Brent Nelsen for Education

Like so many of you, I recently sent my children back to school. I sent one off to his second year of college. I sent another off to his junior year at Greenville High School. My oldest is off the hook: she graduated from Furman last year and got married this summer! It seems like just yesterday I sent her off to kindergarten at Summit Drive Elementary School (Greenville) in a little pinafore dress. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future I’ll watch another little one set off for her first day at school!

My wife Lori and I have been fortunate. In Greenville we have an abundance of public school choices. When our children were in elementary school, the district designated Stone Academy, a school not far from our neighborhood, a “magnet” school. When our friends started moving their children to that school, we realized that we parents had a choice of where to send our children. We liked Stone Academy, but we chose to keep our children at Summit Drive and make our little school just as good as the magnet down the street.

Lori and I joined the School Improvement Council, and I became its chair for many years. With the help of able administrators and teachers-and, of course, many parents-we developed a program and school community that could compete with any magnet school in the district. The magnet program worked for Stone Academy and the non-magnet Summit Drive!

When the time came to choose a high school, all three of our children (with the approval of their parents!) chose to go out of zone to one of the senior high magnets, Greenville High. My remaining high schooler is now spending his mornings at the Fine Arts Center located at Wade Hampton High School and his afternoons at Greenville High.

Life gets complicated when students and parents have choices! But the freedom to tailor an educational program to the needs of children and families is essential to creating an educational system that prepares our young people for a 21^st century world.

In my travels across this state, I have seen excellent public choices for South Carolina students. On Hilton Head Island parents can choose to send their children to one of two schools located in the same building: the Hilton Head Island School for the Creative Arts or the Hilton Head International Baccalaureate Elementary School. Langston Charter Middle School provides a charter school option to Greenville parents who choose single-gender schooling for their middle schoolers. Middle College at Midlands Technical College offers high-level technical training to high school students, while Beaufort High School offers students a choice of majors within a single school. These are good options for parents in these areas.

Not all South Carolina parents have good choices for their children. I want to change that. The challenges of choice are different in the various regions of the state. But we can overcome these obstacles so we parents have good options for our children.