State Takeovers (Part I)

The South Carolina Department of Education is moving to take over a rural SC school district. Is it a good idea?

South Carolina, like around twenty other states, allows its state education agency to take control of school districts to intervene in their finances. Local districts are normally, by law, under the control of locally-elected boards of trustees.

As South Carolina’s Daily Gazette reported this week,

The state Department of Education is looking to take over the finances of Marlboro County schools after a multimillion-dollar budget deficit left the rural district with few options, the agency said Thursday.

In its press release, the Department quoted SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver: “Our highest priority is ensuring students in Marlboro County have access to a safe, stable, and effective educational environment… Unfortunately, the district’s fiscal condition leaves us no choice but to act.”

Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver (center) leads a meeting of the South Carolina State Board of Education.

But it would be fair to ask, how exactly is a poor, rural district like Marlboro supposed to maintain its local fiscal autonomy when the state legislature is ultimately the largest decider of its revenue?

This question is especially important in light of South Carolina law. As the Department’s press release goes on to point out,

Should conditions in Marlboro County continue to deteriorate, state law provides additional remedies. Per South Carolina Code of Laws Section 59-18-1520, the SCDE may seek the State Board of Education’s approval to declare a state-of-education emergency, which would result in a full state takeover of the district.

Are state takeovers effective?

A few years back, the Washington Post reported that,

At least three studies have found that takeovers don’t increase academic achievement. The latest, a May 2021 working paper by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. “On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits,” the researchers concluded.

In general, the authors of the paper found that the process of state takeovers “appears to be disruptive in the early years of takeover, particularly to English Language Arts achievement, although the longer-term effects are less clear.”

The researchers also found that Black and Latino districts were more likely to be taken over by states than majority White districts, even when they had equivalent “academic performance”. A study cited by the authors also found that, “state takeovers of majority-Black districts have been followed by a decrease in the representation of African Americans in local government.”

Additionally, according to a piece for Brookings whose authors included the authors of the previous paper, “we find that takeovers did not increase expenditures or other measures of fiscal health in districts serving majority-Black student populations.”

According to current Department of Education data, a large majority of Marlboro’s students are Black (with well over twice as many Black as White students). The Board is already significantly statistically overrepresented by White members when compared with the demographics of the district.

Malboro has long been underfunded when compared to other state schools.

As the most recent meeting of its Board demonstrates, it’s hard to parse what’s actually going on with the district’s finances. Some Board members have blamed the district superintendent; the district superintendent, in turn, has suggested that longterm district trends in hiring are to blame.

But it’s also hard not to question the implicit framing by the Department’s press release that the local leadership is solely responsible for the district’s dire financial straits, that state intervention is necessary to override a board (and its appointed superintendent) that have been elected by local citizens, and that an agency of the state that underfunded the school district in the first place (led by a proud champion of rejecting federal funds and promoting school vouchers) is best equipped to fix the issue.

According to the state’s office of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs (RFA), Marlboro County received over half of its budget from the state in the most recent fiscal year. For comparison, the larger, more urban Richland School District One received only about 30% of its total revenue from the state. Smaller, poorer, rural districts like Marlboro tend to have low property values, and rely more heavily on the state for basic funding. For its part, the state has consistently used budget provisos to avoid paying out what the state’s Education Finance Act requires, as well as passing legislation like Act 388 that drastically cuts into a local district’s ability to raise revenue from property taxes.

It’s also significant that Marlboro’s federal funding is about half of what it was in 2021 (while, again for comparison, Richland One’s federal funding is about 60% of what it was during the same year).

Given the district’s very high poverty index, it is also possible that federal funding cuts required by the recently-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” will hurt the district even more in the coming years.

The district’s “pupils in poverty index,” according to the official State Report Card, is 87.6, with individual school poverty indices ranging from 83.3 to 94.3, making, the district’s families some of the poorest in the state. (For comparison, the state poverty index is 62.2.)

In other words, Marlboro would likely be struggling financially whatever local decisions it made, because a large majority of its budget is outside of its local control. It’s unclear whether the decision to hire more staff is—as Weaver and some Marlboro trustees have suggested— a major reason for the current budget shortfall. But the ultimate responsibility for funding public schools in South Carolina rests, according to the State Constitution, with the state legislature (which has not, based on RFA data, fully funded “base student cost,” as defined in state law, since 2007, and which, since 2012, has underfunded state schools an average total of almost half a million dollars per year).

District Head of Finance Kwanza Benjamin, during the district’s most recent board meeting, also shared that the projected local revenue for the upcoming fiscal year was about $11 million, while state revenue would be around $30 million. As a result of this revenue, he said the district would need to increase property taxes and/ or draw on reserve funds to balance the budget.

SC moves to take over school districts are often correlated with poverty and race.

Allendale and Williamsburg schools are currently under total control by the South Carolina Department of Education, while Jasper Schools is under financial control, according to Gazette.

Allendale has the third highest poverty index in the state, and the second-highest percentage of Black students. Williamsburg schools has the fourth highest poverty index, and the third-highest percentage of Black students. (Jasper is only a partial outlier here, with a 39% Black student population, and a somewhat lower poverty index of 69.1).

Marlboro criticized by the state superintendent for hiring too many new employees.

According to the Gazette article, state Superintendent Ellen Weaver and her Department have suggested “pointed to an increase in staffing numbers despite a decrease in student enrollment and suggested better aligning the two by laying off unnecessary staff members”.

Again, Marlboro’s finances are likely complex, but the entire state has been struggling to hire enough staff to adequately meet student needs for years. If Marlboro can’t afford to, for example, improve the student-to-teacher ratio by hiring more teachers, perhaps that points to a need for more state and/ or federal funding. It seems hard to blame the entire problem on Marlboro’s mismanagement of funds, even if such mismanagement turns out to have occurred.

During the most recent livestreamed meeting of the Marlboro Board of Trustees, district officials discussed the district’s financial issues.

When I was collecting data for the nonprofit SC for Ed on teacher vacancies, Marlboro consistently reached August with signficant numbers of unfilled positions in teaching and other important student-facing jobs. For example, coming into the 2021-22 school year, Marlboro was posting 25 classroom teacher vacancies, a signficant number in a district that as of the previous year had around 3,556 students. The previous year, when the classes were back in session, the district was posting 17 unfilled classroom vacancies.

During the most recent meeting of the board of Marlboro School District, Superintendent Helena Tillar, under fire from some Board members about the budget issues, argued that some of the supposedly excessive filled positions were a result of the fact that in previous years those same positions had simply gone unfilled. (The data we collected seems to support her argument.)

Student-teacher ratios are hard to determine.

It’s hard to say what South Carolina’s actual teacher-to-student ratio is, because most methods of arriving at that number divide the total number of enrolled students by the total number of certified teachers employed by public schools in the state. Many of these certified teachers are not actually working in classrooms, so that number can be misleading.

Tillar, for her part, stated that district “has chosen to stay at a 25-to-1 student teacher ratio” (a relatively large classroom size, if it does represent the average classroom in the district). She also said the district was trying to increase the number of teaching assistants. And she pushed back on Board member Leevander McRae, Jr., who argued that in her first years on the job (Tillar was appointed in July 2023) she should have instituted staffing cuts to save money, during a contentious conversation.

“Did you want me to come in and take people’s jobs on day one?” she asked.

Board member Danny Driggers offered, “I figure that’s 12 teachers per student when I do my math.” He also said the district had “an overbundance of district staff”.

Since officials supplied such constrasting numbers— which seem to be based, like state numbers, on the total number of staff members divided by the total number of students— its hard to say what actual classrooms in the district look like in terms of class sizes.

In any case, teachers and educational advocates have for years reported excessively large class sizes in South Carolina. Large class sizes can make individualized instruction and accomodation of special education needs difficult or impossible, can contribute to safety issues, and are likely a driver of teacher burnout.

Attempting to address the district’s budget issues by cutting staff might create unintended consequences, and it seems like a more wholistic analysis of the data would be needed to know whether Marlboro really does have an “overabundance” of staff, particularly at the classroom level.

Whether that will come with a potential takeover by the state Department of Education, of coure, remains to be seen.

It’s striking that Weaver has, herself, argued consistently over the past decade, that the solution to perceived problems with schools is more “school choice”; that is, more publicly-funded school vouchers. And yet these voucher programs, including those contemplated in legislation supported by Weaver, have almost always come with the requirement that state oversight of money being spent by private schools be very limited, if it exists at all.

The most recently passed state voucher law, S. 62, contains the requirement that “the freedom of education service providers to provide for the educational needs of scholarship students without governmental control must not be abridged”. (The law is likely to face constitutional challenges in coming months.)

Ultimately, the State Board of Education will have to vote to approve the takeover of Marlboro Schools.

I want to hear from you.

This is a developing story, and one I’d like to continue covering. If you have experience in a district that has experienced or is experiencing a state takeover (in any county or state) as an employee, student, or parent, please reach out. I’d love to hear about your experiences.

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