Half of Charleston County’s high schools face a daunting challenge in educating the new crop of freshmen they will welcome this fall.
Twenty percent of their ninth-graders won’t be able to read better than a fourth-grader, but those students will be expected to learn and perform at a high-school level. Many of these teenagers likely will struggle to simply read the words on their teachers’ SmartBoards, much less understand and analyze the information being conveyed.
The Charleston County School Board recognized the severity of this problem last year by declaring literacy its top priority. Their decision followed a series of Post and Courier stories that revealed nearly 20 percent of the county’s ninth-graders read on a fourth-grade level or worse.
It is impossible to learn when one’s home and parents are in chaos, unpredictable or outright dangerous. My daughter-in-law taught her first year out in an inner city school in Jacksonville. Kids would come to school wearing winter coats even in hot weather and toting everything precious to them, because they didnt want their parent/s to sell them for drug money. The first parents night, only one parent showed up and she was drunk/high. Over half the adults in the US are addicted to a substance or behavior like internet gambling or p-rnography. Too many kids deal with the after effects of abuse, divorce and divide their time between parents. If there were stable healthy parents and homes, school performance would be so much better.