A compromise between Charleston city officials, Charleston County and the county school district will soon bring law enforcement officers into the city’s elementary schools on a full-time basis. It’s a distressingly necessary decision in an era of once-unthinkable school shootings.
It won’t cost $6 billion to build sea walls around Charleston County to protect against sea level rise, as a recent report from the Center for Climate Integrity suggested. In fact, sea walls won’t cost anywhere near that much, because they mostly won’t get built.
The goal of 4-year-old kindergarten is to make up the educational and social deficits created by a childhood surrounded on all sides by poverty. SC House Speaker Jay Lucas wants to expand participation in the state's 4K program.
The annual state budget is supposed to spell out how money is to be spent in the coming year. Indeed, the months-long budget debate is all about which programs will receive how much money, and often-detailed instructions on how those programs will spend that money. But it doesn’t work that way in all cases.
The simple fact of being a member of the clergy doesn’t necessarily make one less qualified than anyone else to thoughtfully and responsibly review what South Carolina kids are taught about reproductive health, family issues and pregnancy prevention.
It’s beach season again, but not just for us humans. We need to share the sand with sea turtles, and that means spreading the word about staying out of their way and not disturbing their nests.
A detailed, forward-thinking proposal to expand what works and rethink what doesn’t in the Charleston County School District is nothing if not ambitious.
The Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, next week provides an excellent opportunity for President Donald Trump to sit down with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in an effort to resolve their ongoing trade dispute. He could use some allied support.
The town of Mount Pleasant is now in the shrimping business as the new owner of the Wando dock on Shem Creek. What happens there over the next few seasons will be crucial to the future of the local seafood industry, as well as the wider Shem Creek community.
The best way to make South Carolina prosper — to make it a place our children and grandchildren want to spend their lives, where businesses want to locate and expand and people from other places want to visit and make their own homes — is to make sure that children grow up to be productive citizens.
It’s time for Congress to draw a red line around foreign attempts of any kind to influence U.S. elections.
This effort by state attorneys general to make it easier for people to buy silencers reminds us that it’s not the people who want sensible gun laws who have moved to the extreme.
About 7% of Charleston County residents commuted to work by bus, bicycle or on foot in 2017, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau. That might not sound like a significant number, but it represents more than 13,500 fewer cars on the road on any given day.
Iran has threatened to exceed its enrichment of uranium beyond the limits of the nuclear deal, ratcheting up hostilities just days after it was suspected of being behind the attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. These threats must be met with a unified response from the United States a…
Four years later, Emanuel AME Church and the nine men and women who lost their lives there in a horrific shooting have become symbols. So have the victims’ families and friends and their fellow parishioners.
With few exceptions, most of the Charleston region suffers from an oversupply rather than a shortage of surface parking space.
Few in the Charleston area will be surprised that flooding in South Carolina has been expensive for the National Flood Insurance Program. The state has racked up $920 million in claims over the past 40 years, according to data released last week.
A mayor’s strength or lack thereof is not so much a function of the rules under which the office operates but rather of the character of the person who occupies that office.
The growing number of bans on plastic bags and some other single-use plastics and Styrofoam containers along South Carolina’s coast has so far focused mostly on the more visible downsides of those throwaway items — litter and harmed wildlife, for example.
Another week, another mass shooting — the most recent one in Virginia Beach late last month — to remind us of our nation’s desperate need for common-sense gun laws.
Mexico has launched a major effort to stem the flood of Central American and other migrants overwhelming the U.S. border by greatly increasing security at its own southern border and other measures. But unless Congress acts quickly to provide needed resources to handle the flood and reform asylum law, the relief is likely to be temporary.
Discussions of Charleston’s housing crisis tend to focus on the plight of homeowners being priced out of desirable neighborhoods or would-be buyers who can’t make the math work on a modest house anywhere in the region, much less near jobs, restaurants and other amenities.
Chinese rulers have gradually and systematically eroded the power of Hong Kong citizens to choose their own government. Hong Kongers don’t like it, and nether should all friends of democracy and the rule of law.
With technology evolving faster than laws, the public has good reason to be wary of law enforcement using powerful surveillance devices like automated license plate readers.
Now that Gov. Henry McMaster has vetoed $2.7 million for turning the Patriots Point exhibit into an artificial reef, saving the vessel, the last of its kind and a National Historic Landmark, is once again an alternative Patriots Point should consider.
Americans suffer from a bombardment of robotic telephone calls estimated to be in excess of 50 billion a year. An increasing number come from fake phone numbers and are connected with illegal scams that too often end up bilking unsuspecting people out of their money. A new ruling could bring…
Whether you believe it’s education or economic development that comes first, the fact is that the two go hand in hand, and both are essential to our state. This year, the effort to improve education in our poorest communities through economic development got a boost from the unlikeliest of places: the new Panthers economic incentive law.
After what was shaping up to be a contentious legal fight, an agreement between Charleston officials and the Charleston Citywide Local Development Corp. turned out to be a big win for affordable housing in the city.
For obvious reasons, nobody “owns” space. And for the relatively few decades in which humanity has been able to reach beyond the atmosphere, there hasn’t been too serious of a problem allocating room for 5,000 or so satellites currently orbiting the earth.
If you ever wondered where in the world former Midlands prosecutor Dan Johnson got the idea that it was OK to spend public money on elaborate parties, campaign-style donations to well-connected charitable causes and luxurious travel arrangements, reading his resume might have given you a hint.
The Trump administration’s plan to reclassify some forms of nuclear waste could be good for South Carolina if it hastens moving vast amounts of radioactive and toxic waste out of the state.
President Donald Trump sat one chair away from German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the British ceremony commemorating D-Day, but the political distance between them is much greater.
The process for earning federal approval for mass transit projects takes far too long and is unnecessarily grueling, and it’s much more competitive than most road-building efforts despite the fact that dozens of cities, including Charleston, are desperate to add better transit systems to their transportation options.
Congress finally passed a much needed disaster relief bill June 4, addressing urgent needs in South Carolina and other states.
The Interior Department continues to ignore the will of South Carolina residents as it keeps processing permits for offshore seismic testing, even though the Trump administration is legally hamstrung in its efforts to open up federal waters for oil drilling in the Atlantic and elsewhere. But…
As one of the world’s biggest, brainiest and wealthiest corporations, Google has options for getting the water it needs to cool its data centers
It’s hard to spend much time at the beach or around our rivers without understanding the problems with plastic bags — from the way they trash up our landscape to the deadly threat they pose to sea life and wildlife.
Turkey faces a momentous choice this summer between an unreliable alliance with Russia or continuing membership in NATO with the United States.
The southern end of North Charleston meets the technical definition of a “food desert.” There’s no full-service grocery store within a few miles, making it difficult for people without personal vehicles to access fresh, healthy food.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the massacre of pro-democracy students by the Chinese army in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a tragedy remembered around the world everywhere but in China. The Chinese government has so effectively suppressed any memory of the event that current students in Beij…
The biggest disappointment of this year’s legislative session was that it ended without the Senate even debating the education reform package the House passed in March.
Getting arrested shouldn’t be a death sentence, but for at least 153 people taken to local jails in South Carolina in the past decade it has been.
The sentiment was undoubtedly welcome. But more than a few Charleston County School District teachers might have preferred that district officials express their appreciation in some other form than six billboards around town at a cost of more than $33,000.
Charleston County Council’s decision to spend at least $330 million and potentially far more transportation sales tax dollars on building the rest of I-526 across Johns and James islands is disingenuous at best.
The solution threatens to do significant damage to well-established businesses throughout the state — and has the potential to harm the tourism industry that is the lifeblood of Charleston and other communities.
The federal government spends far more money each year helping people recover from natural disasters than it spends helping prevent or mitigate the effects of those disasters. And that imbalance is costing billions.
Keep in mind that last year’s hurricane season was forecast to be near average, or slightly below average – just like this year’s.
How do you punish a prisoner for crimes committed behind bars when he’s already serving a life sentence?
Convicting Julian Assange of espionage would not end freedom of the press.
We are still using voting machines similar to the ones Ohio rejected and that computer experts the nation over have panned, and it’s time to change that.
