Stuck In The ‘Middle’

All Tamara Avery wants is what’s best for her five-year-old son, Tripp, and if that ends up helping all of West Ashley, then all the better.
When it came time to enroll Tripp in kindergarten, Tamara and her husband, a local member of law enforcement, wanted to send Tripp to the same school where all the kids he grew up with in his daycare were headed, Drayton Hall Elementary.
But they found out they lived on the line of the district, slated to attend another elementary school. So, they applied for a waiver for him to attend. The waiver was denied, because there wasn’t enough space at the school.
So they packed up the family, which included younger twin daughters, moved into the district, and rented an a house.
And then, last year, Tamara, who works for a local Habitat for Humanity, caught wind of a plan to merge two existing middle schools into one mega-middle school, where her son would be zoned to go.
A native of Clinton, she did a little research and found out that those two schools, St. Andrews and West Ashley, didn’t have the best reputations. The middle school options in this part of town were “teetering off,” said School Boardmember Michael Miller.
“Currently, C.E. Williams is the choice middle school,” said Miller, adding that St. Andrews and West Ashley had been left “to fend for themselves” in years past by the district.
Tamara saw her son’s educational options narrow, again.
She had already found out that picking an elementary and going to an elementary were two different things. Now, with charter schools like Orange Grove and magnets like Ashley River Creative Arts only accepting so many kids, she felt hemmed in.
There will be application deadlines in the future, and lotteries to win, before Tripp goes to middle school, or, she fears, the cost of private school might take a big bite out of her family’s quality of life.
“It just seems like the only way to get a good education is to win the lottery, or hear from other parents how to file the right applications so you can get in there,” said Tamara, who worries how the lower-income families she helps for a living can manage to jump through all those hoops with so much already dragging at them.
So, she got involved again. She spoke at public meetings. She scoured websites. She met with Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. She organized a petition drive.
She began calling the school district to find out about the plan with, she said, limited success. She tried calling school board members, with limited success.
Her fire isn’t that surprising considering the crossroads public education has taken this country to. It was a way off the farm, out of poverty, and thanks to the Civil Rights movement, a way to equality.
Gov. Nikki Haley is fighting for a new funding wrinkle in public K-12 education so that kids in poorer districts can receive the same educational opportunities as kids in the richer ones.
National school-choice watchdogs warn that the proliferation of charter schools and magnets lead to re-segregation of school districts – a potentially touchy subject in local education circles, thanks to a failed attempt to completely integrate schools under something called the Act of Consolidation.
One local magnet has come under fire for having allowed prospective parents to submit their business address to increase the chances of their kid’s acceptance.
And every time a school is torn down, or combined with another while a school is rebuilt, neighborhoods complain about a lost sense of place or community, be it at Chicora Elementary in a rough and tumble portion of North Charleston, or Laing Middle in relatively ritzier Mt. Pleasant.
In late February, it was over.
The School Board had voted on a plan that included on combining the two middle schools, tearing down St. Andrews, and creating a new advanced placement program for 50-100 students in the sixth grade, with more to follow in coming years.
The board allocated $3.4 million to upfit West Ashley, which began life as a high school, and to wait for another school bond referendum to come along to build a new and improved C.E. Williams on 40 already-purchased acres adjacent to the current West Ashley High.
St. Andrews would be torn down, replaced, in the future, with a new Stono Park Elementary.
But that’s just bricks and mortar, dollars and engineering. The plan, according to Paul Padron, the school district’s associate superintendent in charge of all things middle school, is to create a school there “that I’d want my grandkids to go to.”
Padron envisions enrollment swelling to 900 kids, “hog heaven,” he calls it, where per-pupil funding allocations allow for increased flexibility in staffing and offerings for students. When he ran the creation of the new Haut Gap Middle on Johns Island, he saw rundown facilities and a “persistently dangerous” school transformed into a hybrid magnet that now pulls kids from West Ashley.
Padron has committed to be the principal of the West Ashley Middle next year, culling a team comprised of current principals and assistant principals to form what he called his “leadership team.”
The point “man” on the team is a name well known in West Ashley – Mary Runyon, the longtime principal at the high school. Runyon announced to her staff two weeks ago that she would be leaving to be the “project manager” of the merger.
Padron hopes that within the near future, West Ashley will have two excellent middle schools.
Will that satisfy Tamara? Hard to tell; check back in 2020 when little Tripp enters sixth grade.