Beaufort Co. teachers to march for pay, resources May 1. How will this affect schools?

About 7% of Beaufort County School District teachers have applied for personal leave days on May 1, the same day that more than 2,000 educators from across the state are expected to descend on Columbia and march in support of higher pay, smaller teacher-student ratios and more resources for schools.

“Teachers get five personal leave days, and they can use them for any reason and don’t have to tell us the reason,” district spokesman Jim Foster said Friday afternoon, noting that it wasn’t clear how many of the 143 teachers who requested to have off that day were planning to go to Columbia for the rally.

Bridgette Frazier, a teacher at Hilton Head Island Middle School and a 2016 candidate for school board, said Friday that at least 10 teachers from her school were planning to attend the rally, which starts with a march at the state Department of Education building just before 10 a.m..

Earlier in the week, Frazier called on the district to close the school for the day so that more teachers could attend.

“I challenge Beaufort County School District and its Board of Education to show solidarity with its educators and close school on May 1st, 2019, so we can exercise our right to exist and educate the minds of the future with respect and equity,” she wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday.

Beaufort County schools will be open that day.

Teachers were told that they could use one of their personal days for the rally and that the district would find a substitute for their classes, Foster said.

At least one school district in the state, Chester County, has announced it will close for that day, according to a report in The State newspaper.

Frazier, a longtime and vocal advocate for teachers and students, also outlined some of the problems she sees locally, including a lack of mental health resources for students, extra work assignments for teachers that keep them out of the classroom and a myopic approach to education that she called a “one size fits all approach.”

“We need legislators and officials to know we are tired of being shortchanged,” she wrote.

On Monday, Christina Gwozdz, chairperson of the Beaufort County Board of Education, sent a letter to the county’s state legislative delegation with a list of district priorities, namely gaining the ability to set its own school start date, the need for fully funded state mandates, funding for an increase in school resource officers and mental health initiatives to help make schools safer, and increase in teacher pay.

“Teachers are professionals and deserve to be compensated as such,” Gwozdz wrote. “... the State of South Carolina needs to show we value our teachers by increasing their pay.”

The march on May 1 was announced last weekend by the grassroots advocacy group SC for Ed in an open letter on Facebook that said teachers in South Carolina feel “pushed aside and neglected” and that their repeated efforts to get state legislators to act in favor of education had “fallen on deaf ears.”

The letter acknowledged that they, as teachers, were loath to take off a day, knowing it would affect students and parents, but “not participating in this event will only allow the cycle of detrimental educational policy to continue in our state.”

While teachers are expected to see a 4% raise in salaries next year, it appears unlikely that the General Assembly will pass bills that address any of the other considerations, such as classroom size and resources for mental illness, according to reporting from The State newspaper.

In North Carolina, thousands of teachers were also expected to participate in a walk out on May 1 and more than half the state’s public school students have had school canceled for that day as a result.

This story was originally published April 26, 2019 at 4:49 PM.