State’s leaders continue to fail us on many fronts

With all the hub-bub surrounding the transition from one national administration to another, it’s easy to lose sight of the ongoing lack of leadership in the South Carolina governor’s office and the General Assembly in at least three areas of major concern.

The sad state of educational funding in South Carolina is the first of these. The General Assembly has significantly underfunded per-pupil contributions required by the Education Finance Act for years, and even with more money coming from statewide sales tax collections, the system’s continuing reliance upon property taxes results in an inherent imbalance in the funding available to poor, mostly rural school districts.

The consequence is twofold: Teachers make less, and poorer school districts have huge problems attracting qualified teachers.

The state already has difficulty attracting enough teachers: It is training 500 teachers a year through its program of alternative certification for educators because our teacher-education programs fall that much short of supplying teachers for each year’s vacancies.

The second area of concern is that the state’s employees are being required to pay an increasing share of their paychecks into the Retirement System for the sixth consecutive year. Employees’ contributions will now range from 9.2 percent to 9.7 percent of their salaries, a two-thirds larger share than the national average.

Virtually no one in a position of leadership in state government on either side of the political aisle has addressed this issue in anything like a responsible way. Instead legislators and policymakers “study” the problem, while continuing to assume that state investments will return an unrealistic 7.5 percent.

Finally, South Carolinians should be concerned about the state’s infrastructure. My wife and I recently drove to Denver and back on the roads of eight different states, and without exception we found the roads in every one of them superior to our own, with fewer potholes, less rough and uneven pavement and fewer traffic disruptions due to ongoing repairs.

The problems are clear. The status quo has remained “quo” for too long; leaders possessing a genuine vision for the state’s future must emerge.