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Right now the youth, especially people my kids’ age, that’s not necessarily the priority of some of the leaders in the county,” Murphy High School athletic director and girls basketball coach Ray Gutierrez said after resigning last week. Unfortunately, his family is far from the first to leave Cherokee County in search of a better education in recent years, but hopefully their departure will have a big enough impact to make a difference.
Gutierrez and his family are exactly the kind of people we want to build their lives in Cherokee County. He and his wife, Holly, are both Murphy graduates and local to their core. His track record of success on the court speaks for itself, she’s an excellent optometrist with thousands of patients – myself included – and their children are likely to be among the leading students in high school. Losing them all is a blow.
At the same time, who can blame them? Year after year, we’ve watched the counties surrounding us build better facilities and commit more resources to their schools. The Cherokee County Board of Commissioners did step up and fund as many as 24 additional teaching positions, but that was only necessary because we’ve fought tooth and nail to keep more than a dozen aging campuses in dire need of repairs open in a system with declining enrollment.
While Cherokee County expanded and renovated its courthouse, plus bought a nearly new building for the Department of Social Services, Clay and Graham counties were building new schools. Union County, Ga., has had several excellent teachers who live in Cherokee County, including a local school board member, and a former Union Teacher of the Year lived in Hanging Dog. This should have spoken volumes, but apparently not enough of the right people were listening.
Cherokee was once the county where parents across the tri-state area wanted to send their kids, but that time has long passed. And it’s not the staff or teachers’ fault; this is a failure of leadership, which for more than 50 years has kicked the educational can down the road and randomly built new schools instead of developing a long-range comprehensive plan, like Macon County did when state Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-Franklin) was a commissioner. Then again, our county has never been much for planning, which is a big reason why we’re in the midst of the crypto-mining controversy, too.
Even before the $48.5 million settlement of the lawsuits against DSS last week, commissioners cut the school system’s budget by about $600,000 this year. School board members now are faced with making some incredibly difficult last-minute decisions that should have been studied – and likely implemented – years ago, but we couldn’t let go of our sometimes stubborn attachment to the way things used to be and fear of change.
If we wait until the DSS settlements are paid off to address our schools – which will take another decade – Cherokee County students will fall even further behind. Colleges and employers will begin to take note. Fewer families will want to stay here, much less move here. And our growing retiree community won’t have anyone to run local businesses and medical facilities, which is already a burgeoning problem.
Gutierrez simply said aloud what others have been thinking for some time, that for too many people where a building is built seems be a lot more important than the education that occurs inside the walls. A long-range school facility plan that puts our students’ education first should be put on the front-burner and not removed until we’ve done it.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on Twitter @daviddBstroh.