The Missing Piece

This week, the Charleston County Legislative Delegation, made up of 14 state representatives and six state senators, will select the newest member of the county’s School Board.
For the second time in two years, a West Ashley boardmember has stepped down, leaving a piece missing from the countywide board.
This time it was retired corporate executive John Barter, who has left the board to take a pro bono job as the chief operating officer of his undergraduate alma mater, Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala.
Whomever the local delegation selects this week, they will still have to be approved by Gov. Nikki Haley, and will only be able serve the remainder of Barter’s tenure, and would have to run for reelection in November.
Still, an even dozen candidates have stepped forward for consideration – Robert Ray Black, Howard Comen, Edward Fennell, Charles Fox, Charles Glover, Elisabeth Hills, Ian Kay, Burnet Mendelsohn, Anne Sbrocci, Troy Strother, Carol Tempel and Emerson Tripp Wiles.
Despite wincing from a recent trip to the dentist that left half of his face numb, Barter agreed to talk extensively about the qualities whoever replaces him will need to have.
Two qualities Barter said are needed are a deep passion about education, and experience working in a setting where a lot of money gets spent. Barter said many people don’t realize that it is “basically a $500 million-a-year corporation.”
That experience with financial matters, Barter said, is the missing piece in most people who have considered running in the past.
Without that piece, he said, oftentimes if they get on the board, they overstep their roles and meddle too directly with school management and the district’s administration, instead of focusing on policy.
State Rep. Leon Stavrinakis (D-Charleston), who sits on the delegation, said that whatever name emerges as the recommended appointee, that person should be an ardent supporter of public education, and “not serve on the board with a flamethrower.”
The last thing the county needs, said Stavrinakis, a local attorney who previously chaired County Council during his seven-year tenure on that body, is someone with an “anti-public education agenda. Don’t tell me everything is broken – fix it.”
Many observers have noted that the School Board has victimized its own effectiveness throughout the years with infighting. And Stavrinakis isn’t alone in wanting that to end.
Current School Board chairwoman Cindy Bohn Coats praised Stavrinakis’ positions and statements, saying that board members need to be able to work with others and find solutions facing the district, often with people they don’t agree with or enjoy.
Bohn Coats also agreed with Barter’s assessment of the fiscal and financial naïveté many members and hopefuls have brought with them to the political process.
Currently, according to the chairwoman, the school district employs close to 5,000 teachers and staff, serves close to 45,000 students, and has more than 80 schools and facilities in an impressive number of municipalities throughout the county.
As a result, the job of being a board member, Coats Bohn, is both hard and difficult, and that some members have wanted the process “spoon-fed” to them. And that doesn’t work.
While the district has remade its physical image over the past decade, with hundreds of millions being borrowed to build schools in seemingly every nook and cranny in the county, Barter said the job is far from done.
And his replacement better be ready for that, and that a recent report pegged the metro areas growth potential topping out at 1 million within the next decade.
The biggest issue facing all future board members, according to Barter, is closing the achievement gap between richer and poorer students, a demarcation that too often follows racial lines.
“Everybody wants to close that gap, but the challenge is how to do it, said Barter, who added that the only thing he knows about a possible solution is that “nothing is free — it’s gonna cost.”