Comments by Dave Hudson | Eastern North Carolina Now

I spoke out against the SAVVAS curriculum at the School Board meeting on February 21, 2023. As mentioned in the article, we still don’t have an approved social studies curriculum in Beaufort County after more than two years! Teachers are creating their own lesson plans, utilizing information they find on the internet and other sources but without an approved curriculum to use as a benchmark. The decision was made to table the adoption of the SAVVAS curriculum for a later date. This most likely happened because the Superintendent got egg on his face for trying to push through a “woke” curriculum with a weak school board and received more public outcry than was anticipated. They probably hoped to push it through at a later date when the public wasn’t watching but eventually decided to give up completely in order to pursue finding a science curriculum.

This whole fiasco is just another example of why DOGE is needed in the public education bureaucracy. Administrative staff (bureaucracy) at the county, state and federal levels has grown by 88% since 2000. In the same period, student and teacher levels have only grown by 8%. That means bureaucracy in education has grown at an excessively higher rate than the folks doing the actual educating in classrooms and students being taught. We have also seen a continuing decline in school and student performance scores during the same time. That tells me that the bureaucracy is broken and needs much necessary reform. The issues with our county curriculum selection process are a perfect case study as the article explains. If Dr. Parker and the BCS staff are incapable of choosing more than one curriculum at a time, what are they actually doing? The bureaucrats at the county level and the superintendent are incompetent at best and, at worst, don’t actually care about the education our children receive. It is way past time for them to do their job. It is also way past time for the weak, incompetent School Board to hold the superintendent accountable!

Commented: Wednesday, March 19th, 2025 @ 12:47 pm By: Dave Hudson