Rex defends conference at Myrtle Beach resort

As this year’s annual South Carolina Association of School Administrators conference kicked off Wednesday morning, Dr. Jim Rex spent a few minutes defending the cost of the conference in light of widely-publicized school funding struggles statewide.

800 school teachers, administrators, parents, and school board members gathered at Kingston Plantation for the state superintendent’s town hall meeting on the state of South Carolina’s schools, which for the first time included a chat-room format, as media outlets streamed the meeting across the state on several websites.

“We covered a lot of topics,“ said Dr. Rex. “I think people want that from their elected officials—they want to be able to ask questions, and they want them to shoot straight with them,“ he said.

Rex was also careful to shoot straight about concerns from taxpayer watchdog groups about the high cost of putting 800 up in nice ocean-front hotel rooms and feeing them for several days and nights at a time.

“They’re working hard,“ said Rex. “While we’re doing a lot of this sort of thing online to cut out travel, at least once a year we need to pull these people together and let them work together on the very persistent problems,“ he said.

Rex also said 1,800 people attended last year’s conference, where only about 800 were able to attend this year. Some even reported that they were driving in to attend daytime events, from as far away as Columbia.