Editorials from around South Carolina: Hammond shooting video, Spring Valley High School incident, standardized test scores
Police video
It would be nice to be able to write that once the State Law Enforcement Division released an important dashcam video of a police-involved shooting in Seneca that all the questions were answered and the community now has a clear picture of what happened in a Hardee’s parking lot on July 26 and why.
But that’s not the case.
The public finally has the video — much too late. But it is left with many more questions that deserve to be answered.
For three months, SLED refused to release the video that should have been shown to the public much sooner. The video is a public record that needed to be shown to the taxpayers who pay police salaries, the people whom police are paid to protect and, most importantly, the family of Zachary Hammond, who was shot and killed by Seneca Police Lt. Mark Tiller.
That the video was not promptly released does not reflect well upon either SLED or the Seneca Police Department. …
As we wrote in an editorial shortly after the lawsuit was filed, “many questions that surround (Hammond’s) death most likely could be cleared up by the police dash camera videos from that deadly encounter.”
Most troubling, the video does not, as we had hoped, answer many of those questions. In fact, it raises many more that should be explored. For instance: Do police receive adequate training for high-pressure situations? What state laws define when and how officers should apply force? Who should rightly decide whether a police officer acted according to those state laws?
School discipline
Police are not educators. They are not trained to teach children or to maintain the discipline necessary in a classroom. They are trained to ensure public safety and to handle criminals.
That’s important to remember in the wake of an incident at Spring Valley High School that made national news last week. A Richland County sheriff’s deputy was fired after he flipped a student backward over her desk and threw her across the classroom floor.
It is impossible to justify the amount of force used on this child. Yes, she had disobeyed her teacher and a school administrator, and she was being disruptive in the classroom. But that makes her a disobedient student, not a criminal.
She should have been dealt with by school officials, who should not have called the police, even in the form of a school resource officer. …
We put resource officers in our schools to protect children, not to serve as bouncers.
Standardized tests
There isn’t much to rejoice about after seeing recently released standardized test scores for South Carolina students.
On the newly administered ACT exam, no school district in the state met the benchmarks in the four subjects viewed as first-year college courses, based on the average performance. …
These mandated tests, which try to show how well students, and even more broadly, entire schools, are performing, can’t paint a complete picture of the overall performance of either. A number of higher education institutions have actually dropped requirements that freshman applicants must submit SAT or ACT test scores for admissions purposes. Furman University and Presbyterian College in South Carolina, for instance, have adopted some form of test-optional admissions.
It’s important to recognize that too much of a focus on standardized tests can consume valuable class time and also force teachers not to be creative in the classroom.
However, with this new battery of tests in place, it can help provide a clearer picture of how well students in South Carolina are performing compared to the rest of the nation.
This story was originally published November 2, 2015 at 2:05 PM with the headline "Editorials from around South Carolina: Hammond shooting video, Spring Valley High School incident, standardized test scores."