A different master plan for Salkehatchie’s future

IT IS NOT hard to picture what will happen if USC Salkehatchie closes. Professionals who work at the school will pack up and leave, forced out by the need to go where jobs in their field are available. Others who work in support jobs at the university will be out of work, as no comparable jobs are available locally.

The $9 million in community program grants that USC Salkehatchie has drawn would dry up, as would other economic spin-off the campus provides. USC’s Moore School of Business estimated that impact at $11.9 million in 1999. Salkehatchie supporters argue that is a good return for the $2 million in state dollars appropriated to the school each year.

But perhaps most important to the local community, shuttering USC Salkehatchie would mean that Allendale and the surrounding counties would again watch the taillights of enterprise and prosperity headed out of town. In Allendale, Barnwell, Bamberg, Colleton and Hampton counties, they view Salkehatchie as a lifeline. Supporters have united with business people and elected leaders in seeking to convince the Legislature to reject Gov. Mark Sanford’s call to close the tiny campus, a two-year school serving fewer than 800 students.

Because this editorial board supports the elimination of USC’s smaller campuses, leaders in Allendale invited us to visit last week. The State’s publisher, Ann Caulkins, Editorial Page Editor Brad Warthen and I made the trip, guests of Columbia attorney and Allendale native Becky Laffitte, her family and friends.

Our hosts were gracious and caring people, the kind who don’t want to see a gem swallowed up to ease a temporary state budget crisis, only to entrench local woes such as unemployment and lack of opportunity. Just to make sure we knew they were not alone in their view, they invited more than 100 residents, business people and elected leaders from the five-county area to file by us at an afternoon reception.

Those individuals’ stories broke down on several lines. Many were elderly residents whose children completed their first two years of college at Salkehatchie and went on to success at USC in Columbia, Clemson or elsewhere. Some worked in area businesses and said their employees benefit by picking up courses at Salkehatchie. A number were first-generation college-goers, some raising children and working at the grocery store or part-time at the school while taking courses.

Individually, there were some compelling stories showing the value of higher education in lifting spirits and future earnings. However, taken in the aggregate, the history of USC Salkehatchie does not make a compelling case for it to grow and expand exactly as local leaders envision.

There is a master plan for USC Salkehatchie. It includes the construction of new classroom buildings and the development of a traditional campus. The history of similar endeavors in our state says that someday, Salkehatchie would seek to join other branch campuses in becoming a four-year school. That is where the political power and the money have traditionally gone.

It would be better, however, if local and state leaders shaped a new master plan for Salkehatchie, one focused on the people who live all around the school and its five counties — people who today do not qualify for admission to any college.

In December, a group of consultants gave the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education a report that speaks to the problems with USC Salkehatchie in its present structure. The report challenges colleges and universities to help correct the significant deficits in educational levels statewide. These deficits make it impossible for some folks to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

The consultants found that higher education here does a poor job with remedial and developmental education of adults. Once adults have failed that trip through K-12 schools, no one makes their future success a priority. Instead, we build more jail cells.

Gov. Sanford proposes to phase out USC Salkehatchie’s funding until closure in 2006-07. That would be the kind of long, slow death the community has seen before, such as when cotton ceased to be king and when the interstate took away tourism. No wonder they’re fighting that end and frankly, their pleas will probably succeed in the Legislature.

However, it is time for someone to champion a completely different future for Salkehatchie and places like it. What if they became centers for adult education, stepping in where K-12 structures failed? The University Center in Greenville offers a model, one that would have to be adapted for local needs. At that facility, Greenville professionals take nighttime and weekend courses they need to complete four-year and graduate degrees. A similar center in Allendale might offer literacy training and the basics adults in the region never got.

The best master plan for USC Salkehatchie is not another four-year campus in a state that has too many. Instead, it should be a vision of a strong, educated community where residents have the means for their young people to go those few extra miles up the road to college.

In calling for our state’s higher education system to make more sense, no one would enjoy seeing one of the few viable entities in Allendale close its doors. But it’s time for a different kind of investment in the area and its people, one that would give more struggling people the kind of boost that nothing, even USC’s two-year campus, has yet provided.

Reach Ms. Brook at (803) 771-8458 or nbrook@thestate.com.