BRACK: Two dumb ideas: Splitting the school district, offshore drilling

There are a lot of dumb ideas floating around these days, but we thought it was time to pick on two: breaking up the Charleston County School District and drilling for oil and gas off our shore.

First, the school district. Elizabeth Moffly, finally a former member of the district board, has the numbskull idea to break up Charleston’s admittedly large school district into several small districts. The county Republican Party, in a desperate attempt to get some kind of publicity and show relevance, will vote tonight on a resolution to do just that.

Moffly was as a destructive force while on the school board for years, taking up where the late John Graham Altman left off years earlier before he went to the legislature. Other than running for other offices while serving, about the only thing Moffly seems to have done was try to injure the school district instead of making it better and stronger for all students.

The notion that schools will be better with smaller districts is laughable, at best. The whole issue is really about money and how it’s spent.

Wando High School, Mount Pleasant, S.C.

Moffly’s notion, frankly, is a proposal to segregate comparatively wealthy East Cooper taxpayers into a separate district, which could allow a conservative governing board to lower school taxes. But this so-called deconsolidation effort ignores the reality that lower school taxes would mean a downturn for the region’s excellent public schools like Wando High School.

Meanwhile, poorer areas of the county, whose children are subsidized in part by East Cooper taxes, will find schools with fewer and fewer resources, meaning schools that perform poorly now will likely become worse. Also, separate school districts would have to pay for a lot of duplication — separate administrative budgets, human resources, maintenance and the like. Deconsolidation may, in fact, cost more. As the conservative, don’t-go-out-on-a-limb Post and Courier editorialized Sunday, “Studies have shown that small districts tend to spend a larger percentage of their budget on overhead costs and have slightly lower student achievement than large districts.”

Furthermore, district-wide programs, such as the nationally-recognized Academic Magnet School, would be threatened because it wouldn’t have a steady funding source to turn to — unless the “new” separate school districts contributed to countywide projects. But what would be the point of that if the districts were separate?

Residents need to see Moffly’s notion for what it is — a blatant attempt to further destroy public education just at a time when the region needs a strong system to turn out graduates for the 21^st century jobs being demanded by employers. If the county Republican Party wants to go on record as being opposed to public education, go ahead and vote for the party’s deconsolidation referendum. But rest assured: Democrats will use it against you.

The second dumb idea making the rounds is the fascination some people have with offshore drilling for oil and gas. Not only is the whole enterprise iffy, at best, but the amount of oil or gas available off our shore is a drop in the bucket compared to what is available throughout the rest of the nation.

An oil-filled bottle that washed onto a Florida beach after the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Photo by Andy Brack.

Back in 2010, I saw oil washing ashore on the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. I inhaled the stinging scent of petroleum on Mobile Bay. Why risk billions in tourism dollars for South Carolina just to get a scant supply of oil and gas? Better solution: Change state laws to encourage more investment in solar and other renewable resources.

Hats off to mayoral candidate John Tecklenburg for coming out strong last week in opposition of offshore drilling.

Tecklenburg, once president of Southern Oil Company, said his company worked with the Coast Guard to make shore-to-ship oil transfers.

“We were safe and never had a spill,” he said. “But as I saw with my own two eyes at the time, it’s a risky business. Even a small mistake could lead to a large problem. And that was just with my small, local oil distribution company. Imagine the dangers our coast would face from the kind of large-scale industrial oil exploration and drilling that are now being proposed.”

• Have your say. If you feel strongly one way or another about drilling, have your say at a regional meeting of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 11. It is being held at the Wyndham Garden Mount Pleasant/Charleston, 1330 Stuart Engals Blvd, Mount Pleasant.