COLOMBIA – In 2018, voters vehemently rejected the idea of letting the governor of South Carolina choose the superintendent of state schools.
But that was before the pandemic.
Republican Party leaders want to try again, thinking that voters’ frustrations with remote learning will reverse the outcome.
Legislation sponsored by Mayor Jay Lucas would ask voters in November 2022 whether they want to continue electing the head of the state’s K-12 public schools or let the governor choose. The legislature must put the issue to a vote, since changing the state constitution requires voter approval.
A 3-2 vote on February 25, along the party lines, advanced Lucas’s bill to the House Judiciary Committee. The vote, a foregone conclusion, followed the testimony of a single opponent. Legislators did not bother to debate this alone.
Patrick Kelly, representing the state’s largest teacher advocacy association, questioned why she was returning.
“People have already spoken conclusively about this,” said the high school history professor and lobbyist at the Palmetto State Teachers’ Association. “We must trust people in this state.”
He noted that it was nowhere near in November 2018, when 60 percent of voters said “no” to the proposed constitutional amendment, representing a gap of almost 332,000 votes.
It was a dizzying defeat for an idea that Republican Party governors have been fighting for since Mark Sanford took office in 2003. Supporters were so confident that she would pass that they didn’t even organize to campaign until a week before the election.
Asked why he wanted to try again so soon, Lucas told The Post and Courier that it is never a bad idea “to ask South Carolina voters to evaluate a decision as critical as who will lead public education in the state. their education. system. ”
But he acknowledged that the pandemic is also a factor.
“I also believe that COVID-19 revealed significant shortcomings in public education and that there was a lack of response to those shortcomings,” said Lucas. “I think the pandemic has taught us that a singular focus is needed.”
The pandemic certainly highlighted the governor’s lack of authority over how schools in South Carolina function, even with their emergency powers. Governor Henry McMaster said repeatedly that if he could demand that all K-12 public schools offer an entire week of face-to-face learning, he would. But he cannot.
Instead, he has been calling on all districts to do so since last July, when he asked Spearman, a Republican colleague, to support him in law enforcement. But autonomous school councils elected locally across the state readily ignored him, citing a summer peak in the COVID-19 cases, and Spearman approved plans to reopen without the option.
At the time, she said, she didn’t know if it would be safe to open.
But research, both in South Carolina and elsewhere, has convinced that its schools can reopen safely, even with widespread COVID-19 cases. His home in Saluda County is among school districts that have been operating on weekdays since the beginning of the school year.
And she has had some success in the past two months in pressing tough school boards to offer five days in the classroom. On February 26, only one of the state’s 79 traditional school districts operated only online.
Kelly says the pandemic shows why the head of state schools should remain an elected office, rather than the other way around.
If voters had said “yes” in 2018, “there is a chance that our Department of Education faced this crisis with a leadership vacuum – a situation that would have amplified the negative effects of this pandemic on our students,” he said, noting the The state’s public health agency hasn’t had a permanent director in the past nine months.
Contrary to the proposal that would have the state superintendent answer directly to the governor, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control is not a government agency. But the governor appoints all members of the council.
“Our schools have benefited from the leadership of a superintendent with a lifetime of experience in education,” including as a music teacher in Saluda County, Kelly said. “Voters are well equipped to choose individuals for the position of state superintendent who have the qualifications and experience necessary to thrive in that position.”
As for Spearman, she not only supported the 2018 election referendum, but was among the few who actively campaigned for him. She is not going to put that effort into it again.
She “respects the wishes of voters who overwhelmingly rejected their nomination,” said spokesman Ryan Brown.
The Chamber will almost certainly pass the legislation. After all, it’s the speaker’s account. And the House passed it several times before the senators, who had previously blocked efforts, reversed the course and approved in May 2018 to put it to the vote.
This gave McMaster a victory that eluded his predecessors – at least, by letting voters decide. But closing doesn’t count.
Whether this could pass the Senate this time is not known.
follow Seanna Adcox on Twitter at @seannaadcox_pc.