Mattress storein North Charleston, SC

CHARLOTTE – Hey, it's bowl season.

Weird things are going to happen – i.e., Shane Beamer receiving a Mayo bath after South Carolina's 38-21 win over North Carolina in the Duke's Mayo Bowl – and coaches will try almost anything.

Clearly, North Carolina had not spent much time planning for Dakereon Joyner taking the majority of the snaps at quarterback. Shane Beamer and USC kept that secret, rolling him out there the first snap of their first drive.

Three plays later, Joyner's first pass since 2019 at Texas A&M went for a 69 yards to Jaheim Bell for a touchdown.

The element of surprise allowed the Gamecocks (7-6) to score early and often as the offense rolled up as many points in the first half, 25, as it had posted in full games nine out of 11 games against FBS competition this season.

UNC (6-7) struggled to get its feet under it and quarterback Sam Howell was bottled up for the much of the game by USC's defense. Howell was sacked three times and hit several more.

South Carolina's winning the Duke's Mayo Bowl closes out Beamer's first season in a big way, the first Gamecocks head coach to win a bowl game in his first season in decades.

Dakereon Joyner: South Carolina's X-factor

The past couple of seasons, fans have been calling for Joyner to get extended playing time at quarterback. Well, they got their wish, and Joyner proved to be the Gamecocks' jolt.

His dual-threat ability wreaked havoc on UNC's defense all afternoon. He threw the long touchdown to open the game and ended the game a perfect 9-for-9 throwing the ball with a 286 passer rating.

The North Charleston native couldn't be contained on the ground either, rushing 10 times for 64 yards to cap the game with 224 total yards of offense.

Joyner still has two years of eligibility. In the days following this stellar performance, it'll be interesting to see what he decides to do.

Kicker Parker White sets South Carolina all-time scoring record

All he needed was 3 points coming in. And Parker White got them early here at the Duke's Mayo Bowl.

With the 30-yard field goal with 27 seconds left in the first quarter in Charlotte, the senior place kicker broke Elliott Fry's program scoring record and now has 363 career points. Fry had 359.

White came into the 2021 season needing 70 points to set a mark program mark.

South Carolina patchwork defense shines vs. UNC

Howell has been graded one of the highest draftable quarterbacks in this class for a while. And while many loved the matchup of him against a depleted defense that was down three starters and missing a few more, Clayton White and his defensive guys were having none of that.

South Carolina kept Howell and the Tar Heels in check for much of the afternoon. It didn't allow UNC to convert a third down until the fourth quarter (finishing 1-for-9) , sacked Howell three times and frankly was in charge of the tempo.

Preview of what South Carolina football could look like in 2022

Plenty of young guys got playing time against North Carolina as several players chose to opt out or transfer, as well as suspensions and some out because of COVID-19 concerns.

Players like defensive lineman Alex Huntley, cornerback Isaiah Norris and running back Juju McDowell all got considerably more snaps than they had and took advantage of the opportunity. McDowell scored a long touchdown run. Huntley had two tackles, including a tackle for loss, and was disruptive a few more times.

Also, with Joyner at quarterback, how Satterfield used his athleticism could be an indicator of what Oklahoma transfer Spencer Rattler could look like in the Gamecocks offense. Rattler of course will just have a better arm.

Cory Diaz covers the South Carolina Gamecocks for The Greenville News as part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow his work for all things Gamecocks on Twitter: @CoryDiaz_TGN

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – Charleston County School District (CCSD) Superintendent Dr. Gerrita Postlewait resigned Wednesday during a specially called Board of Trustees meeting over holiday break.

Her full resignation will be effective July 1.

In a provided statement, Postlewait said:

“I am resigning as Superintendent of Charleston County Schools effective July 1, 2022. Between now and June 30, I will do everything I can to ensure a smooth transition of leadership.

I have enjoyed immensely the opportunity to serve Charleston County students, personnel, parents, and the greater community over the past seven years. I am heartened by the many accomplishments and accolades CCSD has received and am especially proud of the selfless service teachers, staff, and leaders have provided during the COVID-19 pandemic.

My best wishes to the Board, school district, and students for continued success.”

Postlewait was selected as superintendent in July of 2015, serving for just over five years.

Prior to her role as superintendent, Postlewait served as Chair of the State Board of Education. She has also done extensive work with private organizations in the education sector.

Don Kennedy, who currently serves as CCSD’s Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, will serve as interim superintendent beginning in January.

Kennedy said that when he assumes the role, he will continue focusing on topics that have been of concern for CCSD parents, students, staff, and board members.

Keeping kids safely in school during the COVID-19 pandemic is a top priority for Kennedy, especially with students set to return next week amid a serious uptick in COVID-19 cases brought about by the Omicron variant.

Another main concern is how to use ESSER funds, which are meant to help schools mitigate impacts of COVID-19. Kennedy says that there are many proposals for how to use the funds and the district is still deciding what the most effective model will be.

He said that “trying to work through the learning loss from the pandemic that [the] students have suffered through as well as making sure [they] put in support structures for [the] teachers because of the tremendous workload they have undergone over the last two years.”

Editor’s note: This story is breaking and will be updated.

Charleston County School District, the second-largest district in South Carolina with about 50,000 students, has become a testing ground for the school privatization movement — and 2022 is bringing a new battle.

South Carolina’s schools have long been among the worst-performing in the country, “saddled with a legacy of apathy and low expectations” that leave students “unprepared for the world that awaits them,” according to a 2018 Post and Courier investigation.

School choice — including charter schools, private academics, specialized magnet schools and other options — has siphoned the best-performing students from struggling schools “while children with the fewest resources get marooned in failing institutions,” the newspaper said.

“North Charleston High loses more than half the students in its attendance zone to a host of magnet, charter and private schools, leaving behind a core of poor Black students,” said the investigation by a team of reporters including the award-winning Paul Bowers, who wrote the piece below.

Since desegregation efforts decades ago, the Charleston district has returned to de facto segregation at many of its schools, accelerated by a boom of magnet schools in the 1990s and early 2000s. It currently sponsors nine public charter schools and two public-private partnership schools, in addition to multiple schools within the county sponsored by statewide authorizers.

On Monday, the school board is scheduled to vote on a proposal that would allow the takeover of 23 lower-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black neighborhoods by an “innovation management organization,” which would be allowed under law to hire some of its teachers without a state teaching license.

In this post, Bowers looks at what Charleston’s public schools are up against. A parent of three public school children in North Charleston, he was the Post and Courier’s education reporter from 2016 to 2019 and was part of a team that won the 2018 Eddie Prize from the Education Writers Association. Find him on Twitter at @Paul_Bowers and read his work at brutalsouth.substack.com.

Every few years, South Carolina becomes a battleground for school privatization. It looks like 2022 is going to be one of those years.

Back in the 2000s, the New York real estate investor Howard Rich backed a series of South Carolina candidates pushing school vouchers, which would funnel public education funds into private schools. More recently, we have seen efforts by Gov. Henry McMaster and the state legislature to create a Tennessee-style “turnaround district,” to deregulate for-profit online charter schools via authorizer shopping, and to divert federal covid-19 relief funds from public schools to private schools. Teachers and parents have had to fight these advances tooth and nail and have so far kept most of the damage at bay.

Lately it seems like the tip of the spear for privatization efforts in South Carolina is the Charleston County School District, a starkly segregated and unequal district anchored by a world-renowned tourist destination. The Charleston County School Board is scheduled to vote Jan. 10 on a proposal called “Reimagine Schools” that would allow a private third party to make decisions at 23 predominantly Black schools. I thought now would be a good moment to revisit the history of school board power struggles and dark-money campaigns in Charleston County.

Efforts to privatize the governance of public schools have been supported by, among others, two South Carolina billionaires — Anita Zucker, head of a chemical manufacturer, and Ben Navarro, chief of a debt collection agency. Sometimes working in tandem, sometimes independently, Zucker and Navarro tend to promote charter schools and private takeovers of public schools.

Zucker and her advocacy organization, the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, were involved in a 2015-2016 effort to create a “turnaround district” at the state level, modeled after failed efforts in Tennessee, Louisiana and Michigan. The proposal involved lumping the state’s lowest-performing schools into a new district and bringing in third-party operators to manage them. Similar bills were introduced in Georgia and North Carolina around the same time, but the idea never received serious discussion in the South Carolina Statehouse.

Navarro is known nationally for his failed 2018 bid to buy the Carolina Panthers team in the National Football League. In the financial world, he is known for his Sherman Financial Group, a privately owned firm that filed more lawsuits against defaulted credit-card debtors than others in the industry during covid-19 lockdowns, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.

In the arena of education, Navarro is known for his private Meeting Street Schools, which are sometimes lauded as a model for improving the standardized test scores of low-income students from at-risk communities. Since 2014, Meeting Street Schools has entered unique public-private partnerships with South Carolina public school districts, starting with the takeover of two elementary schools in North Charleston.

With a boost of private funding, the schools invest in wraparound services for students and their families, offer additional psychological support, place two teachers in each classroom, and operate on an extended school day and academic calendar. Those practices have a proven track record of success, but most schools in South Carolina lack the funding to carry them out.

Meeting Street Schools also heavily recruit staff from Teach for America and the KIPP charter network, and they preach the trendy mid-2010s gospel of “grit” — in fact, the disciplinary model is so gritty that one Meeting Street-run elementary school suspended one-quarter of its students in a single school year. Before opening the schools under new management, Navarro sought and received a special exemption from the state’s employment protections for teachers. As a result, Meeting Street principals can hire and fire teachers at will.

Navarro is also closely associated with the Charleston Coalition for Kids, a dark-money group that emerged in 2018 and immediately outspent all other donors combined on advertising for a slate of school board candidates.

Much of the coalition’s funding and spending is hidden from public view thanks to state election law and the group’s nonprofit status, but FCC records reveal it spent at least $235,000 on TV commercials alone in the run-up to the 2018 school board election — four-and-a-half times what all of the candidates combined raised for their own campaigns. (Local activists estimated the coalition’s spending on Facebook ads, billboards, and other media might have cost additional hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

The coalition spent big on the school board election again in 2020, investing $306,000 on TV commercials, including attack ads against two Black incumbents, the records show. Today six of the nine sitting Charleston County School Board members have received backing from the coalition.

A number of national organizations have taken an interest in Charleston school politics as well, including 50CAN (formerly StudentsFirst) and the Broad Foundation. After failing to create a statewide turnaround district in 2016, the 50CAN affiliate SouthCarolinaCAN shifted its focus to the local level — specifically to Charleston County. When I interviewed then-executive director Bradford Swann in December 2016, he said his organization would be focused on “grass-roots organizing” via a five-month fellowship program for parents.

The result was Charleston RISE, a parent advocacy group that also operates a parent help hotline. Billboards advertising its services have appeared all over the county, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Charleston RISE trainees were among the founding members of the Charleston Coalition for Kids when it launched in 2018. Some RISE members said they helped vet school board candidates for the coalition.

Currently the Charleston County School Board is deciding how to spend its share of the covid-19 recovery funds provided under the American Recovery Act’s ESSER III program. Multiple local nonprofits submitted proposals on how to spend the money, but only one has gotten a public hearing.

On Monday, Jan. 10, the school board will vote on a proposal called Reimagine Schools that would target 23 low-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black parts of the county. Leaning on a “Schools of Innovation” law recently expanded by the state legislature, the proposal would authorize a takeover of individual schools by an unidentified “innovation management organization.” The Schools of Innovation law also allows a school to hire up to 25 percent of its teachers in certain subject areas without a state teaching license.

The organization that proposed the Reimagine Schools plan is the Coastal Community Fund, a relative newcomer to school board lobbying. The fund and its CEO, Darrin Goss Sr., have promoted the Meeting Street Schools public-private partnership model, which exempts them from “bureaucratic” regulations. (Complicating matters further, the Coastal Community Fund also administers an investigative fund and Education Lab for the local daily newspaper, the Post and Courier.)

The nine-member school board gave the Reimagine Schools proposal initial approval by a 6-3 vote in December without holding any community input sessions. All six members who voted to approve for the proposal had been endorsed by the Charleston Coalition for Kids.

Whatever the Charleston County School Board decides, the privatization push will continue in parallel at the state level. The state superintendent of education post is up for grabs this fall, and the first candidate to announce her run was Ellen Weaver, a charter school advocate with the conservative Palmetto Promise Institute. A central proposal in her platform is the creation of education scholarship accounts, a modified private school voucher program.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - Hundreds of people will soon be able to receive free dental services due to an expansion of a partnership between a North Charleston church and a non-profit dental clinic.

Since first opening in 1998, North Charleston Dental Outreach said it has provided more than $375,000 worth of dental care for people in the community.

Come summer of 2022, North Charleston Dental Outreach will have a new home. While the non-profit has been offering free dental care to people for more than 20 years, organizers said it’s time for an expansion to reach more people in the community.

The new location will be right next door to the Destiny Worship Center off Azalea Drive in North Charleston. People will be able to walk in and receive free dental services like emergency surgeries, teeth cleanings and removals.

Dr. Bill Sasser and Pastor Larry Goss formed a partnership to offer dental care for many people in the community who don’t have insurance or can’t afford care from a private dental practice.

“Partner with people who know the people in this community more than we do. That’s why we’re excited for this partnership because they’re right there in the community and can direct us on the right path,” said Dr. Sasser, Dental Director of North Charleston Dental Outreach.

The current clinic has three treatment rooms but organizers said it barely has any space for equipment or patients and has outdated technology.

Dr. Sasser and Pastor Goss said the new clinic will be double the size of the current location off Reynolds Avenue. They said it’ll also be fully handicap accessible, have updated technology, and will provide more education and preventative dental measures for patients.

“Not only will people receive services they need or can’t afford, but they can have connections. So after they’ve received dental services, they can come over to the church or food distribution to get resources for them as well,” said Larry Goss, Senior Pastor of the Destiny Worship Center.

The clinic operates with about 20 volunteers. Some are dentists from private practices, and others are dental students from MUSC. Organizers said they hope the new expansion will bring more volunteers to provide more services. The clinic said funds for the expansion came from community donations and some grants.

The clinic said free services aren’t only limited to people in North Charleston since they’ve had patients travel from Walterboro, Orangeburg and North Carolina.

Copyright 2021 WCSC. All rights reserved.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – The owner of a pay-what-you-can restaurant who was forced to move from their location in North Charleston received a major donation on Wednesday.

Destiny Community Café had to leave its location by the end of October and nearly closed for good after the property manager raised the rent. But members of the community came together – in true Charleston fashion – and helped collect donations for the organization.

Ragina Scott Saunders, the James Island native who founded the café, has been serving up healthy and delicious food to those who need help for almost seven years. Food is donated by local farms, nonprofits, and community partners.

She said the need intensified during the pandemic.

But Saunders learned in October that she and other small businesses would have to leave their location because of a rent increase.

“We tried to negotiate and talk with the manager and the only thing they tried to do is push contracts in my face,” she said.

Since then, there has been an outpouring of support from the community. During a special event on Wednesday, Seacoast Church and the North Charleston Dream Center presented her with a $50,000 check to go towards purchasing a new food truck to better serve those in need across the Lowcountry.

“In 2009, the Seacoast Church and The North Charleston Dream Center had a dream to make an impact in this community. And just like you, we ran into obstacles and a lot of trials. But the generosity of the community coming together through their finances and support helped us maintain and serve thousands,” said organizers with the center.

But that wasn’t all. The owner of Swig and Swine was also at the event and handed over the keys to a second food truck to Saunders.

“I’m a firm believer in the fact that everyone’s giving gifts in order to do God’s work. When I saw the story that you had lost your restaurant, I knew that you needed a new set of tools to help give back to the community like you always do, so we have a truck for you.”

Saunders was named a News 2 Remarkable Woman finalist earlier this year. She thanked her community for their willingness to give back during today’s surprise.

“I thank God, I thank the community for having faith and coming together because this is what it’s all about. This is making it even better to happen for us, even before the new year. We were getting calls from people who are handicapped, disabled, unemployed, sick and a meal is the number one thing they are asking for right now,” she said,

Saunders went on to say, “I thank you all for getting us back up and running on the road with not just one, but two food trucks – the beginning of a fleet – this is God’s work, y’all. Thank y’all.”

Saunders said getting out to the communities will be very beneficial to those who are facing hard times and worried about transportation. “We can feed double, triple, what we’ve been doing,” she said. “We even have people that are disabled so we can come to the apartments, low-income communities – this is a blessing.”

Others in the community have donated $25,000 to the Saunders and Destiny Community Café.