Lapdog of McGinley, P & C Ignores Charter School for Math and Science

When was the last time you saw good news in the P&C about the Charter School for Math and Science?  Me too. It just doesn't happen. Instead, the reader learns that CSMS has had several principals, has struggled to find space because the Charleston County School Board refuses to allow it to use most of the Rivers building, and is largely confined to mobile classrooms, thanks to the undying animosity of Superintendent Nancy McGinley.

To McGinley's undeniable horror and despite her feeble efforts at integration in the district, CSMS remains the lone example of a fully integrated school in all of Charleston County. The NAACP must hate this.

Now, thanks to an Op-Ed by CSMS's college counselor, we learn that CSMS has been so successful that 200 applied for 60 spots in its sixth grade. Don't you wonder what would have happened in the future if CSMS had been able to find room for those 200 instead of holding a lottery?

At the same time we learn that in Mt. Pleasant (them that has gets) the Charter Montessori school will be able to practically double its enrollment by occupying the old Whitesides campus with the Superintendent's full cooperation. 

No double standard there.

Buist: Ready to Fill Vacancies or Not?

The Charleston County School District proudly announces that it will add 70 slots when the new Buist Academy building opens downtown next fall. Theoretically, enrollment will stand at 480, instead of the present 410.

Apparently no one seems to care that Buist already has many vacant slots in its supposed "410" number that remain unfilled despite its much-touted secret waiting list.

When it adds the 70 students, will it also fill its present vacancies? Will it continue to allow false addresses? Will these 70 students be spread over the four "lists" or  constitute a new list? Many questions remain unanswered.

CCSD Needs Voice for Taxpayers

As the editors of the P&C have correctly stated, the newly-appointed member to the Board of Trustees (to replace the resigned Mary Ann Taylor) should be a person who reflects Taylor's views.

In fact, it makes no sense to appoint either of her opponents, Miller or Seabrook, to the Board because the voters have already rejected them once in favor of Taylor.  Nor does it make sense to allow the Chamber of Commerce another seat on the Board in the person of Brian Moody. After all, the Chamber already controls the Board in the person of Chris Fraser.

No, the most feared appointee will be one who can read financial statements and ask intelligent questions, one who will guard the interests of students in the district by guarding the wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars. That attitude alone will put that person in the voting minority--at least until the next school board election.

Do we really want another go-along-and-get-along member as the superintendent's salary and those of her close administrative staff reach for one million dollars a year? 

Yes, Henry Copeland, has locked horns with the Taj Mahal over wasteful expenditures, uninforced policies, backroom decisions, and lottery shenigans. He sounds perfect.

CCSD's Meyers: Never Saw a Lottery He Didn't Like

Hold onto your seats. Exiting Charleston County School Board member Gregg Meyers has determined to leave his mark on the admissions process for every magnet school in CCSD.

Academic Magnet High School: this means you.

Meyers, meeting tomorrow, will railroad his CCSD Policy Committee into confirming a lottery process for any students in excess of capacity of any magnet program. With stars in his eyes and at one fell swoop, Meyers creates a Buist-style lottery for every popular magnet program in the district. No more merit-based admissions.

Remember? the old smoke and mirrors game for the favored few?

But wait! There's more!

The new policy will promote racial diversity by allowing the use of zip codes rather than race as criteria.

Let the jockeying for position begin.

You may now understand why Meyers has chosen to leave after this term. You may also understand why CCSD continues to violate open-meeting laws as it considers these changes.

No School Safe When CCSD Policy Committee Meets

Is it true? Is the Policy Committee of the Charleston County School Board about to pull a fast one on the Academic Magnet (AMHS)?

It's a well-known phenomenon that when something is working really well politicians want to tinker with it. Scuttlebutt has it that Gregg Meyers, knowing how well using his law office address worked to get his own children into Buist Academy on the District 20 list, now wants to create a similar structure for entrance to the Academic Magnet.

This marvelous system, virtually guaranteed to be finagled in like fashion to Buist entrance in days of yore, would use zip codes instead of four lists as Buist does. It would also use a lottery.

After all, why would we want only the best students to go to AMHS? Some of them should linger in other high schools to beef up their stats for Superintendent McGinley. Just think of the possibilities.

Meanwhile, Meyers has scheduled the next meeting of the Policy Committee for the last day of Rosh Hashanah, guaranteeing that any observant Jews will not interfere with discussion and offering to take the minutes himself while chairing the meeting, since the committee's secretary will not be there.

Love it.

CCSD Ignores Policy Regarding Buist Admissions

Policies that CCSD staff appear to have disregarded govern the admissions process to the magnet schools, including Buist Academy. Thanks to the yearly turbulence over those "winning" entrance to Buist Academy, especially those falsely representing themselves as living downtown in District 20, in January of 2007 CCSD codified a policy:

"Applicants must certify as follows: 'Under penalty of perjury I certify that, as primary caregiver of my applicant child: A) the residence, which is the subject of this application is my legal residence and my domicile, the place where I and the student actually live at the time of this application and that I do not claim to be a legal resident of a jurisdiction other than Charleston County...'"

[To read the full PDF document as adopted, go to Policy Assessing Legal Residence and Domicile on CCSD's website.]

If ever there were clear evidence that CCSD ignores its own policies, we have it this year. What part of the policy allows a Berkeley County resident participation in the application process to enter the kindergarten class at Buist for the 2009-10 year?

When contacted, CCSD's attorney John Emerson admitted no knowledge of such a policy: as he put it when contacted, "Dr. Gepford tells me you contend that policy requires that residence has to be established at the time of application to magnet schools. Can you tell me which policy you rely on?"

Pathetic, or what?

The response of the querying District 20 resident was as follows:

"It is unfortunate that community volunteers are required to show well-paid professionals in public administrative offices how to find copies of public policies that have been central to such a high profile issue. Or is this just another example of official obfuscation?"

"CCSD's unofficial policy seems to be designed just to stonewall the public with the hope they will simply go away. The magnet school admissions policies are clear." [see above]

"There is no excuse for what can only be described at best as administrative incompetence on CCSD's part. If this error is proven, considering the potential damage committed against the rights of others who depend on the admissions process involving Buist Academy and all other CCSD schools being administered fairly and equitably, reprimands are in order."

"As for the school-based administrator who chose to shepherd this application, considering this is the latest in an extensively documented pattern of abuse, termination is overdue."

Blame for this fiasco must remain squarely on the shoulders of Nancy McGinley and the administrators at Buist Academy that she supports.

Water-Is-Wet News: Buist Shenanigans Redux

Just when you thought it was safe to think that Charleston County's only countywide magnet school for K-8 was back on the straight and narrow in its admissions comes the latest outrage--selecting a student from another county from the District 20 list! Yes, that was no rumor.

Said student, whose parents live on Daniel Island in Berkeley County, was allowed to participate in this spring's lottery for next year's kindergarten slots. He must have been entered on the countywide, failing schools, and District 20 lists--why not? And he "won" a seat with the latter.

If your child were first on the waiting list and you actually lived in District 20, wouldn't you be just a tad upset?

Since the news has gotten out, the parents claim that they own an apartment downtown in District 20 that is at present rented out. When its lease is up in August, they plan to move in. Buist Academy will observe proper admissions policies, and pigs will fly.

Here we have an example of flouting of state law. After Buist's admissions policies made the national news a couple of years ago, CCSD put Doug Gepford in charge of oversight of admissions to all magnet schools. Gepford confirms there is a Berkeley County resident who is registered to attend Buist next year using a District 20 slot. According to one interested party,

"When asked what he plans to do about it, he said he couldn't do anything but monitor the situation. He said his hands were tied, as this was a 'board policy,' and until the board changed its policies, existing rules would allow this admission to take place. He further said he couldn't do anything about it this year, but the board might address this for 'future applicants' to attend Buist who might be admitted 'after next year.'"

What law is broken? "Any exception to extend rights to the other cannot result in the displacement of a rightful and true resident. The promise of future qualification by a non-resident still displaces a current resident." Add to that a presumption of financial leverage to facilitate taking of someone's place in line, and you have an additional problem.

We can all agree that this is just another example of why there is so little confidence in the administration's integrity and ability to lead.

Will the P & C follow up on this story? Too bad we can't get the national news to return.

Buist Again? Let's Take a Step Back

Charleston County School District Board member Ruth Jordan, who lives in West Ashley and is chairman of the Board's Policy Committee, has roiled the waters by suggesting that Buist Academy not be allowed "to become segregated again." Putting her in charge of the Policy Committee is an exercise in chaos now and yet to come! Nevertheless, any suggestion that the "magnet school's admissions procedures could be overhauled to attract more minority students" coming from this quarter should be met with the derision it deserves.

Here is a history lesson that attempts to be purely expository:

• Buist began as an all-black school when Charleston's schools were segregated and not consolidated into one district.
• To meet requirements imposed by desegregation lawsuits, Gregg Meyers (a present Board member) put forward the plan to create a 60-40 school to show the Civil Rights Division that the district was integrated, and the plan was accepted.
• The school's admissions process uses four lists and a lottery to select students, but the results were required to be 40 percent minority.
  
• The school thrived while other schools in what became District 20 of CCSD disappeared or became all-black and failing.
• A lawsuit about five years ago killed the 60-40 race-based requirement.
• Since the ruling, the percentage of minority students attending Buist has declined--CCSD putting the percentage at 25; those in District 20 suggesting that in the lower grades the percentage is more like 15.

Now, the rest of the story.

The present situation couldn't appear more biased and controversial even if it had been put into effect by a White Citizens' Committee operating in cabal. And it's easy to see who is at fault: present and former school board members, their political cronies, and present and former superintendents hired by the school boards. Until the following messes are purified with the daylight of transparency, no one will accept new OR old guidelines.

Before present parents of Buist Academy start jumping down my throat, let me point out that most parents who have sent their children to Buist over its years of operation as a magnet have not played the system in any way! No, Buist's controversies derive from how CCSD has tampered with Buist's admissions to benefit the few and well-connected. The tampering has proceeded under CCSD's "trust us with no verification" policy. There are three aspects to the tampering: implementation of the lottery; verification of the lists; and abuse of "testing" procedures.

1. The potential for abusing who "wins" the lottery is immense, as has been well-documented on this blog and elsewhere. Until the Buist lottery becomes as transparent as the SC Education Lottery, its results will continue to be suspect.
2. Already well-documented here and elsewhere has been CCSD's reluctance to cull from the lists those who do not qualify for them. Due to some well-placed complaints (covered by the mainstream news media), procedures have tightened. However, due to the immense secrecy surrounding who is on what list and where and machinations when vacancies have occured in upper grades (such as allowing seats to go unfilled), no one will trust the process until the lists are public.
3. Buist's potential kindergarteners are NOT taking an "entrance exam" that is an intelligence test; therefore, the school does not select the "best and brightest," as is frequently suggested. The school's results are a combination of motivated parents, self-selection (more likely to be middle-class), and resources that CCSD has poured into the school. In fact, concerning the entering "interview" a previous commenter wrote,

"In the preface to the YCAT, the publisher states that the test is not designed to be used as the sole criteria for assessing a student and the test results should not be used as a single determining factor for directing where a child is placed in school. It further states that the test is to be used only in combination with other measures of a child's abilities, otherwise its results if taken alone may be highly unreliable, especially at the youngest age levels of kindergarten and pre-kindergarten. If that is the recommendation of those who designed the YCAT test, then why is Buist using this test exactly in the manner that the publisher has said it is not to be used?"

If that isn't damning enough for you, how about that the proctors asking the children the questions are not uniform and not qualified, and the reported results are not verifiable by any other human being.

Now, here it comes: District 20 has been such a thorn in the side of the powers-that-be that CCSD will make it a county-wide magnet without a list for District 20. McGinley and Meyers will point out that District 20 now has several "partial magnets" for its population, so why should its residents complain?

Hey, as long as the voters of Mt. Pleasant and James Island can vote District 20 residents like Toya Hampton-Green into office over the objections of residents of downtown, it's deja vu all over again. What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.

CARP: CCSD Redesign as Educational Value

Moving forward with the second installment of our redesign plan for CCSD administration at 75 Calhoun, we come to our second set of criteria definitions (again, thanks to CCSD for setting the format for us!):

Administrative Redesign Criteria Definitions

II. Educational Value: Summarizes academic achievement in CCSD under current administration

A. Adequate Yearly Progress – Does the district meet taxpayers' expectations regarding transparency in spending (cost-effectiveness of educational gimmicks, excuse me, innovations) and answering direct questions regarding educational programs in public forums as well as supporting new charter schools; indicates if pace of progress will ever produce students who on average meet state academic standards

B. Absolute Rating – The value of administrative results compared with similar-size districts in regard to administrative costs, including the superintendent's salary in relation to comparable districts.

C. Improvement Rating – Measures administration's progress since selection of current superintendent in regard to access to magnet programs, funding of magnet schools, and transparency in lottery results for magnet programs.

Care to add any others?

Buist? You Can't Make This Stuff Up

CCSD Superintendent McGinley has regained her memory and gotten her story straight. [See Current Students at Buist Can Stay in today's P & C.]

For all true believers, it goes something like this:

• Last year Janet Rose put in writing that students entering on the downtown list could move elsewhere as soon as they had enrolled. [This behavior is known as CYA in the vernacular.]
  
• As a result, 35 families immediately pulled up stakes and headed for Mt. Pleasant, Sullivan's Island, and the Isle of Palms. Or, at least, that's their story and they're sticking to it.
  

Thirty-five slots that could have gone to actual residents of downtown were stolen over the last few years, pure and simple. Now the miscreants get to keep the spoils. Who would dare to investigate, rather than take Rose's statements at face value? Certainly not the gutless wonders on the CCSD School Board who voted to grandfather these students.

Now the question should be, who's looked at the openings in grades 1 through 8 to see how they were filled from the waiting list this year? Janet Rose? Oh, well, then that's all right. Who's going to oversee the "lottery" system? Janet Rose? Oh, okay.

What a relief!

Flash! CCSD Supt. Remembers Buist

Oh, thank goodness. CCSD Superintendent Nancy McGinley has regained her memory. Do you think it will last until the next School Board meeting? She's now asking for guidance on verifying addresses at Buist Academy.

Not that again!

Problem is, 75 Calhoun has been dawdling over this verification since prior to Goodloe-Johnson's leaving in 2007. Mark Brandenburg's "February 2007" memo is "cover" meant to answer the documented cheating being perpetrated at that point. And the address-verification scam now being pulled by the district doesn't even address the sham lottery results. Further, is anyone asking if there are vacancies in the upper grades for 2008-09? Can Ballard avoid repeating those shameful 15 vacancies that were discovered last year?

Rather than bore all of us by rehashing old battles, I'm going to repost two blogs from 2007:

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Oops, We Forgot! CCSD Address Verification Scandal

Address verification "fell between the tracks" during the transition from Goodloe-Johnson to McGinley, did it? Weren't we told one of the benefits of hiring McGinley was a seamless transition? Guess the seams leaked a little. An article on such printed in the P & C revealed that "District officials said they investigated the allegations [of false addresses used in the Buist lottery process] and didn't find any problems."

That means the district considered the following list of discrepancies for eight students in the 2006-07 kindergarten class provided to it by District 20 proponents in 2006:

1. Used 83 Hester Street to enter the school. The house has been for sale and is now under contract.
2. Used 22B Mary Street to enter the school, but parents claim 4% (primary residence for tax purposes) on Sullivan’s Island. Family never lived on Mary Street.
3. Used 40 Bee Street #205 to enter the school, but parents claim 4% for a home on Johns Island. They own and rent out the Bee Street condo.
4. Used 28A Addlestone Avenue to enter the school, but parents claim 4% on Folly Beach. The family never lived at this address.
5. Used 33 Calhoun St Unit 236 to enter the school, but parents claim 4% in Mt Pleasant. Parents own this condo but do not claim at as a primary residence.
6. Used 70A Church Street to enter the school, but lives with mother in Mt Pleasant. Father lives out of state.
7. Used condo at 32 Vendue Range #300 to enter the school, but parents claim 4% residency on James Island.
8. Lives in South Windermere according to records.

According to Courrege, "The address inconsistencies were never explained publicly." Or privately either, it seems.

These 8 (out of 40 members of the entering class) will be allowed to continue in the sham process instituted by CCSD and promulgated by Buist Principal Sallie Ballard. This list doesn't even include further class members who claim to be eligible on the failing schools list but whose addresses prove they are not!

Funny how when the seams leak, one verifiable item of major concern to residents of District 20 gets dropped, even though administrators in at least two other constituent districts have stated that additional verification would not be burdensome. These complaints, reported on the national TV news last year, were essentially brushed off by Goodloe-Johnson. Can we assume that McGinley will ignore new ones for the Class of 2007-08? Does anyone believe that all addresses used for THAT class will be kosher?

McGinley states the oh-so-very-complicated verification process will be phased in with magnet schools including Buist. She said it. Let's hold her to it.

The cloud of suspicion that hangs over Buist needs to be cleared up NOW; otherwise, McGinley's "street cred" will evaporate.

That was a year ago, folks.

And on the sham lottery process:

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Gambling by the Numbers: Magic Tuition Money

Let's have an education lottery using the methodology now used by CCSD for Buist applicants.

So, those players who pay careful attention to all gambling opportunies would sign up to buy lottery tickets. Exactly one month later CCSD would notify the winners that they had won.

Oh, I forgot.

The ticket holders would not pick their own numbers. No, CCSD would assign secret numbers. In fact, only CCSD would know the names associated with each ticket number.

But that's okay, because CCSD would save holders the trouble of checking their tickets to see if they had won.

Then CCSD could announce through the media that the winners selected by the computer had been notified and were being paid (that's $6000 to $15000 per year for the following nine years).

Of course, due to privacy issues the winners' names would not be made public. A few well-known names might leak out or be subject to rumor, but no one would ever question if the process were fair.

ANY MORE QUESTIONS?

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.

SC Senate District 42: The CCSD Connection

Have you ever tried reading the contributions reports of candidates running for office? They can easily be found on the website of the State Ethics Commission. Inspired by the P & C's report of contributions made to State Senator Robert Ford and his challenger Dwayne Green, I tracked down the senate district number (42) and scrolled through both lists of contributors. [See Green Passes Ford in Senate Race Cash ]

Although I said months ago that Dwayne Green, husband of Toya Hampton-Green of the CCSD Board of Trustees, planned to be mayor of Charleston someday, I must now qualify that by admitting that Green wants to replace State Senator Robert Ford first. I don't know Sen. Ford, nor have I followed state politics closely enough to know if he is vulnerable to this challenge. But what I do know is that the Greens have been enjoying the perks of being Charleston's young black "power couple." Toya's election to the school board after representing CCSD for a local law firm was well bankrolled by local Democrats, and she won despite lack of support from District 20, the constituent district she represents (oops, I mean the one she lives in, since she claims that she represents the WHOLE county). Strangely enough [sorry, the sarcasm just slipped through] the Greens' child was a winner in Buist Academy's "lottery." Readers of this blog will understand that we are using the word "lottery" loosely here.

Toya-Hampton Green has been one of the most vocal critics of CCSD's allowing the new Charter School for Math and Science to use the Rivers building, so I certainly should not have been surprised to see the name of Alice Paylor, present attorney for CCSD, as a contributor to Dwayne Green's campaign.

Cozy, isn't it?

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.

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?]

Charter High School: Good News

The following information was sent out by the Charter High School committee on January 10th. Attend if you can to see how a lottery can be done transparently!

As of today, the Charleston Charter School for Math & Science (CCSMS)
has received more applications than the seats available in every
grade: 6, 7, 8 and 9. Currently, the total is 289 applications for
180 seats as follows: 123 for 40 seats in grade 6, 46 for 40 seats in
grade 7, 38 for 20 seats in grade 8 and 82 for 80 seats in grade 9.

At 3 p.m. on Tuesday, January 15, in the auditorium of the Main
Library, there will be a public lottery to determine which applicants
will be invited to attend Charleston's newest public school.

Applications are still being accepted and will be placed on the waiting
list. Based on the numbers cited above, more applications to grades 7
and 9 are highly encouraged, because the waiting list in those grades
will be very short.

Charter School Lottery? Set an Example for Buist

Today's P & C brings the welcome news that applications to the new Charter School for Math and Science are so abundant that the school will use a lottery for at least two of its grades. [See Math, science school to fill seats with lottery ]

This is the chance to show the transparency to the public that the lottery at Buist lacks. Let's hope the school's organizers keep that well in mind when their lottery is set up.

On a less optimistic note, let's also hope that they are doing more than "negotiating with the school district over whether the school should be charged rent to use the Rivers building permanently." Surely Park Dougherty and friends were not so naive as to think that the State Board of Education would voluntarily rescue them from that controversy. They need to show local politicians on which side their bread is buttered AND exhaust all legal means.

Someday soon, the great state of South Carolina will provide public school building space to charter schools in the same way as other states do. Let's hope won't be too late for this one to succeed.

Post & Courier & the Toya Green Mystery

How did Toya Hampton-Green become the CCSD board member elected from District 20? Notice I didn't say "representing," since Green claims she was not elected to do that.

Running for the school board in 2006, Toya Hampton-Green refused the Charleston City Paper's quiz for candidates, stating, "There's too much at stake in this election to play a guessing game."



The "guessing"would have been regarding the size of CCSD's budget, per-pupil spending, the district's absolute rating on the 2005 state report card, the number of schools in the district, the number rated excellent by the state, and the number rated unsatisfactory by the state. According to reporter Greg Hambrick, Green also described herself as a "businesswoman" (in the business of law, apparently) and "soccer mom."



In this article, Green called the Charleston Plan for Excellence "good"; would refuse to sell the district's office; opposed tuition tax credits; was silent on the role of constituent boards and how to improve schools in low-income areas (even though running as a resident of District 20); and claimed to support charter schools. In a League of Women Voters' profile of the same time, Green stated that her three goals for CCSD were to "increase fiscal accountability and promote more equity among the schools, particularly Downtown"; "achieve better student performance by sound policies set by the Board which better support teachers' mission"; and "build consensus on the Board." Hmm.



In a separate article, the City Paper stated that Green was a "C" candidate but "the fact that she's raised more money than any of the other candidates, including the collected A-Team, is an indication of her support in the community [italics mine]. Like other candidates for District 20, Hampton Green's showed a passion for focusing on improving low-performing schools." It also reported that "the nonprofit Blue Ribbon Committee [a "thinly veiled" arm of the local Democratic party run by the same Katherine Cofer who headed Teach Charleston, a contractor with CCSD]" and "the Business Advocating Change political action committee [BACPAC--an arm of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce]" endorsed both Meyers and Green.

The guessing on our part would be, where did Toya Hampton become familiar with American public education? Where did she go to high school? According to an interview in 2004, she stated that she had to "opt for US citizenship" at the age of 18 because of her dual-citizenship with Germany. Most Americans would assume that meant that, because she was born in Heidelberg of American parents, she gained that duality. Actually, in order to have German citizenship, she needed to have one parent who was a German citizen.

In the same League of Women Voters' profile, Green reported that "as part of her father's career in the Army," she had grown up in Fort Belvoir, Virginia; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Frankfurt, Mainz, and Wiesbaden, Germany; Tacoma, Washington, and Burke, Virginia. Green has also stated that she is the "daughter of a public schoolteacher."

Consulting my own expert on this matter--that would be my own lawyer-daughter of Green's generation, who has lived several years in Germany and, in fact, gave birth to a child there who does NOT have German citizenship--I confirmed that Green is either confused, overstating her German connections, or both. If she ever had dual citizenship, one of her parents must have been a German citizen. Also, the only reason for giving up German citizenship at 18 would be the compulsory obligation to serve in the German military--that is not required of females. Maybe she had a brother or friend who had to do this.

Green's Charleston connection began when she "took off two years between undergraduate school and law school to work as a team leader and public relations specialist for AmeriCorps, the national service organization," according to the LWV. That's also when she met lawyer Dwayne Green, the son of West Indian immigrants, who grew up in Charleston and plans to become its first black mayor.

Certainly, her in-laws wouldn't have touted the local public school system to her! When they moved from Brooklyn where her husband was born to West Oak Forest [small world department: same street I lived on decades earlier], Dwayne first enrolled at St. Andrew's Elementary, then transferred to Blessed Sacrament for two years, then entered and graduated from Porter-Gaud. His not-rich parents wanted him to get a good education and kept searching for the best.

According to the P & C, "Public school at its best is an authentic reflection of the American way of life, says Toya Hampton Green, a Charleston County School Board member and self-described idealist." Unfortunately, that is also true at its worst. Green has her child safely in Buist Academy, after the child's selection by CCSD's notorious lottery while Green ran for the board. Is Buist "an authentic reflection"? She is quoted as saying that, "seeking a seat on the board was never part of [her] plan," when "motherhood prompted her" to see that "trying to get elected to the board [was] a way of holding herself accountable."

Where did all that campaign money come from? How did she get appointed to so many prominent positions without connections to the community? Why is the Post and Courier so eager to give her a good press? Exactly what has she done on the CCSD board so far besides second Gregg Meyers on every issue?

And has she removed politics as an issue on the CCSD Board, which she originally claimed she was running to do?

CCSD's Shame: 15 Vacancies at Buist

"Let them eat cake" is what Marie-Antoinette is reported to have said when told peasants rioted because they had no bread. Though today's historians claim she never made such a callous statement, we can now imagine its coming from the mouth of Principal Sallie Ballard of Buist Academy.

How else to explain the presence of 15 vacancies this fall in the upper grades? Isn't Buist's arcane, mysterious, and closely-guarded waiting list purported to contain thousands of names?

Oh, wait! Those parents have all been contacted by Ballard and have turned down Buist admission because they realize their present schools are so much better academically than Buist!

No, of course not.

I know! All students in the appropriate grades for these vacancies have been tested and found wanting in the brains department.

Yeah, right.

Wait! Maybe . . . the list has been misplaced and Ballard has been frantically searching all fall.

Sickening, isn't it? Fifteen motivated and deserving students in CCSD are being cheated out of a better education at this very moment. How would you feel if your child were one of them?

How many eighth-grade parents at Burke would like to know that their top-scoring PACT-test-qualified child is eligible and possibly has as many as eight empty seats waiting at Buist if they should choose for their child to take advantage of one? Has any one told these parents that these vacancies exist? Do Buist and CCSD officials plan to explain these vacancies to the parents of students on the tightly-held waiting lists?

To those able to take action on behalf of those in District 20, a few suggestions from supporters:

• Ask the Superintendent's office to supply a complete list by grade of what constituent districts are represented in each class or grade level at Buist. It has this data, we know, because it was provided in 2004.
• Find out how many current Buist students show a legally verifiable primary residence in District 20. Ask that McGinley "certify in writing." She is the one ultimately held accountable.
• If the figures are remotely believable, then it will become obvious to what extent District 20 children have been cheated. A statistician from the College of Charleston could verify the probabilities.
• The current Buist kindergarten should show at least 35% District 20 residents (25% from the District 20 list plus at least 10% from names announced at the lottery from the three remaining lists). That would be a breakdown of 10 plus 4, for a total of 14.
• If the number of verifiable District 20 children in this year's kindergarten is significantly less than 14 out of a class total of 40, the parents of District 20 children have been cheated (with administrative approval) once again.
• As for Buist grades one through eight, CCSD would have a hard time justifying to the public an enrollment that shows less than 10 verifiable District 20 children in each of grades one through three and at least 12 or 13 verifiable from District 20 in each of grades four through eight.
• Hillery Douglas has already let slip that last year's numbers at Buist show less than 20% of Buist's students come from District 20. Coincidentally, the Buist student body now contains less than 22% African-Americans. . . even though grades 5 through 8 were admitted before the policy change, using the 40/60 quotas for minority/white.
• If Hillery Douglas's figures are correct, as a conservative estimate, more than 60 living, breathing, verifiable District 20 children and their families are currently being kept out of Buist with the approval of the Superintendent's office.
• District 20 children wait for openings in every grade. The Chronicle might like to run a story on the 15 vacancies as a public service announcement.
• In the unlikely chance that any one of the four Buist lists (such as the one for District 20) is vacant, the public has a right to know. The principal at Buist has no right to withhold this information nor use it as proprietary information to recruit the favored. If she has done so, her actions should become the subject of a professional ethics complaint.
• If McGinley is serious about resolving the Buist admissions issue as it relates to District 20, she should immediately declare that all 15 vacancies be filled and filled first with qualified District 20 applicants. Anything less than filling current vacancies with qualified District 20 children (at least until each grade reaches 25% of its enrollment with real District 20 residents) capitulates to past mismanagement. It also can be interpreted as an admission that her administration has become a party to fraud.

Without an explanation for these Buist vacancies, Ballard is just stalling with McGinley's support. And maybe the Office of Civil Rights needs to revisit its opinion of the desegregation of downtown Charleston, a purpose for which Buist was invented.