Bill allowing state to dissolve boards of failing SC schools close to becoming law
The South Carolina House on Thursday passed a bill that would permit the state superintendent to remove local school boards in chronically low-performing districts and take control of those districts indefinitely in an effort to turn them around.
The bill, which expands and formalizes the existing process by which the state schools chief can take over struggling schools or entire districts, passed 78-25.
It requires one more perfunctory vote before being sent back to the Senate, which overwhelmingly approved a slightly different version of the bill in February.
The Senate will have the option to concur with the House’s changes to the bill, amend it further or conference with the House to resolve the differences. If the Senate concurs with the House’s amendment, the bill would go to the governor’s desk for his signature.
A spokesman for Gov. Henry McMaster said the governor would need to review the final version of the bill before deciding whether to sign it.
The legislation, which has been pushed by the South Carolina Department of Education, represents the state’s latest attempt to improve and sustain academic achievement in South Carolina’s lowest performing public schools, which are typically in high poverty areas.
While the state schools chief may currently take over schools or entire districts under South Carolina law — and has done so in Allendale, Florence 4 and Williamsburg over the past four years — she cannot fire school boards and lacks a process for returning districts to local control.
This bill, which contains language from an omnibus education bill that stalled last year, would grant the state superintendent greater control over the controversial district takeover process by allowing her to dissolve local boards, which state education officials said often try to interfere with the state’s transformation efforts, and ensure the same leaders don’t immediately return to power after the state cedes authority back to local control.
The legislation would allow the state superintendent, with the state Board of Education’s consent, to declare that a state-of-education emergency exists in schools or entire districts that fail to hit certain benchmarks.
The emergency designation would trigger the dissolution of the local school board and initiate a state-led transformation process that would last a minimum of six years, but could drag on longer with the state board’s consent.
In that process, once a state-controlled district hits annual improvement targets for a minimum of three consecutive years, leadership of the district would transition to a five-member interim board composed of state-appointed members who live in the district.
The interim board must serve for a minimum of three years before the state Board of Education can vote to end the emergency declaration and begin the process of returning control to locally elected board members.
If the bill is signed into law, it would go into effect July 1, 2022, and would only take into consideration a district’s subsequent academic performance, said Rep. Raye Felder, R-York, a sponsor of the House bill. That means the earliest the state superintendent could remove a district’s board for chronic student underperformance would be 2025.
Accountability vs. autonomy
Supporters of the bill say the state is obligated to intervene and try its best to turn around districts that repeatedly fail students because all South Carolinians should be guaranteed a quality education.
“It’s our responsibility to speak up for the 780,000 kids that are in our schools,” Education spokesman Ryan Brown said earlier this month. ‘We have an obligation to do that.”
Opponents, on the other hand, argue it’s unfair to remove democratically elected officials over their districts’ performance while ignoring the systemic problems that have contributed to its struggles.
“We have not provided all of the school districts in our state with the same level of resources, programs, teachers, tax bases. It’s just not what we do. It’s not what we have done,” Rep. Wendy Brawley, D-Richland, said Thursday. “We can continue to fool ourselves and keep saying to the school districts and to the school boards, this is your problem, you did it, we don’t like you, you’re incompetent, we’re going to remove you. Or we can honestly look at what we have done in this body to contribute to where we are now. It is highly unfair to hold a person accountable and responsible when they had no ability to change their circumstance.”
Rep. Cezar McKnight, a Williamsburg Democrat, said he understood well the funding difficulties that rural districts face, but said they shouldn’t be used to excuse incompetent leadership.
McKnight, who spoke passionately Thursday about the need for school board accountability legislation, said a few years ago he and other members of the Williamsburg County delegation were rebuffed by local board members after offering to help them through the district’s severe fiscal and academic challenges.
State Superintendent Molly Spearman took over day-to-day operations of Williamsburg County schools in 2018, due to its mismanagement of federal money and consistently low student test scores, and retains control to this day.
McKnight said things had improved since the state came in and spoke highly of the current board, but said he didn’t believe it was acceptable to stand by when school officials aren’t doing their jobs.
“I will not be party to protecting people on school boards who aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do,” he said. “You either step up or step off. And I’ll support any legislation that supports that.”
But removing duly elected officials, especially ones in areas with large minority populations, runs the risk of violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, the South Carolina School Boards Association argues.
An analysis by the organization, which opposes the legislation, found that five of the six school districts in South Carolina that meet the bill’s criteria for state takeover due to chronic underperformance have higher percentages of both nonwhite voters and Black school board members than the state average.
If the six districts identified — Allendale, Colleton, Florence 4, Hampton 2, Lexington 4 and Marion — had their school boards dissolved, nonwhite voters would be negatively impacted at 2.35 times the rate of white voters, according to the analysis.
“We do not support removal of locally elected school boards and disenfranchising voters.,” SCSBA executive director Scott Price said Thursday. “Ultimately, it is and will continue to be our goal under this new law that no school district is taken over by the state and that no school board faces removal.”
Price said he believes the state could face a legal challenge down the road if it attempts to act on the bill and dissolve an elected school board.
He said he also thought the legislation unfairly singled out school board members by making them subject to removal for purported poor performance when no other officials in South Carolina at any level of government can be removed for that reason.
Lawmakers who oppose the bill have raised the same point, asking why local board members should face removal from office for failing students when the state superintendent would suffer no repercussions were her interventions not to succeed.
“I worry about us being so regimented on what will happen to (the students) and to the district and to the elected officials, but then nothing really happens once the state takes over, if they still continue to struggle,” Brawley said Thursday. “I think that’s a missed opportunity for us to really figure out, how do we help those districts and help those rural schools if there’s not going to be the same level of accountability after the takeover?”
State education officials deny that the dissolution of elected school boards violates any constitutional provisions, and said board members should be held to a higher standard than other elected officials because of the critical role education plays in shaping young people’s lives.
Brown, the Education spokesman, said he supported accountability for the state schools chief, but couldn’t envision a scenario in which the state’s turnaround efforts fail.
“Failure would be inexcusable,” he said earlier this month. “I don’t know how you would fail when you have people who know what needs to be done and have the tools and resources to do it.”
How the Senate and House versions of the bill differ
The differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill are minimal, and deal with the conditions that qualify a school or district for state takeover and the composition of its interim board.
Both bills allow the state superintendent to take over schools or districts deemed to be “chronically underperforming,” as well as those that lose accreditation, fail to submit suitable turnaround plans after being identified as underperforming or are embroiled in financial crises.
Following the adoption of an amendment to the House bill Thursday, both bills now link underperformance to the annual school report card. An overall rating of unsatisfactory or below average on the annual school report card qualifies a school as underperforming.
Because annual report cards have not always been issued, the House bill specifies that in years when the state does not issue report cards, the same metrics used to create the report card should be used to assess districts.
“Chronic underperformance,” which is grounds for state takeover, is defined as an unsatisfactory rating on the annual school report card for three straight years and, in the House’s case, five of the last seven years.
Both bills specify that the state superintendent, the local legislative delegation and the governor would appoint interim board members, but they differ in how many seats each entity would select.
The House would have the state superintendent appoint three of the five seats, with the local legislative delegation and governor each appointing one. The Senate wants the local legislative delegation to appoint three seats and the state superintendent and governor to choose one each.
This story was originally published April 29, 2021 at 1:22 PM.