CCSD's Top 10 Stories 2018: # 9--Magnets and Attendance Zones for Sale

At Number 9 on our 2018 list of top Charleston County School District stories comes the ever-expanding ability of the rich to purchase seats in CCSD's most desirable magnet schools and attendance zones. When the Board and Superintendent talk about more diversity in those schools, this is not what they have in mind. 

In some ways the chickens are coming home to roost. Interpretation of a 1962 attempt to allow white students to opt out of their school districts is the root cause. One elementary magnet affected is Buist Academy on the peninsula, where a child has a better chance of getting into Harvard, Yale, or MIT. Its lottery has been  subjected to multiple accusations of manipulation by the rich and well-connected, and its Byzantine eligibility lists suffer the same problem as the Academic Magnet and School of the Arts: students need not live in the county if their parents are rich enough to own property there.

If you live in Berkeley or Dorchester Counties, or anywhere else in the state, for that matter, you can scour the listings of dilapidated housing or arcane empty lots to buy a seat. The minimum price is $300--peanuts. And it appears that state legislators are on your side. Otherwise, why hasn't the law been changed? Last year 40 residents of Charleston County were cheated out of seats at Academic Magnet and School of the Arts by rich outsiders taking advantage of the law. 

But it gets worse.

This travesty expanded to buying a school attendance zone last September when parents living on the peninsula gave their child a one-percent share in a Mount Pleasant property they owned so that she could attend Mount Pleasant Academy. 

Look carefully at the Charleston County schools. The poor remain corralled in failing schools while the rich buy their way out. Past School Boards and superintendents created this problem with the collusion of the well connected. 

Why isn't every member of our state legislative delegation attempting to change the law being used, at minimum to raise the cost of the seats so that only millionaires can buy them? Right--they have friends and contributors who might object.