It is much easier to point blame at one person than at the many who are at the root of a problem.
No doubt, Susie Shepherd, a Wayne County middle-school principal, made a poor decision. She approved a parents' proposal to raise funds essentially by selling grades. She'll pay for her lapse: She's on leave for the rest of the month and will retire on Dec. 1.
At Rosewood Middle School, Shepherd approved a parents' advisory council proposal: Students who raised $20 would get 20 bonus test points.
Anyone who has ever sat in a parents meeting can imagine how it went. Parents wanted to raise money for the school. They sold chocolates last year with disappointing results. Someone frowned on magazine and wrapping-paper sales. Then someone else said, "Why don't we just ask everyone to donate $20?" And someone else said, "Let's offer a little incentive. Maybe 20 test points. Why not?"
Shepherd should have been the one who explained "why not." But she didn't. Maybe the negative implication was not clear to her. Maybe she wasn't paying attention. But one quick, and bad, choice on her part, and now she's filing her pension paperwork.
At the root of this problem, however, are decisions that state leaders have made repeatedly. These are the same people who now voice righteous indignation about "selling grades." But these leaders are the reason parents were so desperately raising money in the first place.
North Carolina public schools have always been underfunded, especially those in rural counties. Wayne isn't the state's poorest county, but it's not affluent, either. There is a huge disparity in the resources available to schools in such counties and those in the urban areas like ours.
The General Assembly knows that, yet efforts to fully close the funding gap have been rejected for three decades. Two equalization funds -- one for low-wealth, another for small-population, districts -- have never received all of the money that they need.
On top of that, the legislature this year slashed school spending. Legislators tried to insulate the classroom but weren't fully successful.
Parents know that their fund-raising can mitigate some effects of such cuts. Private money can buy extra supplies and new computers, pay for a holiday festival that might otherwise have had to be canceled or a field trip. The parental involvement is a good thing, but it should never be as critical as it this year.
One principal made a mistake. But generations of legislators are much more to blame because they created the environment in which such a bad idea had to be considered.
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