Editorials from around South Carolina: dam safety, teacher evaluations, highway safety

Upgrade dam program

At an additional cost of $1.8 million per year, it is difficult to envision a rationale for South Carolina to not improve its dam safety program in the wake of last fall’s torrential rains that caused nearly three dozen dams to fail.

A bill presented by South Carolina Speaker of the House Jay Lucas would nearly quadruple the budget for the program that’s administered by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, according to a report by The State newspaper. The department’s current budget is about $470,000, and it is woefully inadequate.

It is hard to imagine that this legislation would not get the support it deserves. The total cost to recover from the October deluge exceeds $1 billion. Certainly only a fraction of that would have been prevented had the dams been inspected more routinely, but it seems worth the relatively small cost to make the dams safer. …

Once Lucas’ bill is passed, the Legislature and the governor need to follow through with funding.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Nikki Haley acknowledged after the flood that there’s a funding gap in the agency and said that there would likely be more money for the program in the executive budget. That needs to happen.

The reality is, South Carolina gets heavy rains throughout the year. The 1,000-year rain might have been a freak occurrence, but it doesn’t mean the state shouldn’t be prepared for the next significant rainfall. Ensuring the state’s dams are properly inspected, and that more of them are inspected, is simply common sense

Make teacher evaluations meaningful

(S.C. Education Superintendent Molly) Spearman’s office says instead of “high-stakes testing,” student growth will be measured throughout the year as part of teachers’ evaluation.

Clearly students should be tested during the year to ensure that they are learning adequately. And clearly their progress on those tests is in part a reflection of their teachers’ performance.

But the system must ensure that testing throughout the year is rigorous and that it measures how well each student is learning. And “high-stakes” tests must not be disregarded, as they are, after all, an indication of student progress. At the end of the year, if a student has not shown expected progress, his teacher should be held partly accountable.

Teachers have traditionally been assessed by their principals and peers. That would be a bit like a company deciding what to pay a salesman based on how his coworkers think he’s done instead of how much he has sold.

Buckle up

The S.C. Department of Public Safety reports that as of Dec. 20, 918 people have been killed on South Carolina highways, compared to 786 deaths during the same time period in 2014.

That is an increase of nearly 17 percent, and deaths are up in every category of accident.

Through midnight Dec 20, 113 pedestrians have died compared to 104 in 2014, 128 motorcyclists have died compared to 87 and 14 bicyclists have died compared to 14.

And in the face of the danger, too many people continue ignoring the single most important thing they can do to stay alive in a crash: wearing a seat belt. SCDPS reports that of the 612 motor vehicle occupants who have died in 2015, 312 were not wearing seat belts. Statistically, up to half of the 312 would be alive today if they had buckled up.

To be certain, there is something that just does not hit home about numbers and statistics. Tell people that 2-1/2 people a day are dying on the roads and the impact is not as dramatic as asking a person to weigh the question posed in an SCDPS campaign: How many traffic fatalities are acceptable in your family?

The answer is zero but too many people are finding themselves dealing with the loss of friends and family.

This story was originally published December 28, 2015 at 2:58 PM with the headline "Editorials from around South Carolina: dam safety, teacher evaluations, highway safety."