COMMENTARY: School will damage neighborhoods

Recently, Orangeburg County Council and the Orangeburg County School District board, as an afterthought – after the purchase of commercial acreage for the school and passage of a school bond issue to finance the build — changed our lives and retirement by optioning to place a newly constructed Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School in the middle of our residential community.

Instead of discussing the potential of constructing the high school with the community, the council and the school board went forward with a land swap, where both set of politicians placed the priorities of businessmen before a residential community and even sadder above the interests of the children.

At the two legislative meetings, the council echoed the need to support the businesses, but how is that done when you place an underachieving high school in a Black neighborhood? You have less than a skilled workforce and you deliberately undermine the value of the homes in the neighborhood surrounding the high school.

How does that combination fit into Orangeburg County’s overall long-term plans? If you see what l see, it is but another turn to continue institutional segregation of my chosen home.

This permutation of Orangeburg-Wilkinson is but a shadow of the original high school. According to US News and World Report, the high school is ranked 13,383 out of 17,843 nationally, 63% of its students passing state reading proficiency and 29% passing state math proficiency tests.

In the SC School Report Card for 2019-20, Orangeburg-Wilkinson was not rated. In earlier (2015) SC School Grade reports, the high school was ranked 166 out of 221 schools. And looking at reports from 2010 to date, the school has consistently performed below average.

Until we get at the root cause of this underperformance, a new façade is just window dressing and does not prepare the Orangeburg-Wilkinson grad for those jobs the city and the county are planning for.

How does placing an underperforming school in a Black neighborhood help the county and its residents? It doesn’t. It merely reinforces institutional racism by segregating homes, and education into one geographical area.

As Andrew Young stated in 1968, while Dr. King was protesting discriminatory housing practices in Chicago, “We weren’t anti-Daley (or other politicians). We are for good housing, good schools, for good health care.”

We cannot forecast what will happen if Orangeburg-Wilkinson is built in our community, but from history, we know it will depress the value of our homes and drastically change noise levels and traffic. With the influx of a school, many predict the neighborhood and its environment would be unalterably changed.

And if, just if, that would improve test scores and the overall quality of education, l would accept that, but history tells us it won’t. Instead, it tells us that this is the beginning of reshaping our neighborhood into a ghetto and further polarizing our community. I wish our legislators would reconsider and do better.