Education is one key to building and sustaining a community

One of the goals of The Byerly Foundation has been to find ways to help make our public schools among the best anywhere. This Foundation has spent a good bit of money over the past 12 years on various public education projects and will spend more in the coming years. We have a surprisingly effective school system for those students who are willing, eager and able to engage in the curriculum. For example, we have a former next-door neighbor who just earned her MD at the Medical University of South Carolina, after already achieving a masters degree in education and about five years of teaching math at various high schools in SC and Georgia. In a few weeks my daughter will be awarded her Ph.D. Both of these girls were products of the Darlington County Schools though my daughter did get two years at the SCGSSM. My youngest is a language arts teacher in a Title One school in Greenville. The parents who have her teaching their children are among the luckiest in the country. She is a product of the Darlington County Schools.

In the midst of a project to make prospective residents aware of how Hartsville represents "The Art of Good Living," we are identifying those things that need improvement as well as those things that make this such a great community. Schools in our area are doing an amazing job with many of our students yet, a number of our students are not getting what they need.

We do have gaps in the Hartsville Schools. You can see those gaps if you can understand the drop out rate or the graduation rate at the high school level. You can see those gaps in other ways and many parents from around the country will recognize these gaps, because, unfortunately, they exist around the nation.

One of the goals of The Foundation is to help our Hartsville schools find ways to eliminate gaps that can be identified by economics or race. That is not an easy job but they tell me that the city of Madison, Wisconsin, achieved that goal with a single-minded, laser focus over a multi-year period. We are looking for ways to help and one area of current investigation is early childhood-pre school. We are thinking that quality pre-school programs for economically disadvantaged children could be one of the keys to later success. We hear that the FPG Institute on the campus of the University of North Carolina is one of the groups who has had some long-term success. We are talking with them.

Right now, when I discuss the education question with people I stress the idea that we have a lot of fantastic success stories to tell but we generally ignore them and repeat the distressing stories. Children in Hartsville are experiencing amazing success in college, in their careers and in their classrooms. It would really enhance the ability to sell this community if we would tell more of those stories while working with the educators to see what can be done to ensure those who have to climb a more vertical educational slope have some additional tools to reach the summit.