Scott POWELL LEDGER STAFF WRITER Educators have never met an acronym they didn’t like.

Want proof?

Here are a couple of gems I heard with a group of education reporters gathered Tuesday for our annual back-to-school workshop in Columbia.

And yes, dear readers, I am going to share these acronyms with you.

Why? Because I have to make sense of them and so should you.

The two acronyms are:

H.E.A.R.T — Helping Educators Access Resources Together

SLICE — South Carolina Information Longitudinal Center for Education.

You can find anything on the Internet these days.

Just for fun, I decided to look up SLICE on the trusty Acronym Finder Web site.

It came back with five meanings for this acronym.

SLICE stands for Soldier Level Integrated Communications Environment, Stimulating Leadership in Cutting Expenditures Act, Strengthening Local Independent Independent Co-Ops Everywhere, Stateline Ice and Community Expo (Monroe, WI), and psychologists use this acronym for Streamlined Longitudinal Interval Continuation Evaluation.

Are you still reading? OK, you can breathe for a few moments if I haven’t already put you to sleep.

I do not know the reason organizations insist on using long acronyms.

My copy editing professor in college had a simple rule called K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid).

For example, here is a simple way of talking about SLICE in South Carolina schools. I will use the classic five question format all people should use when writing.

Who? State Department of Education

What? A $14.9 million, 3-year federal grant for a cool project to design a statewide data system with test score information from all schools.

Where? South Carolina

Why? This will allow people to eventually look at student achievement for education programs in schools and see if they work well.

How? The public, researchers and educators will be able to ask SLICE for specific data to look at student achievement in different ways. This new data system could eventually be used to see whether local programs like year-round schools, all boys and girls classes, and computer lab sessions help improve student achievement.

When? State roll out of SLICE is scheduled to start in November. It will take three years to put the data system fully in place. A fourth year could be added if the state receives a Race to the Top grant from the U.S. Department of Education this fall.

A state Department of Education spokesperson calls SLICE “one more arrow in the quiver” as we attempt to answer questions about whether schools are doing the right things to help students learn.

Now we have settled what SLICE is about. We can only hope the H.E.A.R.T tool kit helps the state’s 85 school districts meet student needs outside the classroom this year.

H.E.A.R.T is a 58-page document developed by the state Department of Education to provide schools with a way to help struggling students. It provides school guidance offices with a list of people in churches and social organizations available in their communities to help students deal with problems, such as being homeless, mental illness, not attending school, and poor reading skills.

These are all barriers to success in education as Cherokee County schools prepare to start a new school year Aug. 16.

Here are three things I hope will occur in public education:

1. Stop using acronyms like Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and PASS (Palmetto Assessment of State Standards) on test results which tell parents whether schools are doing well in the state and nation and use words like “Pass” or “Fail” which anybody can understand.

2. Don’t automatically buy into the popular political view that South Carolina ranks near the bottom in SAT scores. We are talking about a college entrance exam in which student participation rates on the SAT vary widely in this country.

Maine makes all their students take the SAT for its state high school exit exam.

About 60 percent of South Carolina students take the SAT each year. This same figure is 4 percent in Mississippi.

It’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison of SAT scores when we aren’t even talking about the same number of students in each state.

In keeping with our column theme, SAT was once an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test. Today, the words SAT don’t stand for anything other than SAT!

3. Let’s start using H.E.A.R.T in the community to work together in solving problems in schools.

In exchange, I will spare you another acronym-laced column.

I think I have gone way past my allowed number of acronyms in the paper for the entire year — any way you SLICE it.

Scott Powell (spowell@gaffneyledger.com) covers education issues for The Gaffney Ledger.