Another Day, Another District, Another Scandal

South Carolina’s public schools just can’t seem to keep their noses clean these days.

As if offering the worst government-sponsored education in the Western Hemisphere wasn’t enough, there’s enough corruption going on within our state’s last-in-the-nation public education system to make even Hugo Chavez blush.

First came a sex scandal and documented manipulation of student growth projections in Lexington-Richland School District Five. Next, compelling evidence of academic fraud emerged in the Charleston County School System.  Now, the third major scandal of the summer (that we know of, anyway) is taking shape in Anderson County School District Four, featuring a mix of nepotism and potentially illegal deal-making that once again showcases the ongoing corruption of a system that is failing our state’s children by the hundreds of thousands.

From our friends over at The Voice, we learn that multiple allegations of impropriety have been made against school board members and district officials in Anderson 4 (one of our state’s so-called “high achievement” districts), including potential bid-rigging on a stadium contract, board members voting on their family members’ employment contracts, shady land deals and undisclosed board meetings.

The Voice also reports that some of the whistleblowers who are drawing attention to this smorgasbord of self-serving behavior are disgruntled district staffers.

Anderson 4 is said to be one of South Carolina’s top-performing school districts, yet only a quarter of its eighth-graders are proficient in reading and its SAT scores trail comparable districts in North Carolina by nearly 130 points – all this despite receiving a gaudy $12,365 per pupil from the taxpayers each year.

FITSNews readers, of course, are already quite familiar with how they do things up in Anderson.

We’ll continue to monitor this developing story, just as we’re continuing to follow the academic fraud allegations in Charleston.

If any of our readers have additional information on these stories (or other breaking news tips), please drop us a line over on our submissions page or send a confidential e-mail to info@fitsnews.com.  We guarantee anonymity.

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