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Better education could help root out poverty
The Brack Report
By Andy Brack
Turn down a dirt road on St. Helena Island in Beaufort County, and it won’t be long before you find someone living in or near poverty.
If you find a ramshackle place with peeling paint or a mobile home with a few junk cars littering the yard, you are probably there. Look closely, and in a few cases, you may spy a port-o-john outside the residence.
What may be more surprising is that next door could be a nice, well-kept ranch home or a new mini-mansion worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on land that had been in the same family’s possession since the Civil War.
As millions of dollars of tomatoes ripened throughout the island during the past week, a drive through the Scott and Orange Grove communities served as a reminder that not everyone in South Carolina lives the comfortable life.
About one in four South Carolinians struggle to make ends meet.
Some 14% live at or below the poverty level ($1,612.50 for a family of four per month).
Another 400,000 families are considered “working poor” because they earn less than 200% of the poverty level, even though they have jobs.
An elderly gentleman who lived in a tidy mobile home with a well-tended yard in the Orange Grove community says some people in the area have done pretty well over the years, while others seem to keep sliding down into tougher times. He says he thinks area problems stem from low incomes paid by area jobs, when jobs were even available.
His daughter, a strong-willed mother of one with a lot of get-up-and-go, added her parents stressed the importance of education. While she only has a part-time job, she keeps looking for full-time work to help the family.
Bernie Wright, executive director of the Penn Center (www.penncenter.com) on St. Helena Island, says a number of factors appeared to have led to lifetimes of poverty for some in the area.
“It’s a vicious cycle, and education is at the base of it all,” he says.
“Some of our best minds are being lost,” Wright says. “If they don’t get a chance to excel and be challenged, South Carolina will be a weaker place.
“If you give kids and people an opportunity from the get-go, they’ll get a greater opportunity for success in the long run.”
Other roots of poverty include a dearth of planning for the future and bad decisions to sell land at a relatively low cost, land that would be flipped later by more experienced folks for many times the original sale.
One of the ways the Penn Center is trying to help is by providing educational programs that help people in the area understand what they have in the acreage passed down over the generations.
Wright says that, at one point, blacks owned 90% of St. Helena Island, which made it the largest black-owned area in the country.
“They haven’t been able to retain and build on that tremendous wealth.”
Fortunately, the Penn Center also is helping some people to hold on to land when they face foreclosure because they cannot pay back taxes.
The Center’s Land Use and Environmental Education Program helps seven to eight families a year to keep their land heritage by providing grants to cover part of the delinquent tax bill.
That is good because for some folks on the island, the land is about all they have.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the S.C. Statehouse Report (www.statehousereport.com), a forecast of business developments in the South Carolina Legislature and state government. E-mail him at brack@statehousereport.com.
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