ALLENDALE — A public school is an asset to any community, Gloria Fields said Thursday, but a tuition tax-credit program would be an asset only to some schools and some communities.

And for this rural, impoverished community — where the nearest private school is 25 miles and a county away — tax credits “will be a minus,” said the receptionist at Allendale Elementary.

Fields spoke as she awaited the arrival of the man who both created the tuition tax-credit proposal and very publicly criticized Allendale’s schools — Gov. Mark Sanford.

Sanford arrived here two months after he asked a statewide television audience in his State of the State address if they could “imagine tears being shed because you got into the public school in Allendale or Marion?”

Those remarks were not what Allendale County needs, said Alonzo Frazier, a member of the Allendale School Board.

“We need our leaders to be supportive of the Allendale County school system,” Frazier said, adding the tuition tax-credit bill now before a House subcommittee is not the solution. “This is not a time to criticize. It’s the time to work together on uniting our efforts. What I hope Governor Sanford makes is a commitment to Allendale.”

Allendale schools superintendent Paula Harris said she hoped Sanford left Allendale with “a better understanding of our school system.”

The governor toured the 50-year-old elementary school, walking halls with peeling paint and cracked floors, and visiting classroom after classroom.

He listened as two girls read him a story about their class’s pet hamster. (“It had nine babies!” one child said.) In the basketball gym, where students waited for their annual class picture, Sanford was treated to a dance by fourth- and fifth-graders.

At each stop, Sanford urged the students to study hard.

“How you do in school is incredibly important,” Sanford said.

Judging from his State of the State speech, Harris said, Sanford had a preconceived notion about Allendale. “I think perhaps he has an incomplete idea.”

She, too, believes the bill, called Put Parents in Charge by its supporters, is not the answer.

The bill would give parents income tax credits to home-school their children, send them to private schools or send them to better public schools. Parents who do not earn enough to qualify for the tax credits would qualify for grants from scholarship organizations that supporters say will spring up.

Supporters say the bill would force public schools to improve to compete with alternatives.

Sanford made no mention Thursday of his past remarks about Allendale’s schools or his tax-credit plan until he was asked about them by reporters. Sanford said he visited Allendale to honor an invitation extended a year ago by Edison Alliance, a private company hired by the state to help the district improve student performance.

Afterward, Sanford told reporters that he had “a great visit, in that we saw that — whether it’s at the school board level, the principal level, the teacher level or the student level — a lot of people are working awfully hard in the educational process.”

Sanford said he stands by what he said in the State of the State.

“The point is never from where we start,” Sanford said. “The point is where we end up in the larger voyage of life.”

Sanford said his remarks in January were not meant to “discredit, again, the admirable effort that’s being made here, the hard work that’s being done.”

On its 2004 report card, Allendale School District received an overall, or absolute, rating of below average. Its improvement since 2003, however, was graded as excellent. The district did not make annual yearly progress because it did not meet two of the required 17 objectives.

The district’s poor performance on standardized test scores led the state to take control of the school system in 1999.

But the problems facing Allendale’s schools are not unique to Allendale, superintendent Harris and others said. At the Main Street office of the Allendale Chamber of Commerce, executive director Kathleen Myrick said the problems here are long-term and the solutions must also be long-term.

“This is not something that happened overnight,” Myrick said. “And it’s not going to be fixed overnight.”

Reach Gould Sheinin at (803) 771-8658 or asheinin@thestate.com.