Recent editorials from South Carolina newspapers:
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Dec. 2
The Post and Courier on taxpayers funding private schools:
Nearly 800,000 students attend S.C. public schools. Private schools educate only about 45,000 students. So what’s the best way to make sure all children in our state get the education they need in order to become productive citizens who move our state forward?
Should we pay parents to pull their children out of the public schools and send them to private schools, which have neither the capacity nor the desire to serve more than a tiny portion of them? Or should we make the sometimes-difficult changes that are necessary to improve the schools we own, the schools that have the capacity and the mandate to accommodate all those kids?
With a bill attempting to overhaul public education stalled in the Senate, advocates for helping parents pay for private tuition with state taxes officially renewed their push at the Statehouse
A handful of state senators seem determined to pursue the mathematically challenged approach, and they’re holding a special off-session hearing Tuesday in Columbia to try to push forward a bill that would send your tax dollars to private schools.
Under S.556, low-income families could receive roughly $7,300 - the average amount the state spends on each student - to send a child to a private school. The program, also open to special-needs children, would be capped at 33,000 students the first year, then 67,000 the second year. Starting in the third year, it would be open to as many as 608,000 public school students.
The S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office estimates the bill would take $222 million from public schools in the first year and $457 million in the second year. It says it can’t begin to guess how much it could cost the schools in the third and subsequent years.
That’s a significant hit for already-struggling schools. If a single school lost, say, 30 third-graders, it could simply eliminate one third-grade teacher, although that wouldn’t cover the $220,000 those students would take with them. More likely, though, that school would lose a half-dozen kindergartners, three or four first-graders, seven or eight third-graders, and so on.
People who complain about charter schools and proposals to let school districts contract with nonprofits to operate some public schools might want to pay attention. This is what privatizing schools looks like.
Supporters say the bill would give poor parents a better chance of sending their kids to private schools. Or that sending tax dollars to private schools would push public schools to improve. We wish it were that simple.
Even if there were enough private school seats available, most high-quality private schools stay that way by being extremely selective. So the kids who most need to “escape” public schools probably wouldn’t be admitted. And in most good private schools, $7,300 wouldn’t cover the tuition cost, much less the transportation and other expenses that public school students don’t face.
More significantly, the logic of improving public schools by giving their funding to private schools doesn’t hold up. Consider: How would that theoretical competition push a principal to get rid of incompetent teachers, when state law makes that almost impossible, and when all the competent teachers who are willing to work at that school for the pay they’d receive already do?
It takes more specialized services to educate a child who’s hearing-impaired than one who isn’t, more to educate a child with learning disabil…
How would this imaginary competition push a school board to kick out the students who refuse to study or pay attention, and steal the teacher’s time away from the rest of the students - but who aren’t quite disruptive enough to be expelled under state law?
How would that competition allow a school to lengthen the school day and the school year and require more courses for graduation, when state law doesn’t allow that?
How would it allow schools to cut the class size in half or bring in a second teacher when the Legislature won’t provide the money to pay for that, and won’t allow the schools to raise that money locally?
We could go on, but you probably get the point: We already know a lot of things that schools need to do in order to provide a better education, but state law either prohibits them or makes it too difficult to even try. And now some of the very legislators who have failed to pass the laws necessary to make those improvements want us to believe that public schools will magically improve if they just throw tax money at private schools.
It doesn’t work that way.
If the Legislature wants to improve the schools it owns, it has to give those schools the tools they need to make the improvements - not simply blame them for not doing things they don’t have the legal authority to do. And it has to give them the resources they need - not strip them of those resources in order to fund the schools it doesn’t own or have any control over.
Online: https://www.postandcourier.com/
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Dec. 1
The Times and Democrat on solar power:
The push for solar to supply more energy for South Carolina holds great potential in Orangeburg County, which is blessed with lots of land and farmers and developers willing to see it put to use in solar farms.
Even as Central Electric Power Cooperative announced plans to purchase 150 megawatts of solar power from Orangeburg County Solar Project LLC and Orangeburg South Solar Project LLC at Bowman, with Google promising the power will be used at its expanding data center campus in Berkeley County, the solar industry was digesting a decision by the South Carolina Public Service Commission that could put brakes on development.
The PSC has voted to drop the rate major utilities such as Dominion Energy and Duke Energy pay for solar power, leaving South Carolina with one of the lowest rates paid for solar power of any state in the nation. The PSC also decided that utilities do not need to provide contracts longer than 10 years to solar developers, who contend the absence of longer terms will reduce the possibilities of financing for new projects.
The PSC said the decision is about protecting consumers not major utilities. Yet it will leave South Carolina with some of the lowest rates utilities pay for solar power in any state in the nation. And the contract terms also will be among the shortest.
One local lawmaker has been out front in efforts to protect consumers from high power bills. Rep. Russell Ott, D-St. Matthews, has served as the vice chair of the House Utility Ratepayer Protection Committee and as a member of the Energy Caucus. He was deeply involved in legislative efforts surrounding the S.C. Electric & Gas- Santee Cooper nuclear plan fiasco and was an advocate for reform at Tri-County Cooperative in the wake of scandal involving its board.
Ott told The Times and Democrat he is still trying to understand the rationale behind the PSC’s decisions. “We were definitely moving in the direction of embracing solar and this appears to be a chilling effect for the industry.”
The bottom line on solar development will be the market, Ott said. “If companies are not able to come in and be able to be profitable, they are not coming.”
The price solar companies can receive for their power and the length of contract will impact development.
Though consumers may see the PSC decisions as good news in controlling the cost of energy, they are not welcome in a county that is being called “the solar capital of South Carolina” with more than 10 farms announced in the past three years. And though Orangeburg County will be left to hope that the PSC has not derailed further development, it can look for a silver lining: If development slows, the farms already in place in Orangeburg County will become more valuable.
But slowing development here is not good news and projects already announced could be delayed or even derailed.
As Orangeburg County Development Commission Executive Director Gregg Robinson told The T&D: There’s no way the change can’t impact future farms.
“It will end up heightening the value of the current farms and it will certainly create a more challenging path for the development of future farms.”
Online: https://thetandd.com/
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Dec. 1
The Index-Journal on changes to school’s infrastructures:
Remember walking to school? Or riding a bike?
Remember simply arriving on your school campus, walking right through the doors, down the hall to your locker and then your classroom? No checkpoints. No fences. No walls. No school resource officers. Just you, fellow students, teachers and the much-feared principal’s office.
Yeah. Long ago and seemingly in a galaxy far, far away.
Now we have to build schools that look like starfish, segregating students by grades and with a central office point that affords administrators a better means of monitoring activities. Sort of like a detention center. Cameras, fences, walls, electronics that enable all doors to be locked at the flip of a switch for a quicker lockdown of the entire facility.
Sad, really. But necessary. Because it’s come to this.
Greenwood County School District 50 already has more modern school buildings throughout the system, but it is in the process of reevaluating some of its other facilities and finding opportunities to make those campuses safer.
Certainly no amount of safety measures and safeguards put into place can or will guarantee the safety of our children, teachers and administrators, but these steps absolutely must be taken. Yes, this means spending dollars that might otherwise fund the actual learning process in some other way, but that should not bring criticism upon the district. All our schools - public and private - must be diligent in finding ways to improve campus safety.
We can all hope evil acts such as those that have made headlines in other communities are not carried out on school campuses in the Lakelands, but to deny the possibility is both naive and ignorant. It is ignorant because long before there was a Columbine, a Sandy Hook, a Townville or a Santa Clarita there was Oakland Elementary right here in Greenwood.
We can wring our hands and long for the days when boys could hunt deer in the early morning hours and drive to high school with a weapon in the trunk. We can long for the days when a pocketknife was to a kid yesteryear what a computer is today. We can wish for a return to the days when parents could head to their child’s classroom to drop off the forgotten lunch or book without having to pass through security clearance.
Those days are long gone.
Online: http://www.indexjournal.com/
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