Scoppe: The wrong way to fix Fairfield County schools - or any schools

THE FAIRFIELD County School District makes you just throw your arms up in despair.

The district starts out with the odds stacked against it: a high rate of poverty, which by and large results in kids coming to school unprepared to learn; a rural community that makes it more difficult to recruit and keep the best teachers, whom poor students need the most; and a deep degree of racial polarization that leaves black and white officials constantly questioning each others' motives rather than working together even toward common goals.

Add in a history of financial mismanagement and a bickering school board that keeps running off superintendents and squandering money on itself, and you have all the ingredients for dismal failure: generation after generation of kids who don't get the education we need them to have, and then become parents who don't adequately prepare their own children to learn - or demand better from the schools.

So when Fairfield County's two legislators, Rep. Boyd Brown and Sen. Creighton Coleman, trumpeted their plan last month to essentially overrule the decisions of local voters by giving themselves authority to add two people to the elected school board, and to create their own committee to take over finance decisions, I was torn.

Yes, that is a completely inappropriate response.

But nothing else has worked.

Besides, their plan lacked the odor of mendacity of other efforts by local legislators to take back control over the local schools: It wasn't a complete take-over, and there was no attempt to sneak it through. Rep. Brown sent out releases urging the media to attend a news conference where he and Sen. Coleman would "introduce legislation to correct the wrongs in the Fairfield County School District." Sen. Coleman got up before the Senate to explain what he was doing and why, even though there was no need to do that since by tradition only members of the local delegation - in this case, Sen. Coleman - vote on local bills.

So I said nothing, as the bill raced through the Legislature.

Looking back, I take perverse comfort in knowing that it wouldn't have made any difference if I had condemned the bills every day. While our legislative system is generally designed to stop bills from becoming law unless everyone signs off on them, it's also designed to make these local bills unstoppable.

Still, I was wrong.

The fact that the problems in Fairfield County haven't fixed themselves doesn't mean we need to resort to "solutions" that return us to the legislative baron system of our not-distant-enough-past, where local legislators took care of all the governmental matters back home because they knew best. How many times do we have to be reminded of what our parents taught us all - that two wrongs don't make a right?

What's wrong with the way we used to do things in South Carolina - and the way Rep. Brown and Sen. Coleman want to do things again - isn't that the Legislature was involved in how schools are operated. The schools are the responsibility of the state of South Carolina, whose constitution promises that the state will provide a public education to all children. The state has chosen to delegate that authority to local school boards. It can choose to take back that authority - or any part of it. And frankly, the state needs to be more aggressive about doing just that.

What was wrong was allowing individual legislators to control their local schools. Any choice to reassert state control over the schools needs to be made by the state - not by two legislators.

If nothing else has worked in Fairfield County, that means we haven't tried the right solutions yet. And in fact, we have avoided some pretty obvious solutions to the problems that plague the Fairfield County schools and a number of other districts.

State Education Superintendent Jim Rex, who lives in Fairfield County, sympathizes with the legislative paternalism. He counts his local school board as one of a dozen in the state that are "part of the problem rather than part of the solution."

The best solution, he notes "is to have voters who hold school board members accountable." Which is undeniably true - and sort of like saying the best solution for kids who don't do well in school is for their parents to be better parents.

Just as it is in our own self interest to find a way to make up for those parents' failures, it's in our self interest to find a way to intervene when voters let their school boards run the schools into the ditch.

Dr. Rex, who already has the authority to take over academic control of districts where students aren't learning, has been asking lawmakers to let him routinely audit school district finances and take over fiscal control when he finds significant problems.

He has urged the Legislature to require school board members to attend state training sessions as a group, along with their superintendents, and to bar members from being re-elected if they refuse to complete the course; the training already is required by law, but there's no penalty for board members who refuse.

They're not guaranteed solutions, but no one has suggested anything with more promise. Yet the Legislature has shown no interest in either proposal, in no small part because they're the sort of things that can rile up those school board members - some of whom are the political power brokers in their communities. Which is to say legislators have essentially stuck their heads in the sand. And so when the problems reached a tipping point in one district, the local legislators resorted to the only "solution" they have available.

Last week, Gov. Mark Sanford vetoed the Fairfield County school bills, as he should have. If tradition holds, the other 123 members of the House will sit on their hands while Rep. Brown overrides the governor's veto, and then the other 45 senators will do likewise while Sen. Coleman completes the override.

That's the easy thing for the rest of the Legislature to do. And it's the wrong thing to do. Legislators can begin to take responsibility for the schools they are constitutionally responsible for by breaking their very bad hands-off tradition and voting to sustain these vetoes. Then they can give the Education Department the authority to get to work trying to fix the problem.