SC House panel OKs education ‘fix’ but few target dates for action

Despite requests from impoverished, rural S.C. school districts, a state House panel Wednesday rejected a detailed time line for adopting new policies aimed at improving South Carolina’s public schools.

The S.C. House panel unanimously approved a report detailing dozens of recommendations for education changes. The panel — made up of Republican and Democratic state representatives, and business and education leaders — has been working this year to come up with the proposal in response to a S.C. Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to do more for poor, rural schools.

Included in the approved report is a brief time line detailing target dates for making some improvements. For example, the time line recommends increasing state money for school buses and school-bus driver salaries by July.

None of the recommendations are binding on the state Legislature, which returns to work in January. But the report is intended to provide a blueprint for state representatives, expected to introduce legislation that would enact some of the changes.

House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington, said the report is a “tremendous starting point” for improving the state’s K-12 system.

Lucas said many of the recommendations are focused on giving the state Education Department and locally elected school boards more flexibility, and “show that money is not the solution to all of our problems.”

Panelists agreed lawmakers must act swiftly to improve K-12 schools.

South Carolina needs a highly skilled workforce to fill the jobs coming into the state – such as the ones Volvo will create in Berkeley County, said Lewis Gossett, chief executive officer of the S.C. Manufacturers Alliance.

“The fear, the sense of urgency that I have, is Volvo will fill that plant up with people,” Gossett said. “Are we going to fill it up with people who live around there or are they going to move from the Midwest or the Northeast?”

No time lines? ‘How serious are you?’

Advocates of the school districts that sued the state in 1993 for more money wanted to include target dates for enacting other changes – for example, improving academic performance and teacher recruitment, and oversight of school districts.

More than two decades have passed since more than three dozen school districts sued the state, saying they could not provide students with an adequate education.

"If you’re building a house and you don’t have time lines and you don’t have budgets, how serious are you?" asked Terry Peterson, a consultant who was an education director under S.C. Gov. Dick Riley in the 1980s.

Peterson said he has worked on advisory panels that helped shape other major S.C. education laws. Each, he said, included recommended time lines.

“Why not hold the General Assembly accountable?” asked state Rep. Jerry Govan, D-Orangeburg, pushing for a time line. “That’s what the Supreme Court was trying to do, in saying we need to do something.”

But Republicans on the panel questioned whether the report needed to include a specific time line.

S.C. Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, a Republican and former state representative, promised her “full commitment” to pushing the education reforms.

But, she said, a time line could slow progress if legislators think a deadline is being forced upon them.

“We’re not waiting,” Spearman said. “Much of this is already underway. I don’t want to do anything that might give pause to General Assembly members to say, ‘Oh, well we can’t do it by then, so we’re not going to do it.’ ”

That is how lawmakers reacted when the state’s highest court tried to guide the legislative process.

In November 2014, the Supreme Court ordered lawmakers and education leaders to work together to fix a series of education problems – from improving academic performance and the quality of teachers in rural schools to fixing transportation and facilities woes.

Earlier this year, the court gave lawmakers a time line for coming up with legislation to address its concerns. However, after push back from lawmakers, the school districts that sued the state and the court agreed to throw out the deadlines.

After Wednesday’s vote, David Longshore, a former Orangeburg schools superintendent who is on the House panel, said he was disappointed the panel rejected setting dates for more actions. But he said he understood the fear of some on the panel that setting deadlines would hurt the effort to build coalitions to pass legislation.

“But look through our lens: We’re 20 years down the road.”

This story was originally published December 16, 2015 at 4:48 PM with the headline "SC House panel OKs education ‘fix’ but few target dates for action."