Florence school district asks SLED to look into election

FLORENCE --

Mystery still surrounds just how last November’s Florence School District 1 election was held using the wrong election map but there’s not much question now as to which path the district will pursue in resolving the mess.

Dr. Allie Brooks Jr., the district’s interim superintendent, said Monday that the district has forwarded — and hence, endorsed — a request by three school board members to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), asking that the state’s top law enforcement agency look into the matter.

“It’s been submitted. That’s in the works,” said Brooks. “We (the district) welcome their investigation, or the Department of Justice’s, or anyone else who wants to get involved. We (the district) have nothing to hide. I think everyone knows that we had nothing to do with this. We do want the truth. We want to model truthful and ethical behavior for our kids and if it takes an investigation to get to the bottom of this, then that’s what we’ll do.”

Besides turning the request into formal school district action, a special meeting of the Board of Trustees has been called for Tuesday evening, just to address this issue. It’s set for 6 p.m. at the district office on Dargan Street.

The school district’s action comes less than a week after three frustrated members of the FSD1 Board of Trustees authored a letter demanding a SLED investigation. Alexis Pipkins, Pat Gibson-Hye Moore and E.J. McIver delivered their missive after the board’s March 10 meeting in which questions about the November election once again went unanswered. That was the second time the matter has received an airing of sorts at a regular school board meeting.

That was frustrating enough for McIver, who joined the board in December. For Pipkins and Gibson-Hye Moore, who have been following the convoluted story of FSD1’s most recent political redistricting in one form or another since 2004, it was positively exasperating.

Those emotions bubbled over during a Saturday morning interview with the Morning News in which Pipkins, a Florence native and Wilson High graduate, called his old high school principal — that would be current superintendent Brooks — “deceptive.”

“I’m a student of his from way on back,” said Pipkins, “but I’m not in school anymore. I’m a grown man. He (Brooks) has been deceptive and we need to get to the bottom of this.

“We’re not looking for glory,” Pipkins said, “just for history to be recorded in the right way. We’re looking for fairness.”

Pipkins’ reference to Brooks’ deception dealt with the perceived failure of the superintendent and board chair (Porter Stewart) to forward information they received at the end of January about the election to the rest of the board. That information was eventually released to board members, and the public, at the March 10 school board meeting. Pipkins and company, meanwhile, wound up filing Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain some information.

“That’s just not how it should work,” said Gibson-Hye Moore.

The issue of responsiveness and possible deception are just more tangents in situation that’s been filled with side tracks.

The more central issue is why state officials gave the Florence County Election Department the wrong map when helping it prepare for the 2010 elections, and possibly elections before that. Officials with the South Carolina Office of Research and Statistics said in December that a clerical error caused them to send the wrong version of the FSD1 map to the Florence office. Just when they sent the wrong version isn’t clear. Florence County Elections Director David Alford said he believes the office has had the same map used in the 2010 election since the new districts were approved by the legislature in 2006. Alford’s only been in the Florence elections office since 2009, however, so he’s not sure that’s the case, and he said Monday that he can’t say with any authority which map was used in the 2006 or 2008 elections.

Florence School District Attorney Laurence McIntosh wrote in an April 2006 memo to the board at the time (which included Pipkins and Gibson-Hye Moore) that copies of a map he received from ORS just before the legislature passed the bill installing the new elective districts for FSD1 was, in fact, the same map the school board approved by a 7-1 vote in December of 2004.

During a December 2010 school board meeting, a copy of the school board-approved map, produced that evening by Pipkins, was compared to the map used in the 2010 election and it seemed clear that it was different, though not markedly so.

Pipkins said Saturday that he’s not sure the local board of elections has ever used the correct map, or for that matter, even bothered to change maps at all. Because of lengthy involvement in the matter, he does tend to see the matter through a particular lens, one that harkens back to the days when Afro-Americans fought tooth and nail for equality, or anything close to it, in public education and everywhere else.

“To me,” said Pipkins, “this whole affair is nothing but a misguided effort to turn back the hands of time.”

Pipkins’ theory is that fellow school board member Willard Dorriety, the only “no” vote on the district plan in 2004, used political connections to create an alternate plan to the school board-approved plan because he was bitter about losing the vote and fearful that an Afro-American majority would retain control of the board. That Dorriety created an alternate plan is not in doubt. The plan, which Dorriety said was changed to create more efficient districts that contained fewer split precincts, was sent to the U.S. Department of Justice for pre-clearance, along with the school board-approved plan. It may also have been, briefly, in the hands of state legislators pushing the FSD1 district bill through the statehouse. Pipkins said he and Gibson-Hye Moore, on a February 2006 visit to Columbia, learned of the alternate plan and maneuvered to make sure the school board plan was the one in front of the legislature.

The point of all this alleged maneuvering is the election of additional Afro-American representatives to the nine-member FSD1 Board of Trustees, or the frustration of such an initiative. The single-member district voting system, procured through an NAACP lawsuit in the 1990s, is designed to assure that some Afro-Americans are elected to the board. The representation is supposed to at least approximate the racial makeup of the entire school district, which is about 37 percent black, or was in 2006 when the new maps were created. Currently there are three blacks on the board.

Under the school board-approved plan, three districts are heavily black majority and three are heavily white majority. Three others have black minorities of between 33-38 percent. The differences in racial makeup between the school board-approved plan and Dorriety’s alternate plan are miniscule to say the least. In the seat most affected, Seat 9, the percentage of black voters falls from 38.8 percent (school board plan) to 34 percent (alternate plan).

That’s enough to make a difference in a close election. Whether it would have mattered in 2010, when corrections made across the school district to place voters in the correct seat uprooted 5,799 voters, is uncertain. One candidate, Maggie Smith, mistakenly filed to run for Seat 9 when she in fact lived in Seat 2, according to the maps used by the elections department. Smith, who’s black, received 345 votes. Another Afro-American candidate, Terry James, received 459 votes. Eventual winner Wil McLeod, who is white, won with 919 votes. That’s more than James and Smith combined, but only by 115 votes. Pipkins and Gibson-Hye Moore say that more black voters than that were in the wrong district due to the wrong map being used.