SC education agency requests $480 million more for school districts

South Carolina’s new schools chief is asking state lawmakers to spend $480 million more on public education next year, in part to increase aid to lower-performing districts.

The state’s lowest performing school districts would benefit from most of the department’s budget requests, S.C. Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman told a House K-12 budget-writing panel Wednesday.

More than $227 million of the proposed new spending would go toward increasing the amount of money schools get based on student population. That spending takes into account how much it costs to educate different types of students.

Much of that increase would cover inflation and enrollment growth. But the new spending also would send more state money to districts for students enrolling in college-level courses, something S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley also is pushing as a way to make sure S.C. high-school graduates are prepared for college or careers.

Much of the agency’s budget request also is aimed at providing expertise to impoverished, rural school districts to help make existing programs successful, Spearman said.

That support, she said, has been cut back at the agency in recent years.

The state also faces a S.C. Supreme Court mandate to improve public schools, especially in rural, impoverished districts that sued the state in 1993 for more support. The court expects an update from lawmakers on their progress when this year’s legislative session ends.

Spearman said the Department of Education’s support to those impoverished, rural districts has been cut back severely in the years following the Great Recession.

“I lose sleep on this one every night – some of these low performing districts that we have not been out there...giving them the support that we need,” Spearman said.

The request also includes:

▪  $19 million for career specialists. State law requires school districts to have one career guidance counselor for every 300 students. The money would help school districts meet that requirement.

▪  $25 million to raise the beginning teacher salary to $30,000 from $29,500, a priority, education advocates say, for recruiting and retaining teachers

▪  Hire an additional 56 employees, including: nine to focus on state standards, reading and early childhood and 14 federally funded workers in the state’s Medicaid and school lunch programs.

The request for new employees also includes $1.2 million to hire 18 new teachers for the state’s growing Virtual S.C. program, which offers live-streaming classes online to students statewide.

South Carolina’s virtual course program is the 5th largest in the country, Spearman said. In the 2014-15 school year, more than 27,000 students filled more than 39,000 virtual seats in classes in the program.

State Rep. Shannon Erickson, R-Beaufort, said she to support the virtual school expansion, she wanted students in impoverished, rural school districts to benefit.

Spearman said her intent was to expand the program and focus efforts on continued growth will help give students in impoverished, rural districts with high teacher turnover rates access to high-quality teachers.

The money also would cover

This story was originally published January 20, 2016 at 3:20 PM with the headline "SC education agency requests $480 million more for school districts."