THEIR VIEWS

State lawmakers are

short-changing school districts

School districts are shortchanged on school buses and reimbursements for school bus-driver salaries. According to South Carolina law, the state is supposed to fund the cost of school bus services in local school districts. But state lawmakers have almost never fully funded bus expenses — and districts have had to bear an ever-increasing share of the burden. ...

State lawmakers are shortchanging school districts in two ways: by not fully reimbursing school districts for bus-driver salaries and, worse, by not purchasing enough newer and reliable buses. The $6.3 million that Greenville County taxpayers paid last school year was primarily for bus-driver salaries.

The bigger problem concerns the poor condition of school buses statewide. Almost half of the state’s 5,600 buses need to be replaced, but state lawmakers have balked at buying new buses on an annual basis. ...

State bus purchases are not keeping up with growth either. Of the 36 buses the Greenville district requested from the state since 1999 to accommodate growth, only 11 additional buses have been provided. The state law is plain: The state is responsible for providing school bus transportation. State lawmakers are not living up to that responsibility.

The Greenville News

Monitoring dropout numbers

essential to solving the problem

A state program to monitor the progress of schoolchildren and determine how many of them drop out before graduation is long overdue. State Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum announced recently that public school students have been assigned numbers as early as kindergarten to make it easier to track them through the course of the educational career. Tenenbaum believes the state will have solid statistics on the dropout rate in about four years.

Accurate information is crucial to determining which students are leaving school early and what can be done to keep them in school until they earn a high school diploma of the equivalent. Unfortunately, concrete dropout figures have been elusive.

Some critics claim that fewer than half of the state’s students graduate from high school. While that seems preposterous, no rock-solid statistics exist to show otherwise. ...

The point is, however, that accurate numbers are essential. We don’t know how to attack the dropout problem — or the problems that result from it — until we know how severe the dropout rate is.

It’s high time the state undertook the task of monitoring student progress from kindergarten on.

The (Rock Hill) Herald

Maybe it’s time for tolls

on other road projects

In signing a bill that allows tolls on Interstate 73, Gov. Mark Sanford also erected a signpost of sorts for financing other badly needed South Carolina road projects. The bill, of course, speaks only to I-73. It guarantees that the state, via tolls, will pay a share of the $2 billion cost of the 90mile road between Myrtle Beach and the North Carolina line in Marlboro County.

This project is far larger and much more expensive than the state’s other two toll roads (both short), yet legislators and Sanford needed less than a month to complete the tolling legislation. That suggests the time may be ripe for financing other must-have projects — such as upgrading U.S. 521 as Georgetown County’s highspeed link to Interstate 95 — with tolls. The South Carolina populist taboo against roads that aren’t ‘‘free’’ might be shattered at last.

The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News