Teacher Renewal Center: Taxpayers may pay for “private donation”

Iron Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head.

Plans for “Camp Rex” are moving forward, and funding for the project is about to become another expensive burden for South Carolina taxpayers.

The new Teacher Renewal Center was originally touted as being “privately financed,”  but now the Upstate’s News Channel 4 reports that that the center “will be paid for through grants, a modest registration fee and possibly state dollars.”

It’s good to see that the “law of unintended consequences” is a good enough reason for education bureaucrats to charge South Carolina taxpayers even more money.

While training and merit-based awards for teachers sound like a great idea, in practice the State Education Department has a sordid history of failing to effectively deliver on it’s hype.

Camp Rex

“The scope of this takes your breath away, it truly does,” state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex said at the announcement. “It’s such an amazing show of support for our children, for our schools and for our state. Now we have to honor Mr. Anthony’s support by building something that will become the gold standard for the whole nation.”

At first glance one might think that Jim Rex is talking about bloated education bureaucracy here in South Carolina, but he’s just talking about the proposed Teacher Renewal Center in Pickens County.

We would never presume to tell someone else what to do with their own money, but 10 million dollars would translate into a lot of scholarships for low income students.

Of course the need for real school choice pales in comparison to the need teachers have for a state -of -the- art waterfront complex to take state paid vacations to in the name of “R&R.”

According to Rex, “One in three new teachers leaves the profession within five years. We have to find creative ways of stopping this dangerous draining away of young talent.”

What about the dangerous draining away of young talent that occurs when fifty percent of students in South Carolina drop out before graduating high school? Rex has been anything but creative in stopping this waste of young lives and taxpayer dollars.

Rex is more than willing to accept philanthropic and corporate donations for bureaucratic indulgence, so why does he not support them going to struggling students?

Taxpayers around the state will all breathe a sigh of relief when Jim Rex decides to focus on real reform, not making South Carolina the nation’s “gold standard” of flabby bureaucracy.