Let’s Look At Downsizing The CCSD

I believe that government should only be paying for the core services that the people need from it. When it comes to education, the core services are delivered by principals, teachers, and teacher assistants as well as specialists in the main office, library, and maintenance staff.
What we have in the Charleston County School District (CCSD) today goes well beyond the core services needed to deliver quality education to the more than 45,000 students attending neighborhood and magnet schools in our county. We have more than 30 administrative personnel in the school district who earn more than $100,000 a year and contribute little to the task of educating our students.
Not only is the bloated bureaucracy in the CCSD costly to taxpayers, but it also detracts from the ability of our hard-working principals and teachers from carrying out their jobs.
Kelvin Curtis, who ran for the Charleston County School Board in 2014, met with hundreds of principals, teachers, and parents and heard a steady refrain. “Principals and teachers are being intimidated by district administrators,” said Curtis. “They are constantly being talked down to and feel a tremendous sense of insecurity.”
The Charleston County School District was created in 1967 by the state General Assembly under the Act of Consolidation to address the funding inequality, which existed for county schools at the time. The CCSD is divided into 8 Constituent Districts as follows: District 1 (Awendaw/McClellanville), District 2 (Mt. Pleasant), District 3 (James Island), District 4 (North Charleston), District 9 (Johns Island/Wadmalaw), District 10 (West Ashley), District 20 (Downtown), and District 23 (St. Pauls/Edisto).
West Ashley Constituent School Board member Henry Copeland notes that the Constituent Districts have been increasingly marginalized by the CCSD since 2007. “If constituent boards were given the autonomy and training they need,” Copeland said, “we wouldn’t need to be having a conversation about de-consolidating the CCSD. We would have a true partnership between the Constituent Boards and the consolidated School Board.”
The CCSD has more than 75 neighborhood schools and magnet schools, such as the Academic Magnet School, the Charleston County School of the Arts and Garrett Academy of Technology. In my opinion, the CCSD is too bureaucratic and too unwieldy to effectively manage all of those schools effectively.
Former Charleston County School Board member Elizabeth Moffly recently introduced a resolution to the Charleston County Republican Party Executive Committee to deconsolidate the CCSD into five smaller, locally-controlled school districts with locally-elected school boards. The funding for the smaller districts would be allocated on a per-pupil basis with extra funding going to students living in poverty and special needs and gifted and talented students. The magnet schools would be available to students throughout the county as they are now.
Despite the huge growth in West Ashley over the past few decades, enrollment in West Ashley neighborhood schools has actually declined. The CCSD recently combined St. Andrews Middle School and West Ashley Middle School into the former Middleton High School building due to low enrollment. A lot of West Ashley families have sent their children to magnet, charter and private schools because the neighborhood schools were not meeting the needs of their children. Perhaps local control of West Ashley schools is the solution.
One of the arguments for large school districts is that they are more cost-effective. Research by Syracuse University Center For Policy Research shows that consolidation only saves money for districts with fewer than 1500 students. The Charleston County School Districts has positions such as Executive Director for Student Support Services, Associate Superintendent of Accountability and Support Structure and Chief Academic Officer. Do any of these bureaucratic positions help meet the core needs of our schools?
Let’s start the conversation about downsizing or de-consolidating the Charleston County School District.
John Steinberger is the chairman of the Charleston County Republican Party, a leading Fair Tax advocate, and a West Ashley resident. He can be reached at John.steinberger@scfairtax.org.