Back to School/Progress of School District

August 15, 2006: Our speaker was Nancy McGinley, second in command of the Charleston County School District (CCSD). Ms. McGinley delivered a very informative speech that updated the club on the Charleston Plan for Excellence three years into the Superintendent’s tenure; illustrated how the CCSD’s progress was tied to national education goals; and related their challenges for the 2006-07 school year. She was passionate in stating the need to always view education in a social context. Her experiences lead her to believe any community’s health may be measured by the efforts and resources it puts into educating their children. “Charleston has a great opportunity; we are in a roll analogous to the civil rights movement.”

Ms. McGinley stated curriculum improvement was her number one goal. The enablers for improvement are sound financial/business practices, increased accountability, integrated public engagements that create allegiances/partners, and best practices for safe, orderly schools.

In order to combat the increasing dropout percentage (up 2.2% between 2000-01 and 2002-03) CCSD is creating a continuum of care to help meet the needs of the full spectrum of children. One size does not fit all. The first level is Preventative Programs to reinforce positive behavior and reward accomplishment. The second is Intervention Programs that will attempt to reverse any negative trend before it becomes acute. The third is Rehabilitative Programs which are designed to isolate children with strong dropout characteristics and provide individually tailored help. These programs are critical to reverse the trend that shows not only is the Charleston rate higher than Greenville and Berkley counties but theirs is decreasing while Charleston county continues to increase. The target grade for dropout prevention is ninth grade.

Ms. McGinley stated that the CCSD continues to stick with the key elements of the Plan for Excellence: coherent curriculum, benchmark testing, and differentiated instruction. She expounded on the testing stating “we check three times a year which facilitates tailoring the differentiated instruction.” There are impediments to optimizing the testing results. When the testing shows a students not in the correct class for their knowledge level there is a lack of alternative placement options. CCSD has just one percent opportunity as compared to five-ten percent nationwide. “We’ve gone to great lengths to help this situation” stated Ms. McGinley. In November 2006 we will outsource to Community Education Partners to increase our placement options. That combined with the Accountability Court Program we implemented in 2005-06 we should start seeing results. The court requires parents to attend parenting courts with their children/students. The third element, differentiated instruction, includes academic intervention which combines intense literacy and math classes with behavior modification.

Ms. McGinley ended her talk using a comparison of CCSD standardized testing scores with seven other counties nationally. The emphasis was not on the comparative numbers, but on the trends between grades 3, 5, and 8. Testing scores drop dramatically. She summarized, “in CCSD we see children of all economic backgrounds test about the same through grade 3 and then drop off dramatically after that.” “Those counties around the nation who maintain higher standardized scores teach concepts and have a better distribution of nationally certified school teachers throughout the entire district…we must move to do the same.”

Submitted by Bill Crowe, Keyway Committee