It’s not lofty idealism to imagine a world where a North Charleston principal doesn’t have to take an extra job to lift up students in need. That world should be reality. That should be our starting place.
Thank goodness for selfless people like Henry Darby. But his story is proof that we’ve failed.
Darby’s generosity and hard work has earned him scores of well-wishers and thousands of extra dollars to put to good use.
It has also shined the national media spotlight on Charleston County, where a principal was so compelled by poverty inside his school that he signed up to work the overnight shift at Walmart. He also serves on Charleston County Council.
“I am an optimist … I know that these times will not always be with us. I know that my students will not always be in poverty,” Darby told NBC’s TODAY show last week.
We need optimists like Darby, especially in public education, where 87.3% of his students lived in poverty in 2017-2018, according to the latest figures published by Charleston County School District.
Sadly, that’s the reality for around half of Charleston County families with school-aged children, especially students of color.
Darby is right, though — it does not have to be this way. We know this because it’s not that way at every school.
A short five-minute drive from North Charleston High, which is 82.6% Black, sits Academic Magnet High School, which is 80.4% white. Consistently ranked among the highest-achieving high schools in America, just 3.5% of Academic Magnet students live in poverty.
This is not a challenge specific to North Charleston, but the numbers show poverty closely follows racial lines throughout the county. Downtown at Burke High School, which is 96.7% Black, 92.5% of families live in poverty. In Mount Pleasant, where Wando High’s 2017-2018 student body was 80.2% white, 21.28% lived in poverty. West Ashley High, 58% nonwhite, had 58.17% poverty.
On average, in 2017-2018, students at majority-nonwhite high schools in Charleston County were nearly four-times more likely to live in poverty than majority-white high school students (83.06% compared to 21.44%, respectively).
This inequality persists well beyond high school. It corresponds with staggering American racial wealth disparities, with the typical white family having a net worth eight times that of Black families in 2019, according to the Federal Reserve.
These problems are too big to be left for Henry Darby to fix.
Personal generosity and determination are no substitutes for building a system that gives Wando Warriors and North Charleston Cougars the same chances in life. This should be the work of our government, not the responsibility of a generous few.
This is not an accident. For years, small government politicians have hacked up the social safety net designed to help the people Darby is desperate to serve.
Surrendering the role of these programs to churches, charities and philanthropy has not worked. If anything, it has made inequality worse, as politicians allow themselves to ignore the problems facing their communities.
Instead of a homeless shelter, we get another athletic complex.
Instead of fairly funded schools that reflect our neighborhoods, we get “school choice” segregation.
Instead of tax revenue, we get a check presentation on TODAY.
Principal Darby deserves all the help he can get for his students. They certainly don’t seem to be getting it anywhere else.
Sam Spence is the editor of Charleston City Paper.
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