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TOWN MEETINGS ON SCHOOL FUNDING CONTINUE TONIGHT
Steve Morrison, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Abbeville v. South Carolina suit for school funding equity, will speak tonight in Orangeburg in the next of a series of town hall meetings on South Carolina's funding for public schools. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at Edisto Forks United Methodist Church on Highway 301 South and is open to the public.
Meetings featuring Morrison, lead attorney Carl Epps, former Governor Dick Riley and Wofford College President Bernie Dunlap have already been held in Florence, Anderson and Columbia. Additional town meetings are being coordinated in Charleston, Greenwood, Spartanburg, Rock Hill and Beaufort.
Morrison's presentation describes the present state of two South Carolinas, divided by economics and race. The division is due, Morrison says, to consistent, institutionalized under-funding of public schools by the state in 35 school districts where African-American students comprise the majority of public school enrollment.
The series is co-sponsored by a consortium of 88 organizations that first collaborated for the March for Education Equity in May, 2004. Each of the town hall meetings features the same format: a one-hour program of information regarding school funding, including a speaker and an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the ongoing school funding equity trial in Manning, and a one-hour small-group program wherein participants can discuss common questions related to school funding. Participants' responses and suggestions will be compiled, summarized and shared with others attending the town meetings as well as policy makers.
EDUCATION FIRST, NAACP JOIN FOR KING MARCH FOR EDUCATION
Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina chapter of NAACP, announced Monday that his organization will join with Education First to co-sponsor a March for Education and Justice on January 17, the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Events on King Day will include a prayer service at Mt. Zion Baptist Church at 8:30 a.m. before the 10 a.m. march to the State House. Speakers at the State House rally will include State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, former U.S. Secretary of Education and Governor Dick Riley, plaintiffs attorney Steve Morrison, the Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III and Bishop John Hurst Adams, who will deliver keynote remarks.
CLOSING ARGUMENTS, VIGIL SET FOR THURSDAY
Closing arguments by the plaintiffs in Abbeville v. South Carolina are set to begin at 9 a.m. Thursday, December 9, at the Clarendon County Courthouse in Manning. A silent vigil by plaintiffs and supporters will be held outside the courthouse from 1 to 1:30 p.m., when attorneys defending the state legislature will offer their closing arguments. Plaintiffs will have an additional half-hour for rebuttal to the state's arguments at 5 p.m.
In many respects, Abbeville v. South Carolina is tantamount to Briggs v. Elliott, the case that originated in the same courthouse in the 1950s and which was included in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the case which yielded the U.S. Supreme Court's historic decision in 1954 to desegregate schools. Active and retired educators, parents and community leaders who are able to attend Thursday's proceedings are urged to witness this equally historic occasion and to participate in the silent vigil in support of public schools.
CLOSING ARGUMENTS IN ABBEVILLE V. SOUTH CAROLINA
Education First, a consortium of more than 85 organizations promoting the full funding of quality public education in South Carolina, is sponsoring a series of town hall meetings across the state to raise local awareness of the need for education funding. Meetings have been held in Florence, Anderson, Columbia and Orangeburg, and more are being planned in Spartanburg, Greenwood, Charleston, Beaufort, Rock Hill and Aiken. At each meeting, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in Abbeville v. South Carolina has described the case as it has been presented to Judge Thomas Cooper at the Clarendon County Courthouse in Manning. Following is the presentation made by attorney Steve Morrison in Orangeburg in December, two nights before he and Epps offered their case’s closing arguments.
America is a contract, a promise, a covenant.
The compact among her people is called a Constitution. America’s dream is that all of her citizens will be educated, able to prosper in a democratic society and a free and open market. It is that covenant that we have brought to court, to have that covenant interpreted. What does it means when we promise to each other that we will educate all of our children?
In 1947, a group of people in Clarendon County, in a case called Briggs v. Elliott, went to the same courthouse and said, We want a school bus for our African-American children to ride to school. That’s all they wanted. They petitioned for a school bus.
That case was tried in South Carolina in the federal court in Charleston by Thurgood Marshall. At about the same time, Robert Carter tried a case called Brown v. Board of Education in Kansas, Oliver Hill tried a case in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the two other cases were tried by a team of lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Delaware. Those five cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court under the name of Brown v. Board of Education in 1953.
It was in large measure on the basis of our case from South Carolina that the Brown v. Board decision struck down separate but equal in the United States. That opened restaurants, buses, trains, hotels and businesses, and it created an atmosphere of opportunity. But in South Carolina, we have yet to realize the dream of an adequate education for every child.
We started this case in 1992, Abbeville v. South Carolina. We were thrown out of court in 1996. Judge Thomas Cooper said the Constitution only requires free and open schools, meaning a teacher with a piece of chalk in a building. The school is open, a child can go in, and that’s all the opportunity they need.
We got that decision reversed in 1999, and Chief Justice Ernest Finney wrote an opinion that will go down in the history of this state.
The Supreme Court said that each child is entitled to adequate and safe facilities, and the legislature must provide each child with the opportunity to acquire three things. Notice the genius of this position: The ability to read, write, and speak the English language, and knowledge of mathematics and physical science. Those are skills that each child can master as an individual, for himself.
Then, he said, you have to go further, to be able to function with other people: A fundamental knowledge of economics, social, and political systems, and of history and governmental processes. That means we can work together in a social system, work together to make money in an economic system, can function in a free and democratic society in a political system. We can approach our rights under government by understanding governmental processes, and we can understand our own history.
Then the Supreme Court took one step further: Academic and vocational skills. Beyond the individual skills of step one, and social/societal skills at step two, each child will receive the opportunity to acquire vocational skills necessary to work for a living and make money, and academic skills necessary to learn for a lifetime. Notice the and in that phrase: It means that a child will be able to think and do.
There are two fundamental thoughts in this case. One is that each child is entitled to these things. The other is that the beneficiary of this covenant is not just the child, but is all of us.
If we wanted to create an eternal standard, one that would stand up today and a hundred years from today, what might we say is the purpose of education in South Carolina? We’re asking the judge to say this: We will educate our children in such a way that they can take care of themselves, can take care of the people they love, can participate in a democratic society, and can compete in a free market. That’s an eternal standard for our covenant.
Notice that we’re not looking for a system of free and open private schools, or just for the rich, or just for suburban kids, or just for white children, or just for Protestant children, but for every child. The Constitution includes a mandatory clause: We shall do this for our children. The General Assembly has to provide our children with an education.
So why do we need this lawsuit? Here’s what the state is providing today. In my school districts, my children are not prepared for the next grade. In grades three through eight, every child takes the PACT test. In Allendale, 49% of my kids are not ready for the next grade level in math, 57% in English. In Hampton 2, 59% of my kids aren’t ready in math, 54% in English. In Lee County, 51% of my kids aren’t ready in math or in English. In Marion 7, it’s 52% not ready in math, 54% in English.
If 40% or 65% of our children are not ready for the next grade, what kind of an education are these children being provided by the state of South Carolina? And what’s the excuse for providing them that kind of education? Over and over again, we’ve told the judge: Test our children all you want, just give them a decent chance to pass the test.
So from these test scores, we see that our children are not being provided with a fair chance to succeed. Do you know what happens to a child who’s not ready for the third grade? He’s not ready for the fourth grade, for the fifth grade, for the sixth grade either, or any grade thereafter. What he’s ready for in the ninth grade is to drop out of school.
When fifty, sixty and seventy percent of our children in the plaintiffs’ districts are dropping out of school, we know that 65% of them will end up on public assistance. They can’t find a job because they’re not ready for a job. And 35% of our children end up incarcerated. Is there a return on investment for a child who winds up in prison?
There’s a Nobel Prize-winning study from the University of Chicago that says for every dollar you invest in public education, the state gets a six-dollar return. If we invest one dollar in educating a child in the plaintiffs’ districts, that child is going to deliver a six-dollar dividend to his community. They buy more cars and pay more car taxes. They improve their houses and pay more property taxes. They buy and sell more things and create more revenue from sales taxes. And they know how to function in government, so they pay more in service fees.
For every dollar we invest, there’s a six dollar return. For every dollar we don’t invest, there’s a child in jail or on welfare. One gives us a huge return on investment, and the other gives us no return at all.
Not only are our children not ready for school, but as they work through school, they fall further behind. Well, what are my kids getting? The data shows we have substantially fewer teachers with continuing contracts, teachers with experience. We have substantially fewer teachers with advanced degrees, substantially fewer teachers teaching in their field, and substantially lower salaries, but we have substantially higher teacher turnover.
What does that mean? It means my kids have the lowest-paid teachers, the highest teacher turnover, the fewest teachers with advanced degrees, the fewest teachers teaching on continuing contract, and they have the most teachers teaching out-of-field. And they’re getting test scores that show they’re not prepared for the next grade? Well, what did we expect?
Let’s provide my kids the same quality they’re getting in Irmo, or York, or Spartanburg or Greenville.
Who are the plaintiffs?
I told you my kids are poor. My kids are mostly poor and mostly black. I’m sure that’s no surprise. Eighty-nine percent of the kids in the plaintiffs’ district are minority, as opposed to 48% of the kids in the state’s public school system as a whole. And about 88% of my kids qualify for free and reduced lunch, compared to 55% statewide.
What else do we know about my districts?
My kids are from the country, not from the city, in some of the poorest and most isolated districts in the states. So South Carolina has created school districts with the highest minority populations, with poorest populations in the poorest communities. Then look at what the legislature has done to them systematically, consistently pushing expenses back to these districts: expenses for teacher benefits, expenses for transportation, expenses for capital costs and building schools. Do we need a little more time to fix the problem?
Statewide, 17.4% of schools are ranked unsatisfactory or below average, but 75% of schools in the plaintiffs’ districts are ranked unsatisfactory or below average. Do we need a little more time?
Over a three-year period, 87% of my schools were ranked unsatisfactory or below average at least once, and 79% were ranked unsatisfactory or below average all three years in a row. Do we need more time? We don’t need another year, another two years, another three years of this same-old, same-old.
Can the state honestly say, Let’s just stay the course on the Education Accountability Act, keep doing the same thing and expect our children to do better? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. Our children will not do better if we adults don’t do better for them.
When we create a covenant to educate our children, no matter where they are, who they are, how rich or poor they are, that covenant is ours to keep. We adults are the promise keepers.
Can we say we’re keeping our promise? Look at the dropout rates and tell me that. Sixty percent of students in Allendale drop out before graduation, 66% in Florence 4, 54% in Hampton 2, 67% in Lee County. Half to 70% of our kids are not being educated in such a way that they can move through school to graduation.
If we’re a company that intends to build a plant to make airplanes or cars and pharmaceuticals, and we need good, educated people to build our airplanes or cars or pharmaceuticals, are we going to build in Lee County? No. We’re probably not going to Dillon or Marion or Allendale or Orangeburg either.
Let’s look at Lee County. Its total assessed property value is $25 million. But it costs them $25 million to build a new high school. If they sold every piece of property they have at the assessed value, they could build one high school. But it’s not that they only need one high school, they also need middle schools and elementary schools. The state of South Carolina has to build more schools in Lee County; you can’t ask the people to pay more taxes in Lee County.
And what about Jasper County? Jasper County’s tax rate is among the highest six tax rates in South Carolina. For every mill, for every one-tenth of a penny that they tax their people, they raise $1,275. In Greenville, on the other hand, one mill raises $1.3 million. So do you just ask the people of Jasper County to tax themselves more, when they’re already taxing themselves at the sixth-highest rate in the state, and when the people of Greenville County are taxing themselves at the 84th-highest rate out of 86 school districts? Who’s got the money?
A company isn’t going to locate in Jasper and pay the sixth-highest tax rate when it can go to Greenville and pay the 84th-highest tax rate.
So what happens? We have a cycle of poverty and ignorance and despair which continues because no new business is going into Jasper.
That’s why we need a lawsuit, because all of our children are not being educated, because the promise to our children is not being kept.
In Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court wrote, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Look at this data. In Hampton County, white residents make up 45.5% of the population, but only 1.5% of the student population in public schools. In Lee County, white residents are 36.5% of the population, but only 6.5% of the student population. We have systematically re-segregated our schools in South Carolina. We’ve aggregated more black children into the schools that are inadequate and then refused to pay for them. White children in these counties are not in these school systems.
Rather than address these obvious issues, the state says, Let’s wait and see.
During Sen. John Matthews’s four days of testimony, we put up a chart that showed all the acts passed by the legislature from 1974 forward to 2004. We pointed out every time South Carolina had put on a Band-Aid here, a patch there, and failed to address the core problem.
The Education Finance Act – the basic act that funds South Carolina’s education – was designed in 1974 and implemented in 1977. We haven’t revised the way we fund education in South Carolina since before Microsoft was founded in 1978. We haven’t revised the system of funding for the Internet age, the computer age. Is it any wonder that it’s insufficient?
In 1983, Sen. Matthews and others pushed through the Education Improvement Act, which was supposed to provide an extra penny of state sales tax for approaching the problems like the problems in our poorest, most rural school districts. That money has now been sucked into the General Fund and used as General Fund money.
Not only do we have a nearly thirty-year-old funding formula, but we’re not even funding it fully. We’ve systematically under-funded it by $200 million to $600 million a year, depending on who you ask. The Education Oversight Commission presented a report saying that public schools were under-funded between $600 million to $2 billion a year, and that doesn’t count building schools.
Governor Miles McSweeney in 1903 said, “Yet the bare facts of the condition of the average school in some counties are shocking. If the Legislature will discharge its responsibility to the cause of education in its entirety in the State, there must be State aid to the public schools.”
There is a school building in Dillon County that was built in 1896, the year that Plessy v. Ferguson established separate but equal as a principle for railroad cars. The school’s bell tower has so much bat dung in it that the ceiling fell down onto the classroom below. Fortunately, there were no children in there when it fell. You can’t go in there, there’s such a bad smell.
Governor Coleman Blease in 1913 said, “If you will travel through the country and see the unclean, uncomfortable, ragged and unpatched – to express it in a word, most miserable looking buildings, that are called school houses, and not feel ashamed of what your State is doing for the education of her future citizens, then surely you have no sense of shame. Gentleman, I can not paint the picture too black – school houses with holes in the walls and floors and roofs, where children have to huddle together to keep warm; school houses so small and so crowded that children must be so close together they actually have to breathe into their lungs the breath which comes from the bodies of others.”
In 2003, a teacher testifying in this case told the court that she went up to the door of a kindergarten classroom that had 35 kids in it. It wasn’t very big. When she opened a door, a child fell out. He was leaning against the door.
In 1932, Superintendent James Hope told the legislature, “Until the problem is solved, South Carolina will never realize for her children the ideal that should be the goal in every democracy – equality of educational opportunity for every child.”
Do we need a little more time?
Governor Robert McNair said, “Despite our increased commitment to education, we know that only one of every two children who enters the first grade in South Carolina will graduate from high school. Statistics tell us that one out of every ten children entering the first grade is so poorly prepared he will repeat that grade.”
That was 1969. Today in Allendale, 57% of students drop out before the twelfth grade; in Hampton 2, it’s 62%. Back in 1969, it was only one of two students who dropped out. We’re not getting any better as we go forward. We don’t need a little more time.
Why hasn’t this been changed?
The children I represent are the children of the powerless. They only account for 15% of the population of South Carolina, so they have no political power. It’s up to us around the state to make the difference for them. They live on the I-95 corridor.
The parents of my kids get up early in the morning to go to work. A lot of them go to work at Hilton Head, at Myrtle Beach, at Beaufort. They’re making our beds, taking care of our tables, cleaning up our golf courses.
They leave before dawn for work, and they get home late at night, sometimes after going to a second job. Maybe there aren’t two parents at home. Maybe there are three, four, five children. Maybe Mom is working hard as she can work to put food on the table, shelter overhead, clothes on their kids’ backs, and people ask why she’s not helping them? People ask why she’s not buying them poster board at Wal-Mart when there’s not a Wal-Mart within 50 miles? People ask why those kids aren’t ready for the next grade?
And the governor wants to put parents in charge and offer choice? My mothers don’t have a choice. They’re exercising all the choice they can exercise just to get food, to get shelter, to get clothes.
When you get down to it and say I want my children to have choice, let’s go to Jasper County. If I want to get one of my kids up in the morning and get them over to Beaufort, because that’s where I’d have to send them, how would I get them there? I’d have to hire a taxi cab; Mama can’t take them over there. And how would I get them back at 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon when she’s working a full-time job? She can’t get them back.
Maybe we could send them to Savannah, where the teachers make $5,000 a year more. But Georgia won’t take them.
Well, let’s just give them a voucher and send them to the private school. Do you know what’s the private school in Jasper County, founded during the time of integration in 1971? It’s called the Robert E. Lee Academy and there’s a Confederate flag flying right outside of it this morning. My children aren’t welcome there.
So giving a voucher makes no sense, giving a tax credit makes no sense, “Putting Parents in Charge” makes no sense in the poorest and most rural school districts. What makes sense is fixing public education.
So how do you fix it? First, just fund it like you said you would in 1974. That’s a start. How about then you update your 1974 formula? How about weight that formula for the poorest and most rural school districts?
And in 1974, the state paid for 100% of teacher benefits. The fastest-rising cost of all is medical insurance. But instead of paying 100% of benefits for teachers, the state of South Carolina has told districts, We’ll just pay 60% and you make up the difference. In the poorest and most rural school districts, either you pay the medical insurance or you lose a teacher. What do you do? So you don’t build a new building, don’t buy new books.
So my kids have the oldest school books, the oldest school buses, the oldest laboratories, the least-adequate science materials. It’s because my districts have to pay the teachers’ medical insurance benefits, and transportation costs, and construction costs that the state pushed back to them. After sending those costs to the districts, the legislature sucked away from us the EAA money. And we all bought into a lottery so we’d have money for education, but is that money going to our poor, rural school districts? No.
If we want to change this picture, we have to attract and retain the greatest teachers for the greatest need. That may mean that a teacher in Hampton County gets paid a lot more money than you’d get paid to teach in Irmo or Rock Hill or Spartanburg. It may mean that when you go to Jasper County to teach, instead of earning $30,000, you earn $70,000. There’s nothing wrong with that; our kids deserve it and our kids need it.
If that’s what it takes to lift our kids out of this cycle of ignorance, poverty and despair, then where is the money better spent? Our children perform as well as anybody, no matter how poor they are. Not one witness said poor children can’t learn.
In 1984, Governor Dick Riley said, “Industrial development truly begins in the classroom. Being 50th in support of education sends a message: it tells potential industries that we don’t expect much from ourselves or our future. It says that Georgia and North Carolina have more confidence in their children than we do.”
Sen. Matthews testified that there are two kinds of southern states. There are states like Kentucky that move forward; states like North Carolina, where legislators had the political will to step up the funding to its poorest schools and most needy children; states like Georgia, which went beyond South Carolina in the past ten years.
Then he looked across the courtroom and said there are states like South Carolina, which just keep going further and further backward as people keep moving further ahead of them.
It’s a matter of political will, a matter of keeping the covenant, a matter of taking what God has given us and giving it to our children as we promised in our Constitution.
If we love our children, as we’ve said in our covenant in the Constitution, then we must educate them.
The covenant for education comes from 1868. Think about that. After the Civil War, African-Americans were freed in this state, and they took their place in the legislature. When they adopted a Constitution, second to being free, they said they wanted our Constitution to promise our children the right to an education. It is that covenant that we champion.
