--well, another case is yet to be made. Of course, the plaintiffs should go ahead with their appeal of this one, but if the courts refuse to interpret the rules to mean what they say, the statistical route remains. It's time to pull it into shape.

Now, before you stop reading, let me say that I'm not going to bore you with statistics here. My point is that many high-profile lawsuits have been won on such data, the most obvious one being against the tobacco companies. The legal reason for that warning on each pack of cigarettes is the statistical correlation between cigarette-smoking and cancer, not scientific or medical evidence (although I'm sure by now some exists).

You can see where I'm heading with this. A statistician should be able to take the addresses of each student of Buist for the last, say, 10 years, and show that it is statistically impossible to arrive at the composition of its student population as it has stood over that decade without finagling and malfeasance on the part of officials "testing" with the YCAT and running the "lottery."

In other words, based on CCSD's use of four lists for kindergarten, a statistical case can be made that the number of Buist students living in District 20 should be within a certain range if CCSD has followed its own rules. Needless to say, CCSD officials, especially Janet Rose, have done everything in their power to avoid handing over the numbers. Thanks to FOIA, they can't hide forever.

Now that Doug Gepford supposedly is culling the waiting lists for Buist, will its "lottery" also be run transparently, or will we again have "trust us, the unknown number beside your child's name didn't come up." [If you want to see how its lottery "works," see my blog of last March, Gambling by the Numbers: Magic Tuition Money.]

Superintendent McGinley's integrity is on the line here.

Education Non-Profits: Profitable for Some!

Politics and money and sex.

Wow! Can you imagine a more volatile mixture? Yet that's exactly what we have with the Heritage Keepers program being used statewide and in Charleston County schools.

It's NOT new. It wasn't just adopted this year. Questions have been raised about the selection of this particular nonprofit for YEARS. Questions have been raised about how the program presents itself and who benefits from its contracts. Questions have been raised about its political protectors.

In fact, every red flag you could think of has been raised in regard to this "non-profit" that receives millions of dollars from the taxpayers of South Carolina and seems to have local political links.

Apparently, the P & C has finally decided that the issue merits newsprint in Tuesday's edition.

[See Character Program Questioned].

Let's see. So the SC House is poised to approve a five-member oversight committee for "abstinence-based programs." Why stop there? What about oversight of the rest of the non-profits in the education blob that are swilling at the public trough?

And CCSD's response to questions about the program? "The school district also has asked the state Department of Education for guidance, said Tamara Kirshstein, the district's science and health curriculum coordinator." Now, we don't know how long Ms. Kirshstein has held that position, but after years of using the program, isn't asking for guidance NOW a bit late?

Pathetic, isn't it? Or it would be if it weren't our tax dollars being wasted.

Buist Lawsuit May Be District 20's Last Gasp

For sure, once CCSD's Board of Trustees starts appointing District 20's constituent board members (and all others, as supported by Sen. Robert Ford's stealth bill), the raison d'etre of all constituent boards will no longer compute.

Let's all remind ourselves why these constituent boards were created. The idea was to bring what were then separate districts into partnership while still protecting the interests of each individual district. Decades later, the results reveal it was a forlorn hope for the downtown district. Instead, its best interests have been ignored, with the proceeds of its considerable assets going to build up other constituent districts, especially in Mt. Pleasant.

So it is with a certain amount of nostalgia that we read of District 20's day in court over the lawsuit concerning CCSD's policies for Buist Academy [Buist to Get Board Answer], noting the irony of Alice Paylor's role in the Buist controversy, obviously a conflict of interest. As District 20's attorney, Larry Kobrovsky, correctly pointed out, "it wasn't fair for former Charleston County School Board Chairwoman Nancy Cook to receive free representation from Paylor on an issue related to her board candidacy and then preside over the Buist Academy principal's appeal of the constituent board's admissions policy decision."

Just out of curiosity, does Buist still have "over 1000 on its waiting list"? I thought Doug Gepford was working on that.

CCSD's Pretend Residency Politics

CCSD labors mightily and brings forth . . . a mouse.

Saturday's P & C reveals the results of its new policy on enforcing attendance zones. [See Board allows 6 outside zone to stay at school].

Whom should we feel sorrier for: Nancy Cook, who voted to enforce the residency policy approved on her watch and was voted down 8 to 1 by the rest of the CCSD board members; or the St. Andrews District 10 constituent board, which naively assumed that enforcing that policy was what it was expected to do? Perhaps its members have now discovered they have more in common with the District 20 constituent board than once they thought!

According to the constituent board's chairman, Russell Johnson, "no one on the constituent board wanted to move children mid-year, but they were trying to uphold the county board's rules."

'I'm not real fond of (the county board) making rules that they don't enforce themselves,' Johnson said. 'What is the point of the residency verification if they are not going to enforce the results?'"[italics mine]

Exactly. So the plan is, drag your feet verifying addresses for the first semester; then allow the miscreants to keep the children where they should not be because they've been in the school for a semester. I'm not talking about hardship cases here, but it's hard to believe that all six exceptions fall into that category. Let the parents explain to Johnny Joe why he has to change schools mid-year. It reminds me of the criminal who murders his parents and then begs for mercy because he's an orphan.

If CCSD is not willing to enforce its attendance zone policy now, there is no reason to believe it will do so in the future. The school board passed this policy to placate those who believe (and still do) that the lists for Buist Academy have been "cooked" and bypassed for favored children of the well-connected. Nothing has changed at Buist with this policy. Community concerns have not been answered. Only St. Andrews was impacted by Goodloe-Johnson's assigning multiple unhappy Buist applicants to the school as a sop. The uproar began when the school became overcrowded and added mobile classrooms as a result.

At Buist, which claims to be the only magnet school to have completed the process of verification, the process was never truly started. No enrollees were checked to see which of the four lists they were supposed to be fulfilling. Does anyone believe that all of them actually live in Charleston County? Why should anyone when downtown addresses have been proved false in the past and NOTHING happened?

Gepford should not allow himself to be used as a figurehead for this ethically-challenged group, not if he has any self-respect.

[By the way, is this the same Doug Gepford who is a supporter of Charleston Collegiate School?]

P & C Discovers the Education Blob!

Only 20 years! That's all it took for the P & C to read the entrails of the "education blob." That sobriquet, coined by then-Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, describes non-profit organizations feeding at the public trough in the name of advancing education.

Saturday's paper finally provides coverage of the finances of Heritage Services, showing how (as I have stated previously in this blog) non-profit does not mean "non-profitable" to those involved. [SeeSex-ed nonprofit banks heavily on public funds ]

There's politics involved? Gasp!

Whether you are against abstinence-based sex education or not is immaterial here. What everyone can agree upon is that public funding of non-profits (and even for-profits) needs to have more oversight and transparency. Those who pay attention to CCSD's administration can easily rattle off the call letters of many--CEN, CEP, NTP, etc.--that remain shrouded in mystery as to effectiveness per dollar spent. Why do I suspect that Heritage is not alone in its important political connections, family business salaries, and lack of accountability to the taxpayers?

Maybe because I didn't fall of the turnip truck yesterday?

Do You Believe in Coincidences? Dicenzo's Demise

As I pointed out in December in CCSD's Musical Chairs with Principals,

maybe it's just a coincidence that the first head to roll in McGinley's plan to shuffle principals once more belongs to the wife of a principal of a charter school.

Anne DiCenzo [fired principal of Mitchell Elementary]'s letter in her own defense that appears in Tuesday's P & C reveals why people simply do not trust what CCSD officials say. The abrupt removal of a principal just before the Christmas holidays suggests that somehow DiCenzo was ineffective. Well, as the letter states, if she was, her evaluations didn't reflect it.

In her own words,

Principal responds

For the past seven and a half years I have been the instructional leader (principal) at Mitchell Elementary School. I have been removed from Mitchell because I was an ineffective instructional leader. As the leader of the school, I am evaluated yearly. All of my ratings have been high.

In the 2006-2007 school year, all below average and unsatisfactory schools had to complete a plan for school growth for the six core strategies of the Plan for Excellence. The ratings are zero to five, with five being the highest. I scored between 4.83 and 5 in all strategies.

I also instituted new programs this year to help students and staff increase achievement. I hired two teacher interventionists to help with small-group instruction at the upper-grade levels. I hired two reading recovery/interventionist teachers for the lower-grade levels, and I hired a prevention specialist to minimize disruptions in the classroom.

Our PACT scores should increase this year, according to our winter MAP scores, which are the district's benchmark test. The MAP scores showed a vast improvement and indicated that the new programs were successful.

PACT scores reflect only a few days out of the school year and are only a snapshot of a part of the school. I am proud to say the teachers and staff at Mitchell are there for the students and go above and beyond every day. We do things for students that are not measured on a test. Mitchell is a family community. I will miss my family very much.

Anne DiCenzo

In other words, what more could she have done? What warnings did she have to improve?

It's politics, folks, CYA that uses principals as pawns. Superintendent McGinley has to look like she's creating progress, so musical principals is the current answer.

We can expect more of the same.

Blog Commenters' Top 20 Quotes of the Year

1. Politicians are stupid, generally speaking, but they make for good conversations.
2. Investigative reporting is obviously not the P&C’s strong suit.
3. [In the Buist lottery] An antiquated bingo ball machine would at least allay fears of malfeasance or manipulation.
4. Give Sallie [Ballard] a break. She recruited and did test prep at 4K programs on James Island and not downtown for a number of good reasons. For one she didn't want to steal from the downtown elementary schools that need numbers for Maria Goodloe-Johnson's points system.
5. In my day these downtown people would have minded their own business and appreciated public servants like Gregg Meyers.
6. It might be appropriate to ask how many [. . . ] real estate deals have determined the direction of our downtown schools?
7. Oh, this has to be a bad movie. Hollywood couldn't write this stuff if they tried.
8. What's the real mission of CCSD under its present leadership? Is it to operate successful public schools for all, or is it to manipulate the half billion dollars a year in public education dollars to benefit other interests, including graft from within?
9. Will someone from the Broad Institute, which trained and recommended G-J for this position, please either take credit for this style of leadership or disavow it altogether.
10. GOD I HOPE THE PEOPLE IN SEATTLE AREN'T READING OUR COMMENTS [about Goodloe-Johnson].
11. No one [in circles of power in 1963] considered that in its death throes, Dist. 20 might actually fight back. Certainly no one ever thought that white and black residents of the peninsula might actually form alliances in a common effort to reestablish quality schools open to all within the inner city.
12. Before McGinley tries to cast herself as doing missionary work in the Deep and Un-Reconstructed South or confronting the ills of abject poverty among minorities relegated to vast urban ghettos, she should first calibrate her aim relative to real conditions . . . .
13. For those of you who aren't familiar with CCSD, some refer to our rural districts as the last ditch before you're dumped.
14. That very bright child at Memminger is too valuable to hand over to Buist. If a school such as Memminger loses 2 or 3 of those high PACT scorers it could mean their school report card drops to failing.
15. When was the last time county school board members and senior school district administrators allowed individual members of the public to ask them direct questions?
16. If Dr. McGinley isn't committed to changing what Dr. Goodloe wouldn't, then she should be gone in a year. This is her one and only chance to demonstrate professional integrity by reaching out to restore trust.
17. I thought the P&C was doing a "feel good" article on the local NAACP organization to be featured in the "Faith and Values" portion of an upcoming Sunday edition. I guess when someone checked the data on the local NAACP chapter led by Dot Scott and her comrade in arms, Joe Darby, they realized the article might have to be placed on the obit pages instead.
18. 75 Calhoun is a cheap, poorly designed and expensive to operate building. It's falling apart. Look closely at the public garage, too. It's cracking. It's all part of a sweetheart deal involving the city, CCSD and the chosen contractors that were paid off with the padded overpriced contracts. We're paying now for a building that is less than 20 years old but is still falling apart.
19. Nothing will change unless they are forced to change through the court system.
20. There should be very little tolerance for failure when people start mucking with the education of children. We’ve allowed CCSD and its questionable experts to do this for nearly 40 years without holding anyone accountable.

Surprise? CCSD Board Violates FOIA

Whatever happened to transparency needed in CCSD to improve public trust? Unfortunately, Superintendent McGinley seems to believe secrecy is her friend.

For example, her "conversations" in the districts this fall turn out to be staged opportunities to answer questions from index cards carefully culled to showcase topics she wishes to address. Her meetings with constituent district boards, except for the one in District 20, have all broken the FOIA. In District 20 the constituent board refused to break it by meeting with her behind closed doors.

Now we learn that she and the school board again broke the FOIA by discussing the restructuring of associate superintendents' responsibilities for one and one-half hours in executive session--claiming they were going over "personnel matters."

Oh, Nancy, Nancy, you have such big plans to improve the district, but you still don't get it. Such incidents combined with your sudden announcement that Memminger and James Simons Schools will be destroyed (yes, that's the correct word) are going to be your downfall. Do you want to improve the district or not?

Whistle-Blower Writes Feds: CCSD Finally Acts

Maybe the P & C wants to make sure that readers always read to the end of their article. or maybe the real news is too embarrassing to put in today's headline, which merely states,


"County schools return $32,000 overcharge: Report on breakfasts served was overstated."

Who was not watching the store? The article throws lots of district-wide numbers at the reader but clearly boils down to this. During the 2006-07 school year at Stall High School until February a former food services director and two other CCSD employees committed fraud by sending in ridiculously higher numbers of breakfasts served in hopes of getting more pay in the following year.

CHARGES HAVE NOT BEEN PRESSED, NOR DO THESE CRIMINALS HAVE NAMES. Their full punishment, according to the article, is no longer being employed by CCSD! Well, after all, they were only planning to steal federal tax dollars.

According to Courrege,"The individuals responsible for oversight, Mark Cobb, the district's executive director of facility services, and Walter Campbell, the district's food services director, said they didn't find out about the discrepancy until May." So, the number jumped remarkably higher but no one in charge noticed or maybe cared. After all, what's the incentive to ask for FEWER dollars?

Claiming "an isolated incident," Cobb happily reports that "The food service budget still broke even, and the miscalculation didn't result in any other consequence to the district." Well, the budget should break even if it's reinbursed for the actual number served!

Of course, the district refuses to discuss why the three employees left, claiming "personnel matters" and, in response to this embarrassing problem, has hired another bureaucrat to do this part of Cobb's and Campbell's jobs.

To our UNSUNG HEROES list we should now add, along with Rudell Burch, wonder-worker former principal at Schroder Middle School, the name of Paul Nowosielski, cafeteria manager at Stall. When ignored by his supervisors after reporting the problem soon after being hired at Stall in February, he hoped patiently for action until the end of the school year and then wrote a "letter to the federal government." Campbell and Cobb can play CYA until the cows come home, but no one writes to the feds unless he's getting the run-around. They probably figured the extra money he would get THIS year, according to the crazy remuneration used by CCSD, would keep him quiet. Nowosielski is the one that points out that the system "gives people an incentive to falsify the numbers." It's also not clear if he kept his job after that.

Who invited him to the party?

Wouldn't you love to see the contents of that letter?

Does he still have a job at Stall or with the District?

Not Just a River in Egypt

He's not an addict and has never been treated for mental or drug abuse problems.

Well, that's a relief! We were so worried about his drug rehab program! His appearances in court and postponed pleas were for a trendy vacation in Arizona? That explains everything--except why Ravenel's lawyer wasn't more careful briefing him about what to say or why the judge didn't call that lawyer on the carpet for lying to get a postponement.

It would be pitiful if it weren't so self-serving.

And, speaking of self-serving, what gives with the lame coverage of this story by the P &C? How often does a state treasurer campaign with cocaine parties? From the response of our local paper, you might almost get the idea that such events are pro forma. In fact, the editors seem to have a serious lack of curiosity regarding the whole sorry mess, much of which obviously happened locally.

I'm not much on conspiracy theories, but in that same vein, how could the judge who let Pasquale Pellicoro out on bail be so stupid as to not take his passport? Such actions are taken routinely, even for those holding U.S. passports.

Those of you expecting the return of this Italian citizen from Switzerland any time in the 21st century--well, my bridge in Brooklyn is still for sale.

County Council & State: What About City Council?

So the editors of the Post and Courier find it appropriate to criticize the state "competitive grants" program, as I have? They side with a lawsuit brought against it by a "citizens reform group," do they? [See today's editorial page.]


How about closer to home, editors? You've now editorialized about the Charleston County Council's handouts and the state's pork. What about funds given to charities and nonprofits that are hidden in the City Council's budget? They don't count?


Don't you wonder what the City-Council equivalents are of our state-tax dollars for "the Hilarity Festival, the Come-See-Me Festival, the Mighty Mo Festival, the Flopeye Fish Festival and Squealing on the Square"?


Let's not be hypocrites.

Council's "Earmarks," or Are They Payoffs?

According to the P & C of August 31, the big winners from the Charleston County Council's slush fund derived from our tax dollars (those receiving $5,000 or more, no strings attached) are:

• Crisis Ministries, $23,000;
• American Red Cross, $15,250;
• Evening of Prayer Ministries (food services), $14,000;
• Pastors, Inc. (anti-drug program), $11,000;
• Lowcountry Senior Center, $9,000;
• Coastal Crisis Chaplaincy, $8,000;
• Kecia E. Miller Foundation (free mammography screening), $7,000;
• Lowcountry Crisis Pregnancy Center, $7,000;
• SC Coalition for Black Voter Participation, $7,000;
• Youth Empowerment Services, $7,000;
• Lowcountry Food Bank, $6,750; YWCA of Greater Charleston, $5,500;
• Center for Women, $5,000;

And those who got a "little something" of $1,000:

• Boys and Girls Clubs of the Trident Area, $1,000;
• Center for Heirs Property Preservation, $1,000;
• Eastside Community Development Corp., $1,000;
• New Horizons, $1,000;
• North Charleston Community Interfaith Shelter, $1,000;
• Palmetto Project, (health care access), $1,000;
• Rein and Shine (equine assisted therapy), $1,000;
• St. James South Santee Senior and Community Center, $1,000;
• Vanderhorst Koinonia Ministries, (Road to Success Job Fair), $1,000

And those "in the middle"?

• Daniel Joseph Jenkins Institute for Children, $4,750;
• Dee Norton Lowcountry Children's Center, $4,000;
• Independent Transportation Network, $4,000;
• Trident Literacy Association, $4,000;
• My Sister's House, $3,750;
• Special Olympics, $3,500;
• Father to Father Project, $3,250;
• Lowcountry AIDS, $3,250;
• Carolina Youth Development Center, $3,000;
• Communities in Schools of the Charleston Area Inc., $3,000;
• Emancipation Proclamation Association Inc. (student scholarships), $3,000;
• Family Recovery Court, $3,000;
• Hospice of Charleston, $3,000;
• Metanoia Community Development Corp., $3,000;
• Project Read, $2,500;
• Bridge of Hope, $2,000;
• Charleston Area Senior Citizen Services, $2,000;
• Charleston County Children's Medical Homes Project, $2,000;
• Charleston Development Academy Charter School, $2,000;
• Clemson Extension Services, $2,000;
• Florence Crittenton Program, $2,000;
• Goodwill Development Center Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival, $2,000;
• Humanities Foundation, $2,000;
• Sustainability Institute (sustainable homes), $2,000;
• Cannon Street YMCA, $2,000.

According to the same article, the state attorney general has said, "As a general rule, outside agencies that get public dollars should serve a substantial segment of the community and the public purpose should involve a governmental function. That rules out projects that benefit a particular group or neighborhood. The attorney general also has cautioned that any contribution to a religious group for social services such as feeding programs must be on a contract basis."

Congratulations to the three Council members who refused to go along with this charade of giving tax dollars to nonprofits in exchange for support--Thurmond, Bostic, and Schweers.

No one questions that some of those on the list are quite deserving. Others are mysterious. Mainly, it's the method of delivery that's disturbing.

Butter Wouldn't Melt in Their Mouths

One by one the CCSD school board proponents of charging high rent to the Charter School for Math and Science, a public school desiring to use a vacant public school building, sweetly assure the audience that they favor charter schools--and then prove it by adding an illegal quota system to the rent issue passed on a 5 to 4 vote.

If you were not at the school board meeting of August 13th but have had the time to view the two programs broadcast of the events, you are probably as annoyed as I am by the sanctimonious and hypocritical statements of members Jordan, Douglas, and Hampton-Green as well as by the Keystone-Kops aspects of the so-called participation and voting by cell phone of Meyers and Cook. These five treat their constituents as if they fell off the turnip truck yesterday!

In his successful campaign State Superintendent Jim Rex made much of what he calls "public school choice," suggesting it as a way to get successful, appealing, competing choices to parents and students without going the school-voucher route that would send public funds into private schools. He and the majority voting on CCSD's board need to take heed. Throwing up too many roadblocks to new charter schools will backfire. If the public gets tired of waiting for those choices, it will decide to support vouchers instead.

Not that the tactics being used are unexpected. Nor were they invented here in Charleston. They're being used in various forms all over the United States to halt, slow down, and cripple the growth of public charter schools. As former New York Daily News reporter Joe Williams writes in a recent issue of Education Next, apart from the more obvious legal barriers to successful charter schools being considered in state legislatures, the "'air war,'"

". . . there is also evidence of a perhaps more damaging 'ground war.' Interviews with more than 400 charter school operators from coast to coast have revealed widespread localized combat—what one administrator called 'bureaucratic sand' that is often hurled in the faces of charter schools. Indeed, as a 2005 editorial in the Washington Post described charter school obstruction in Maryland, 'It’s guerilla turf war, with children caught in the middle. Attempts to establish public charter schools in Maryland have been thwarted at almost every turn by entrenched school boards, teachers unions and principals resistant to any competition.'
The goal appears to be to stop charter schools any way possible."

For the rest of these interesting parallels to CCSD's latest tactics and tales of the turf wars, see http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/4611587.html .

To quote Hamlet on his murdering uncle, "One may smile and smile, and be a villain."

"Bureaucratic sand," indeed.

Say It Ain't So, Joe!

Why would Superintendent McGinley and a representative of the charter high school committee meet in the office of the mayor of Charleston four days before McGinley announced her commitment to charging a high rent on the Rivers building that insisted on an illegal quota system and sharing of the building with a phantom "Lowcountry High Tech" school?

According to a well-placed source,

" Mayor Riley and Dr. McGinley called a meeting in the mayor's office with a representative of the charter school group in order to dictate terms for the occupancy of the Rivers building. The lone charter school representative who was allowed to attend the meeting was essentially ambushed. This meeting was four days before the county school board's vote (last Monday) and several days after Mayor Riley had assured representatives of the NAACP and the Ministerial Alliance that he would 'take care of the matter.' Mayor Riley and Dr. McGinley agreed in advance that they would make the environment so objectionable at Rivers that the Charter School would be unable to attract the numbers that it would need. The rent discussion was just a distraction for what would really KILL the charter school outright which is what both officials appear to want."

The only person with the authority to "call a meeting in the mayor's office" IS the mayor. The last time I looked, Mayor Riley had no legal standing in CCSD. In fact, although once the Charleston city schools functioned under the aegis of the mayor and council, as a result of the Act of Consolidation that is no longer true. Not "legally." That never stopped Joe Riley apparently. It's unlikely that he called this meeting in his role as a board member of the Charleston Education Network.

It's not difficult to understand that, although McGinley gives lip service to the concept of charter schools, she really hates them. After all, public charter schools COMPETE with the other public schools run by the district and its school board. As with James Island Charter High School, the probability exists that sooner or later authorities in charge of the other public schools will look like bad managers (for obvious reasons). What is not so clear is why Mayor Joe Riley wants to kill the downtown charter high school.

What do the NAACP and Ministerial Alliance hold against integrated high schools? Does Joe Riley really believe that his opposition to the charter high school will guarantee the support of African-American voters? Why? How can he even look them in the eye after what has happened to downtown schools on his 32-year watch?

Rivers Building Renovation: Why $24 Million Sinkhole?

Indignation continues to mount over CCSD's bare-knuckled attempt to knock out the new Charter High School for Math and Science by charging unreasonable rent to a public school desiring to use a public school building. However, lost in the heat of battle is a proper focus on the escalating estimation of the cost of renovating the Rivers building for its use.

Renovation costs pegged at $10 million only months ago are now estimated at $24 million! Why this sinkhole??? No use proposed by charter high school proponents has brought about this unconscionable increase.

Is it a case of Bill Lewis's inability to add and subtract, the contractor's being given a blank check, or CCSD's attempt to show that the charter high will be too expensive?

The Post and Courier routinely treats outrageously high building costs in CCSD as ordinary. Now we even have relatively new buildings, such as the "Taj Mahal" and West Ashley High School, requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs.

No wonder residents complain about school taxes: they suspect that money is going down the sinkhole. Meanwhile, schools like Charleston Progressive suffer and beg for library books.