AS SCHOOL DISTRICT FAILS, PR DEPT WINS NATIONAL AWARDS

Whichever bureaucrat at Orangeburg’s Consolidated School District 5 decided to bury their education woes in a heaping pile of taxpayer-funded public relations is a genius and they deserve an award. Oh, well isn’t that timely…

The Times and Democrat reported Monday that Orangeburg 5’s public relations department won national acclaim for the tenth straight year from the National School Public Relations Association. Spokesman Greg Carson and PR Assistant Cindy Kinard reigned in fours Awards of Excellence for making the world believe that things are just fine and dandy for Orangeburg’s youth.

And good for them, because every district needs a good PR department when they make the school in Dangerous Minds look like Harvard. The Voice for School Choice blog notes:

In 2008, the average SAT score in Orangeburg 5 was 946, 38 points behind the state average and 71 points behind the national average. SAT participation in Orangeburg 5 was a mere 24 percent, half the South Carolina high school average. ACT scores in Orangeburg 5 averaged 16.7, 2.8 points behind the rest of the state, 4.4 points behind the national average.

The state’s performance rating for the district has gone from “below average” (2006) to “unsatisfactory” (2007) which is the lowest possible rating, and the reported graduation rate has dropped 15 percent in the last three years.

Saddest of all, the huge race-correlated performance gap between black and white students is among the worst in South Carolina. In 2007, there was a thirty point disparity between the End of-Course (EOC) pass rate of black and white students. There was also a twenty point gap in average PACT scores.

All this failure, despite huge sums of local, state and federal money. Total per pupil revenues were $11,433 in 2006 and are projected to reach almost $14,000 per student in 2008. That’s more than $2,500 more per child than the state average.

So my hat is off to the outstanding Orangeburg 5 PR department; they can truly turn shat into shinola.

I bet they could throw you into a tank of man-eating sharks and then convince you to put on a pair of chum-filled underwear. And then they’d tell you to go up and punch the biggest shark in the nose and you’d do it. Because you’re gullible like that. Not me though, I’m much smarter.