Jim Rex Funds Green Bean Museum With School Choice Grant?

S.C. SUPERINTENDENT OF EDUCATION COULD BE A LOT DUMBER THAN WE THOUGHT HE WAS

FITSNews – December 13, 2007 – We actually laughed at the first two people who pitched us this story (and then hung up on them) because we figured there was no way in hell that image-savvy S.C. Superintendent of Education Jim Rex would ever do something this stupid. Help fund a friggin’ green bean museum out of a grant that’s supposed to support public school choice innovation in South Carolina? No way, we thought.

Amazingly, though, that’s exactly what appears to have happened last Friday.

After failing to initially make the cut in a state budget that included pork for pretty much everything else under the sun, South Carolina’s most notorious government boondoggle is listed as a partner recipient for a grant awarded by the Public Choice Innovation Schools program, a $2.6 million pot of money that’s administered by the State Department of Education to “support partnerships to create Public Choice Innovation Schools (PCI Schools) and to provide for their evaluation.”

According to a S.C. Department of Education e-mail obtained exclusively by FITSNews, the infamous National Bean Market Museum is specifically identified as one of three targets for an “Arts Immersion School Partnership” grant awarded to Florence County School District 3.

Here is a copy of the Department of Education e-mail, which was sent by Deputy Superintendent Elizabeth Carpentier to grant recipients last Friday:

State Department of Education grant manager Gail Widner declined to provide FITSNews with the specific dollar amount awarded to each grant recipient, but did caution us against referring to the green bean museum as a “boondoggle.”

“There’s plenty of other boondoggles out there,” Widner said. “Trust me, I work with a lot of them. This agency runs a lot of grant programs.”

Wow. There’s a comforting thought.

“I have to admit that (Superintendent) Rex almost had me,” House Majority Leader Jimmy Merrill told FITSNews. “His talk about single gender education and his pseudo-admission that choice is a viable method for increasing competition and improving education made me think he was different. But the new Jim Rex choice plan is different and far more complex than I originally thought. The sheer brilliance of issuing grants from a school choice fund in order to settle the ongoing debate over bean public awareness and the bean’s status in the entire vegetable hierarchy is without question. Finally, we will have an answer to that age old question … what is more important to society and the education of its youth, the green bean, the lima bean or the pinto bean?”

The majority leader added, “Personally, I’m a black bean guy because it is a tasty bean that can be eaten by itself or in any number of Mexican culinary delights. Now I don’t have loads of research and a potential museum to back my claim that the black bean is the superior bean, but I am confident that additional funding can be secured through some department of education grant program to validate my stance. Should this prove unworkable, I am confident somebody over there can restructure the definition of classroom spending so we can include green bean studies as (a) legitimate classroom expenditure.”

Wow. Somebody needs to sign Merrill up for a weekend at the Comedy House, because that’s pretty good stuff, people. And obviously more than a little tongue-in-cheek, in case you missed it.

Back in November, Florence School District 3 described the program as follows in the grant application it sent to the State Department:

“We will have three community partners that have been actively involved with Florence School District Three for many years. These partners will now become a part of the governance board of our arts immersion school that will make this innovative school a success. We are requesting $89,710 for planning and $375,050 for equipping in year one and $269,913 in year two.”

The grant proposal provides a detailed three-year budget delineation, which breaks down funding sources by the ”type” of expenses (i.e. employee salaries,  employee benefits, purchased services and supplies and materials), but there is no breakdown of how much money will be specifically allocated to the partnering institutions, including the green bean museum.

UPDATE – According to Deputy Superintendent Carpentier, the breakdown for the grants is as follows:

Anderson 5 – $367,495
Greenville County – $359,625
Florence 3 – $184,133 (green bean partner)
Orangeburg 4 – $500,000
Richland 1 – $500,000
Richland 2 – $388,747

UPDATE II - According to Florence District Three Spokesman Brian Huckabee, the green bean museum would not have directly received any funding from the grant, but we’ll probably never know for sure now because according to Huckabee, the district is likely to return the money since the grant was only partially-funded.

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