McMaster’s plan to fund SC private schools represents a wasted opportunity

Recently in the midst of a nasty presidential campaign season, President Donald Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos here to South Carolina.

They didn’t come to bring much needed additional COVID-19 testing kits and protective equipment; rather, they came for a quick campaign stop and photo opportunity.

While a pandemic kills South Carolinians at increasing rates every day, our national leaders stopped by our state just to push a political agenda.

And Gov. Henry McMaster has not helped matters.

Real leadership needed

McMaster and some Republican legislators recently held a press conference to demand that all of South Carolina’s public schools be open for regular, in-person instruction five days a week. But while doing this, they offered no solutions and promised no support for extra funding for measures to keep students, teachers and staff healthy.

Then just days later McMaster held another press conference — this one to announce the allocation of $32 million of taxpayer money to private schools; in effect, McMaster’s plan calls for using 67% of the money in his emergency relief fund to support private institutions.

The reality is that McMaster used this pandemic to further the Trump administration’s national political campaign agenda.

There are 46 state senators in South Carolina: Could you imagine what the reaction would be if each of us seized on this public health crisis to advance each of our particular causes? Yet that’s exactly what McMaster has done by playing politics in a pandemic at the expense of public schools.

We need real leadership bringing us together and channeling all available resources to end this pandemic.

Of McMaster’s $48 million allotment, he is allocating $32 million for 5,000 private school students; meanwhile, the remaining 750,000 public school students get to split the rest. Again, these are public tax dollars — and the governor could have used this money in a variety of other ways.

What we need

He could have raised teacher pay, which is something he said he would do last December when he promised teachers a $3,000 pay raise in his 2020 executive budget. Yet we are now in the new fiscal 2020-21 budget year and teachers have received nothing; they have been told to wait until after the COVID-19 crisis.

McMaster could have used this $32 million to provide hazardous duty pay to the thousands of critical workers who have continued to work throughout this health crisis.

We have a state law that requires that we spend at least $3,164 per pupil in base student cost, yet South Carolina is currently underfunding this at $2,489 per student. If McMaster had decided to use some of the fund money to finance this required cost, we could have decreased class sizes and gotten better supplies in our classrooms.

Or McMaster could have simply advocated for using the funds to meet the other real needs facing South Carolina as we deal with COVID-19 while seeking to reopen schools.

Among other things we need:

▪ More funding for increased Department of Health and Environmental Control staff to process test results in a quicker fashion.

▪ More test kits and more protective equipment for testing.

▪ More plexiglass dividers to enforce social distancing in classrooms.

▪ More school social workers to help find our lost students.

▪ More high-speed internet in rural areas.

▪ Reduced class sizes.

Instead McMaster decided to use our tax dollars to fund private schools that aren’t required to:

▪ Provide full face-to-face instruction (which is what McMaster is demanding from our public schools).

▪ Provide the same state assessments as public schools.

▪ Publish the same accountability data that public schools are obligated to reveal.

The truth is that we have no way of tracking the success of private schools, yet they get our public tax dollars.

There is a time for political campaigning, and there is a time for putting all divisions aside so we can address the crisis facing us.

We need to stand together and keep South Carolina safe.

State Sen. Mike Fanning represents District 17, which includes Chester, Fairfield and York counties. He is a longtime educator.

This story was originally published July 28, 2020 at 8:58 AM.