Educational task force hears need for urgency BY JIM HILLEY jim@theitem.com FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2015
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SERVING SOUTH CAROLINA SINCE OCTOBER 15, 1894 2 SECTIONS, 22 PAGES | VOL. 120, NO. 137
HEALTH
A sense of urgency is needed for South Carolina to make headway in providing an equal education to all children in public school, said Lee County School District Superintendent Wanda
Andrews after the latest meeting of the House Education Policy Review and Reform Task Force on Monday in Dillon. “There has to be a sense of urgency, everybody spoke about that,” she said. The task force was created by House Speaker
Jay Lucas to study how to reform the state’s education funding to comply with the South Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling in Abbeville County School District v. the State of South Carolina in favor of poor, rural school districts, saying the Legislature had failed
to ensure students receive “a minimally adequate education” as mandated by a 1999 ruling that sent the case to trial. The ruling directed legislators and school officials to solve funding discrepancies between rich and
SEE TASK FORCE, PAGE A8
Aiming for more than just good grades Sixty elementary archers from across the state take aim during the National Archery in Schools program’s State Championship on Wednesday at the Sumter County Civic Center. Archers fired fifteen arrows from 10 meters and again from 15 meters, and the scores are totaled. High School competition was Thursday.
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National Archery in schools program holds state competition in Sumter BY HAMLET FORT hamlet@theitem.com The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources welcomed more than 700 student-archers to Sumter Civic Center on Wednesday for the two-day National Archery in Schools Program state tournament. The tournament is in its 10th year. The National Archery in Schools Program, operated by state wildlife agencies across the country, started in Kentucky as the Kentucky Archery in Schools Program. A year later, surrounding states wanted to get involved, and the program became national. Ten years ago, South Carolina joined, and now, 296 schools in the state are in the program. Archery is a rapidly growing
sport, according to the South Carolina NASP coordinator and 1st Sgt. in the Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division Ryan Bass. “It’s in no small part due to the movies that are out right now,” said Bass. “It’s a growing interest.” Bass said the natural interest in archery in South Carolina comes in part from the connection with bow hunting and the fact that any child can line up and shoot. “We have found that it’s a sport that every kid can do,” Bass said. “Not every kid can be the basketball or football star. But I can take a kid who normally wouldn’t do those other sports, and he or she can stand on that line and do just as well as every other kid no matter the athletic ability.” The correlation between bow
and arrow hunting and archery is a hard one to miss. Being with the DNR, Bass said he hopes archery can get youth interested in hunting on the state’s vast natural lands. “Our goal is to get kids out shooting and shooting safely,” said Bass. “Do we want to see kids transition over to the hunting side? Absolutely.” Despite holding the event in Sumter this year, only one local school has recently joined NASP, Lakewood High School. Prior to this year, no Sumter schools participated in the program, and program coordinators said they hope hosting the event in town will encourage local schools and their students to get interested in the sport.
SEE ARCHERY, PAGE A8
Prosecutor: Co-pilot ‘intentionally’ destroyed plane PARIS (AP) — Ignoring the captain’s frantic pounding on the door, the co-pilot of the Germanwings jet barricaded himself inside the cockpit and deliberately rammed the plane full speed into the French Alps as passengers screamed in terror, a prosecutor said Thursday. In a split second, all 150 people aboard were dead. Andreas Lubitz’s “intention (was) to destroy this plane,” Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the horrifying conclusions French investigators reached after listening to the final minutes of Tuesday’s Flight 9525 from the plane’s black box voice data recorder. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the conclusions brought the tragedy to a “new, simply incomprehensible dimension.” The prosecutor said there was no indication of terrorism, though he did not say why investigators do not suspect a political motive. The inquiry is instead focusing on the co-pilot’s “personal, family and professional environment” to try to deter-
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
French gendarmes hold German and Spanish flags as family members of people involved in Germanwings jetliner that crashed on Tuesday in the French Alps attend a gathering in Le Vernet, France on Thursday. A French prosecutor said Thursday that the co-pilot of the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps this week appeared to want to “destroy the plane.” mine why he did it, Robin said. The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf when it lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and began dropping from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. The prosecutor said Lubitz did not say a word as he manually set the plane on an eight-minute descent into the
craggy French mountainside that pulverized the plane. He said the German co-pilot’s responses, initially courteous in the first part of the trip, became “curt” when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing. Robin said the pilot, who has not been identified, left the cockpit when the plane
reached cruising altitude, presumably to go to the lavatory. Then the 27-year-old co-pilot took control of the jet as requested. “When he was alone, the copilot manipulated the buttons of the flight monitoring system to initiate the aircraft’s descent,” Robin said. The pilot knocked several times “without response,” the
prosecutor said, adding that the cockpit door can only be blocked manually from the inside. The co-pilot said nothing from the moment the captain left, Robin said. “It was absolute silence in the cockpit.” The A320 is designed with safeguards to allow emergency entry into the cockpit if a pilot inside is unresponsive. But the override code known to the crew does not go into effect — and indeed goes into a lockdown — if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry. During the flight’s final minutes, pounding could be heard on the cockpit door as the plane’s instrument alarms sounded. But the co-pilot’s breathing was calm, Robin said. “You don’t get the impression that there was any particular panic, because the breathing is always the same. The breathing is not panting. It’s a classic, human breathing,” Robin said. No distress call ever went out from the cockpit, and the control tower’s pleas for a response went unanswered.