Index-Journal. March 9, 2024.
Editorial: New SC gun law way too restrictive
We don’t get it.
Gov. Henry McMaster should have sent lawmakers back to work on the open-carry permitless gun law he signed Thursday.
Way, way too restrictive.
First of all, just as the Second Amendment makes absolutely no mention of needing training or a permit to carry a sidearm, it makes no mention of any magical age to have a gun. In fact, it makes no mention of disallowing known criminals, felons if you will, from carrying.
The new law does encourage people to take a course on the safe handling and use of a gun, and to even get a concealed weapons permit, but does not require such. Whoop-tee-doo!
However, the law again meddles with people’s Second Amendment rights. Stiffer penalties for those who tote their sidearm in places where they remain banned, which is yet another sticking point that should have caused McMaster to send lawmakers back to the debate room. By the way, that’s stiffer penalties for those who repeatedly take guns where they are still prohibited. Repeatedly? So, how many strikes do they get?
The law comes down harder on people who commit crimes while armed with a weapon, even if they don’t use it. That seems a bit harsh, doesn’t it, if no gun was actually used. But wait! There’s more. Even greater penalties can be given such an offender if he or she does not have that much-encouraged concealed weapons permit.
As we said before in this space, the Second Amendment makes no provision for age requirements to have a gun, so our lawmakers and governor should have ensured the rights of any person to carry, regardless of age. Heck, we have teenagers running around right here in Greenwood exercising their open-carry and permitless rights. So why not let them get started sooner?
And, again noted in this space before, how can it be our right to possess and openly carry our sidearms with any restrictions whatsoever? Why do our rights end when it comes to schools? When it comes to government buildings, including those where our legislators gather? Seems a tad hypocritical, doesn’t it? Especially when they who make the rules do not have to play by them.
Oh, and as for situations in which law enforcement responds to a call and encounters a handful of people with guns openly visible, all they need do is say “If you’re not involved in any criminal activity here, please raise your hands.” Or just hope for the best outcome and that no mistakes are made.
Note: If after reading this you are not sure of our position, please refer to Webster’s Dictionary for the entry “sarcasm.”
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Post and Courier. March 12, 2024.
Editorial: SC raises are great, but teachers can’t unhear lawmakers’ competing message
One day this week — maybe today, maybe Wednesday — we likely will hear South Carolina House leaders congratulating themselves for approving a state budget that gives an even more significant raise to teachers than the ones we’ve seen the past few years.
And they should do that: The appropriations bill the House began debating on Monday would raise the minimum starting pay for teachers by $4,500 to $47,000. That’s up by nearly $20,000 from a decade ago and another indication that lawmakers are serious about meeting Gov. Henry McMaster’s goal of getting starting pay up to $50,000 by 2026.
More serious than Mr. McMaster perhaps, since the House plan puts more of a shrinking pot of new revenue into teacher pay than Mr. McMaster and Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver had requested, and puts the state in easy reach of reaching its goal a year early. All of which means, if the Senate agrees to the increase, as it should, it’s time to set the next goal.
The House budget writers’ plan is smart because it is targeted more than the previous increases have been to two particular problems: too few people entering the profession and too many senior teachers retiring early.
The first is straightforward: New teachers would get a bigger pay bump than current teachers.
The second is a combination of rejecting the governor’s smart but unpopular plan to base pay less on credentials earned and of providing higher pay for veteran teachers by making a change that we’ve never been sure is fair: give annual raises to teachers who have been teaching more than 23 years, rather than ending the so-called steps after 23 years. That’s certainly fair to individual teachers, but those teachers tend to congregate in better-off districts. Is it fair — and more importantly, does it serve our goals of providing a good education to all kids — to help the wealthiest districts pay higher salaries to teachers the poorer districts can’t attract?
The answer is almost irrelevant, though — as are questions about the value to students of each additional degree teachers receive — because it’s a seller’s market and we’re continuing to struggle with a national teacher shortage. Indeed, S.C. schools started the fall semester with a record number of teacher vacancies. Again.
So we have to do whatever we reasonably can to attract and retain teachers, even if that means the schools with the fewest struggling students continue to get the best teachers, and the schools with the most struggling students continue to get the worst teachers, and everybody in the state subsidizes that inequity.
The problem with the House’s approach isn’t that it might very well result in an even greater imbalance of quality versus need. The problem is that it does not represent all the state can reasonably do to address the teacher shortage.
The problem isn’t that the budget should provide even larger raises; sure, that would be nice, but there are also a lot of things the Legislature could do to reduce the teacher shortage that would not cost a penny. Yet lawmakers refuse to do those things.
Most of our legislators do not talk about teachers as if they are the enemy. They do not keep trotting out bogus claims about S.C. schools allowing teachers to “groom” and “indoctrinate” students — charges that no one has produced a single piece of evidence to support. Some lawmakers do, though, and their colleagues mollycoddle them and the voters who insist on believing such claims without evidence by passing legislation to address a non-problem that teachers are convinced will muzzle them.
Most of our legislators don’t claim to have proof that a public school student in Greenwood County “was authorized” by a teacher to identify as a cat. At least one did last month, though, and his colleagues didn’t demand that he either provide that evidence or take back his claim.
On top of that silence, our legislators continue to push policies that most public school teachers interpret as anti-teacher — most recently the bill the House is expected to pass next week to remove all the limits on the 10-month-old voucher law that was supposed to start as a small pilot program but now would be open to every private school student in the state along with homeschoolers, at a cost of up to $2 billion a year.
Most insulting to teachers: Some homeschool students wouldn’t even have to take the standardized tests that teachers detest in return for the taxpayers subsidizing their education by non-teachers. Why not? Because a handful of homeschool parents showed up at a public hearing last week to complain about the requirement that thousands of public school teachers have been complaining about for decades, to no avail.
Message, once again, received: Teachers’ voices don’t matter.
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Times and Democrat. March 9, 2024.
Editorial: FOIA vital tool for public access to government
The First Amendment assures there will be no prohibition on press freedom, but it does not ensure that government must cooperate in any way with a free press. That is where laws such as South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act are essential for press and public to have access to information.
Observed March 10-16 around the nation, Sunshine Week is a nonpartisan collaboration among groups in the journalism, civic, education, government and private sectors that shines a light on the importance of public records and open government.
Sunshine Sunday began in Florida in 2002, led by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, and became a national observance three years later.
In approving South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act in 1978, the General Assembly stated: “It is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner so that citizens shall be advised of the performance of public officials and of the decisions that are reached in public activity and in the formulation of public policy.”’
But there are problems:
— A meeting of a council is held without giving notice to the public that elected its members.
— A request for information about taxpayer-financed salaries of public officials in a school district is rejected, with officials telling the media and a group of citizens they’ll have to go to court to get such information.
— An incident report about an auto accident involving a police vehicle is not made available until reporters get wind of the incident and make a formal request. It takes weeks for the report to be made public.
— A public body votes to enter closed session, citing only “personnel matters” as the reason. Officials emerge two hours later to announce “agreement” on a course of action.
— A school board discusses a document that is before the trustees meeting in public session. Reporters and all in attendance are refused a copy of the document.
Ignoring or giving short shrift to the principles of open government is not infrequent — in The T&D Region, around the state and throughout our country.
In South Carolina, we have a better-than-average Freedom of Information Act, a law designed to ensure that government operates in the open. Lawmakers made key improvements in 2017:
— Criminal penalties for FOIA violations, which have never been imposed, were removed. Violators are now subject to awards for damages and attorney fees.
— The waiting period for response to a request for access to public records was reduced from 15 days to 10. If the records at issue are older than two years, an agency has 20 days to respond to an FOIA request. Before the change, no time limit existed for when documents had to be provided.
— Agencies are required to post fees for searching and copying documents. That fee schedule replaces the “reasonable cost” provision that has come to mean anything from an agency billing a person thousands of dollars for research to amounts far above market rates for making copies of documents. The bill requires agencies’ fees not to exceed the prorated hourly salary of the lowest-paid agency employee. Copying fees would have to be at the commercial rate and cannot be charged if documents are transmitted by electronic means.
— If a public record exists digitally, a person has the right to request and receive it via electronic transmission.
Not to be lost during Sunshine Week and every week is the importance of the FOIA, which is not a law for journalists only. It provides government access for every citizen, including the many having never sought a public record or attended a public meeting. The law is there to ensure your right to know.
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