Officials at a Greenwood County government-run school district violated state law when they failed to test a new employee for tuberculosis (TB) – while the employee in question violated state law by failing to provide a doctor’s certificate showing he was not infected. As a result, seventy-four people (mostly children) linked to the Ninety Six (S.C.) Primary School have tested positive for the disease – an airborne strain of mycobacteria which attacks the lungs. Of those, twelve have shown abnormal chest X-ray readings – signifying an active infection.
South Carolina state law – specifically code section 44-29-150 and 160 – requires schools to subject new hires to an “appropriate evaluation for tuberculosis prior to being hired to work in any public or private schools, kindergartens, and day cares.” The law also requires would-be employees “to present a health certificate from a licensed physician certifying that the applicant does not have active tuberculosis.”
Neither of these requirements were followed by officials at Greenwood School District 52.
In fact district officials failed to follow these statutory guidelines even after they were informed that the employee in question – a janitor – had been previously exposed to TB.
Wow …
Sources at the S.C. Department of Education (SCDOE) tell FITS a memo from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) went out to every school in the state last week reminding them of their legal obligations regarding TB testing. The memo did not mention the Ninety Six scandal, although the implication is clear.
“Employees who are found to have current or past tuberculosis disease shall not be allowed to work until the individual receives written certification by a licensed physician that the individual is non-contagious,” the memo states. “The reason behind the law is important. If an individual has the TB germ, even if the person is not currently infectious, the person must take the complete course of medicine that will prevent ?the employee from becoming infectious and possibly exposing others.”
Once again, a government-run school has totally shirked its obligation to students – this time putting their lives and the lives of their family members at risk. Of course the three Democratic Senators driving this inquiry – Joel Lourie (D-Richland), Brad Hutto (D-Orangeburg) and Vincent Sheheen (D-Kershaw) – have yet to address the school district’s clear culpability in this matter, which isn’t surprising considering all three are arch-defenders of South Carolina’s failed ?government-run system.
“The law required the school to get the employee cleared by a licensed physician and they didn’t even send him to the doctor before they put him in the school with the disease,” a source familiar with the situation tells FITS. ” The whole mess could have been prevented if the school had just followed the law.”
We agree …
The only question now is whether the district will be held accountable for its failure, or whether – as is so often the case with academic under-performance at government-run schools – the blame will get shifted someplace else.
44 comments
Well Crop. You know you gotta rush these things. Can’t have a child sitting in gum the next morning!! Important shite here FITS. Dang man. What kind of numb nuts are you? Fracking sycophant prene. Get a life FITS. You’re mean. And I see blue text on this page. This is clearly discriminatory somehow. You JERK. :)
Home schooling just keeps looking better and better.
Clearer lungs (unless redneck mama is a chain smoker) but emptier head.
Tell it to the home schooled Jeopardy champ from Columbia.
They do well in spelling bees and geography bees and simple retention and pattern recognition and such, which is admirable, but momma usually cannot teach critical or analytical thinking or French or geometry or saxophone.
Although I choose not to home school, a couple close to us does (they live in a great house within a crappy school district). He’s a physician and she’s an accountant who now stays at home (certainly not the norm for SC or most states, I know). What they can’t teach directly, they farm out through some kind of co-op thing with other home schooled kids. I am not that familiar, but my buddy says it works like a champ. As long as my business continues to do well so I can afford it, I’m leaving mine in private school, at least through elementary school. My point is, home-schooling used to be a zip code full of kooks and weirdos, but is becoming more and more mainstream as the public schools here continue their decline in many locales. It’s personal preference.
No concept of the Trivium, let alone the Quadrivium?
Government schooling is based on the Prussian model.
Maybe you should read up on what builds “critical or analytical thinking or French or geometry or saxophone” more effectively of the two.
If the goal of your quoted statement above being was the priority of government schools then the Prussian model is certainly not the one that should be used.
In that context young Josiah Washington is right where he should be from a classical education perspective:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCMac3SFkoQ#at=246
delete “being” please from that sentence
Brother, you are OLD SCHOOL! We do the “poor-man’s” Trivium / Quadrivium in our house to supplement what the private school provides…the Harvard Classics “5 foot shelf,” cultural exposure, logic training, rhetoric, civics, etc. The things that seem to be falling away in modern society, much to our collective detriment, I think.
Awesome Mike! There are also support groups for that too if you ever end up home schooling instead of private.
I get exposed to lots of “drivium,” with no small proportion of it here.
And Prussian or not, someone has to know geometry or French or how to play the saxophone in order to teach it. What proportion of even college educated parents could do one of them, far less all three?
Well Crop. You know you gotta rush these things. Can’t have a child sitting in gum the next morning!! Important shite here FITS. Dang man. What kind of numb nuts are you? Fracking sycophant prene. Get a life FITS. You’re mean. And I see blue text on this page. This is clearly discriminatory somehow. You JERK. :)
Home schooling just keeps looking better and better.
Clearer lungs (unless redneck mama is a chain smoker) but emptier head.
Tell it to the home schooled Jeopardy champ from Columbia.
They do well in spelling bees and geography bees and simple retention and pattern recognition and such, which is admirable, but momma usually cannot teach critical or analytical thinking or French or geometry or saxophone.
Although I choose not to home school, a couple close to us does (they live in a great house within a crappy school district). He’s a physician and she’s an accountant who now stays at home (certainly not the norm for SC or most states, I know). What they can’t teach directly, they farm out through some kind of co-op thing with other home schooled kids. I am not that familiar, but my buddy says it works like a champ. As long as my business continues to do well so I can afford it, I’m leaving mine in private school, at least through elementary school. My point is, home-schooling used to be a zip code full of kooks and weirdos, but is becoming more and more mainstream as the public schools here continue their decline in many locales. It’s personal preference.
No concept of the Trivium, let alone the Quadrivium?
Government schooling is based on the Prussian model.
Maybe you should read up on what builds “critical or analytical thinking or French or geometry or saxophone” more effectively of the two.
If the goal of your quoted statement above being was the priority of government schools then the Prussian model is certainly not the one that should be used.
In that context young Josiah Washington is right where he should be from a classical education perspective:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCMac3SFkoQ#at=246
delete “being” please from that sentence
Brother, you are OLD SCHOOL! We do the “poor-man’s” Trivium / Quadrivium in our house to supplement what the private school provides…the Harvard Classics “5 foot shelf,” cultural exposure, logic training, rhetoric, civics, etc. The things that seem to be falling away in modern society, much to our collective detriment, I think.
Awesome Mike! There are also support groups for that too if you ever end up home schooling instead of private.
I get exposed to lots of “drivium,” with no small proportion of it here.
And Prussian or not, someone has to know geometry or French or how to play the saxophone in order to teach it. What proportion of even college educated parents could do one of them, far less all three?
So like almost everything else, now a legitimate public health crisis has become politicized too. The Dems want to blame Templeton and DHEC, while Repubs blame the public schools. How about this? Why don’t we figure out what happened and fix it? And that includes holding accountable those who failed in their jobs — whichever side they are on. Sure the Repubs underfund and thwart activities by the government — that’s what they do. The Dems are going to defend their constituencies in public schools — that’s what they do. But we have a public health problem around innocent children. Fix it and then squabble!
Amen!!! Find out what actually happened. Don’t go in with preconceived ideas over whose fault it is.
So like almost everything else, now a legitimate public health crisis has become politicized too. The Dems want to blame Templeton and DHEC, while Repubs blame the public schools. How about this? Why don’t we figure out what happened and fix it? And that includes holding accountable those who failed in their jobs — whichever side they are on. Sure the Repubs underfund and thwart activities by the government — that’s what they do. The Dems are going to defend their constituencies in public schools — that’s what they do. But we have a public health problem around innocent children. Fix it and then squabble!
Amen!!! Find out what actually happened. Don’t go in with preconceived ideas over whose fault it is.
Ah, yes, the after-the-fact memo, a classic among SC bureaucrats.
“…although the implication is clear.”
No. It’s not.
Your mama ever tell you: when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
Of course, your mama raised a dissembling sycophant.
That’s why this site has not written a thing about the Florida Dept of Ed. head resigning over the fact he changed the score of a big Indiana (his previous post) GOP donor’s school from C to A after he implemented the same letter grade that Mick Zais and Jay Ragley copied from him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/education/floridas-education-chief-quits-amid-report-that-he-changed-a-schools-rating.html?ref=education
I’ve followed the story in Fla. Although its relevance here is questionable to me, unless your point is voters electing anti-government pols (TP types) to office and then scrambling and shifting blame when those same pols fail to manage the public’s business well?
No. It’s just about FITSNEWS and it’s dissembling and deceit. Just another example of half a story, knowing that way too many people never look at but one side and trying to manipulate those poor souls into allegiance to an ideology that is of no benefit to them and their class.
The Fla. education story jumped into my mind because it is new and shows that the system that Howard Rich has been paying politicians in SC to adopt is just a con game to make money for the few in a grand scheme of crony capitalism – REAL government subsidized crony capitalism.
I couldn’t agree more that South Carolina is just a rat’s nest of taxpayer-subsidized crony capitalism. But the voters go to the polls again and again electing and re-electing the same malefactors. How do we break the chain?
Ah, yes, the after-the-fact memo, a classic among SC bureaucrats.
“…although the implication is clear.”
No. It’s not.
Your mama ever tell you: when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
Of course, your mama raised a dissembling sycophant.
That’s why this site has not written a thing about the Florida Dept of Ed. head resigning over the fact he changed the score of a big Indiana (his previous post) GOP donor’s school from C to A after he implemented the same letter grade that Mick Zais and Jay Ragley copied from him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/education/floridas-education-chief-quits-amid-report-that-he-changed-a-schools-rating.html?ref=education
I’ve followed the story in Fla. Although its relevance here is questionable to me, unless your point is voters electing anti-government pols (TP types) to office and then those pols scrambling and shifting blame when they fail to manage the public’s business well?
No. It’s just about FITSNEWS and it’s dissembling and deceit. Just another example of half a story, knowing that way too many people never look at but one side and trying to manipulate those poor souls into allegiance to an ideology that is of no benefit to them and their class.
The Fla. education story jumped into my mind because it is new and shows that the system that Howard Rich has been paying politicians in SC to adopt is just a con game to make money for the few in a grand scheme of crony capitalism – REAL government subsidized crony capitalism.
I couldn’t agree more that South Carolina is just a rat’s nest of taxpayer-subsidized crony capitalism. But the voters go to the polls again and again electing and re-electing the same malefactors. How do we break the chain?
HALEY – TUBERCULOSIS THREAT TO CHILDREN
HALEY – TUBERCULOSIS THREAT TO CHILDREN
I wonder how the disgruntled ex-DHEC’ers are going to try to blame this one on Templeton? And isn’t this the very same school system that has been bellowing, “She wouldn’t tell us anything!” as if that somehow affects the progression of a disease.
I wonder how the disgruntled ex-DHEC’ers are going to try to blame this one on Templeton? And isn’t this the very same school system that has been bellowing, “She wouldn’t tell us anything!” as if that somehow affects the progression of a disease.
There is a big, GIANT story here. That’s all I’m going to say. The State is never going to tell the real story..the Free Times lost any good investigative reporters to do so. Will lost his coyones to Haley a long time ago….where’s the “little girl” from Charleston to get to the bottom of this. Like Glenda the Good Witch has said…it was right there all along…
There is a big, GIANT story here. That’s all I’m going to say. The State is never going to tell the real story..the Free Times lost any good investigative reporters to do so. Will lost his coyones to Haley a long time ago….where’s the “little girl” from Charleston to get to the bottom of this. Like Glenda the Good Witch has said…it was right there all along…
Vince Sheheen runs their school district? Dang he’s a busy man. What is Nim’s responsibility?
Vince Sheheen runs their school district? Dang he’s a busy man. What is Nim’s responsibility?