South Carolina High School Case Study

Carolina High School, located in Greenville County, was established in 1956 as a 9th through 12th grade public high school. In 1995, the school was chosen to be a magnet school where at its peak had a student enrollment of over 1300. When the needs of the community changed and local mills closed, the dynamics of the community changed, dropping enrollment down by several hundred students. By 2000, the average family income was just above $22,000, where a little over 9% of the families were reported by the 2000 Census as earning less than $15,000 per year. Due to the changes in the surroundings of the school, the school suffered from great challenges. In a location stricken by poverty, the enrollment in 2008 was a little over 700 students with over 80% of the population being minority and served by the free and reduced lunch
For seven consecutive years, the state of South Carolina rated the school as At-Risk, bringing in specialists in English, Math, and Science to help turn the school around. The test scores were in the bottom 5% in the state and less than 50% of the students who started Carolina High graduated with their 9th grade cohort. The teacher turnover rate was high, where 15 to 20% of the teachers left after each school year ended. The focus of the school was more centered on discipline and to keep the students in the classroom rather than curriculum and instruction and learning. Reactive approaches to education were employed rather than proactive. Because of the challenges the school faced, finding teachers became very difficult and less than quality teachers were sent to the school from other schools just so there was a warm body in the classroom. The expectations of the teachers was to keep the students in the classroom and do work, lacking an emphasis on the quality