Never forget: It’s in Hilton Head’s DNA to support local public schools

Hilton Head Island found itself at a sandy crossroads in the 1970s.

People were pouring over the bridge to seek their fortune, and they weren’t all retirees.

Young people with more dreams than sense came, thinking they could create a community from scratch.

They had children, and they expected great schools.

While the establishment in many small towns in the South turned their energies to private schools in that era, a cadre of Hilton Head Islanders said, no, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and improve the public schools.

They formed a nonprofit called the Island School Council to raise money to supplement what the county and state would do for the one public elementary school on the island, and the middle school and high school in Bluffton that served all of southern Beaufort County.

Their main fundraiser was the Lowcountry Auction on Labor Day weekend. It was a festive, bustling, all-hands-on-deck social affair. The late Tim Doughtie, wearing head gear that made him look like a pink pelican, often stood on stage whipping up interest in auction items, from an old car to a terracotta lamp.

This organization later spawned the Evening of the Arts to raise money specifically for arts education in the local public schools.

We can see today that this group of parents of the 1970s took the island down the right path.

I thought of them last week as what you might call one of their successors, the Foundation for Educational Excellence, honored me with its Peggy May Inspiration Award. This quiet foundation, a 501(c)3 and a fund of the Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, gives tens of thousands of dollars annually to teachers and public schools throughout Beaufort County. Since 2007, it has given more than $300,000 to the schools for opportunities not available through the regular budget.

BEAUFORT COUNTY POVERTY

They know the needs.

A little more than half the 21,000 students in the district live in poverty. On Hilton Head, a slight majority of the students are Hispanic, often struggling with a new language as they are expected to ace standardized tests that are in English.

And now, representatives of the foundation were told last week, the district faces a years-long challenge to catch students up in math skills lost during the coronavirus pandemic.

By opting to pitch in rather than bail out, the foundation is keeping alive a tradition as old as some of our live oaks.

They might not even know about the Island School Council, or the Gullah value of supporting the schools that long predated it.

The wood frame Cherry Hill School building stands today on Dillon Road as a silent witness to this strong island ethic.

It served as a one-room schoolhouse from 1937 until the island’s first red brick, consolidated elementary school opened in 1954. It was in the Stoney community at Fairfield, built as one of the “equalization schools” in a state effort to stave off integration.

But the Cherry Hill School would not have been there without sacrificial, voluntary giving from an impoverished community during the Great Depression.

HILTON HEAD PARENTS

A successful application to place the school on the National Register of Historic Places says:

“Cherry Hill School was the first school built specifically for educating African-American children on Hilton Head Island. The school was the result of a vigorous neighborhood effort to have a freestanding school building to replace a school of the same name that was located in the deteriorated parsonage of the St. James Baptist Church.

“The Beaufort County School District only consented to the creation of the new school after the community raised the funds to purchase the land.

“The community continued to be involved in the school by helping to raise funds to maintain the school and to pay teachers’ salaries for extra months of school beyond the school district’s calendar.

“Although the number of children who attended the Cherry Hill school was small, it was an important center of learning for the community, even beyond the first through fifth grades. Children unable to afford to continue their education off island, at one of the public schools or privately-owned boarding schools, were allowed to stay at the Cherry Hill School as teachers’ helpers.”

And long before that, parents were pitching in just as soon as education became available to formerly enslaved islanders.

Eliza Ann Summers of Connecticut, who ventured to Hilton Head during the Civil War to teach young freedmen in what is today Sea Pines, wrote her dear sister back home that parents kept her supplied with split firewood, shucked oysters, security and a horse for transportation.

Each generation finds itself at the same sandy crossroads.

We know the path that must be taken.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.