|
Bud Ferillo - Georgetown Times
Feb. 22, 2009
I am glad that the issue of funding South Carolina's public schools is receiving healthy discussion in the Georgetown Times and applaud the paper's recent editorial supporting the constitutional amendment to install "high quality education" as South Carolina's public education standard in place of "minimally adequate education."
Our state's public school system has been woefully under-funded for decades and the problem has only worsened when the Legislature repealed residential property taxes and replaced the declining sales tax as the principal state source for school funding.
Siphoning off scarce tax dollars to fund vouchers or tax credits for families who choose to send their children to private schools is a bad idea to start with and an especially dangerous one in view of the state's diminishing sales tax revenues.
What South Carolina needs is a first class public education system that will equip future generations with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy. Our nation, as a whole, is falling behind our global economic competitors in providing quality education and we are facing a bleak future because of it.
South Carolina must finally come to grips with its difficult past, like the one shaped in our present state constitution by Gov. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman to create the deplorable system of separate and unequal education.
Today's school children are sentenced to schools that have been unequally and inadequately funded from day one.
As our economy improves, we must put public education ahead of all other state responsibilities and insure that our education system aspire to high quality, unless of course you want to settle for "Minimally Adequate" as our state standard and the signpost to our future.
Bud Ferillo
-Mr. Ferillo is producer and director of the film "Corridor of Shame" about South Carolina schools.
|
Media Center 
