A recent homicide in North Charleston resulted from a robbery gone bad. Charles Michael Cooke and his father were simply working to prepare a house for a needy family. Two teenagers on their way to school decided to use a gun to rob them. The two miscreants were caught almost immediately, but what seems to have been lost in the telling is that they were students at Greg Mathis Charter High.
Our local school board should answer several questions about the perpetrators. For example, why was a Summerville student attending a Charleston County charter school? Aaron Jordan White of Summerville possessed the pistol and did the shooting, according to his own confession.
We don't have enough criminals of our own and must import them from Dorchester County?
Another question concerns the gun: was White in the habit of bringing it to school everyday? Was it ever inside of Greg Mathis High?
Will we ever know the answer to that one?But it gets better!
When Darby raised the specter of closing Greg Mathis last month, ABC News 4 interviewed a student at the school who was a success story.
You can't make this stuff up: his name was Aaron White!
White proudly announced this was his "first regular high school" after spending two years in a "juvenile correctional facility."
See http://abcnews4.com/news/local/charleston-school
Greg Mathis exists as a replacement for the discipline school upon which CCSD squandered millions of dollars in the last decade. Now it accepts "students who have been arrested, fallen behind academically, dropped out or been suspended from their regular high schools." And Dorchester County's problems as well apparently.
I don't know about you, but if my child "had fallen behind academically" or "dropped out," I wouldn't want him or her together with the likes of Aaron Jordan White or his locally-grown partner. You do understand what it takes to get arrested or suspended from high school these days?
Greg Mathis enrolled 72 students last year. School Board Chair Kate Darby wants to close it as a cost-cutting measure.
"The district's legal counsel sent a letter to Greg Mathis Charter High on Dec. 19 citing an audit that stated, 'substantial doubt remains regarding the ability of the School to continue as a going concern.' The school's charter is up for renewal in June. The letter said Greg Mathis ran a deficit for four consecutive years and had a net deficit of $105,509 as of June."
By the way, this amount is a rounding error to the district's overall budget.
"Principal Natrice Henriques said the school already has shrunk its deficit from $160,000 in June 2015. The school changed its paid time off policy to save money and eliminated a $50,000-a-year CEO position. Donors have given money to support a brick masonry class and meals at an after-school program, she said."
"The district's letter to Greg Mathis did not mention academics, but the school has consistently low test scores and one of the lowest four-year graduation rates in the state — 17 percent in 2017. Darby proposed revoking the school's charter in April 2016, but no other board members joined her."
Darby wants to send students suspended from their high schools back to those high schools. That means that suspension no longer matters. She wants to send students who've been arrested (and are presumably out on bail) back to the welcoming arms of their original high schools. Does it matter if the arrest was for murder? How about rape? Drug dealing? Guess it's all the same to her.
Perhaps a prison bus could pick up the Greg Mathis students who fall into these categories and deposit them at the school's doorstep, where they would be guided into their classrooms. No doubt the neighborhood surrounding the school would like some reassurance that students approaching the school will not commit murders on the way.
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