Coming to PBS tomorrow, Tuesday, March 17: 180 DAYS: HARTSVILLE
Jacquie Jones and Gerald McLaurin’s chronicle of a year in South Carolina’s elementary school system makes its debut this week as part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “American Graduate” initiative.
Ranked 45th in the nation in education, South Carolina’s educators are under the gun to make improvements. On a practical level, this means raising student performance as measured by standardized tests. On a personal level, for the school officials featured in Jones and McLaurin’s profile, it means doing right by their students and their parents, recognizing the challenges they face due to poverty, and finding a way to instill a desire to learn – all in the 180 days they have to work with in a single school year. The filmmakers spent this year in the small town of Hartsville, focusing primarily on two elementary schools: West Hartsville, led by principal Tara King in her first year in the position; and Thornwell, overseen by veteran principal Julie Mahn. These school administrators take center stage in the proceedings, even engaging in some friendly inter-school rivalry to encourage school pride from their charges. King finds herself facing lower test scores than expected, as well as an unengaged parent base, while also having to deal with Rashon, a bright student whose bad behavior threatens to lead to expulsion and a continuation of the cycle of poverty that has held back his mother, Monay. Mahn, meanwhile, a white principal in the school with the highest concentration of African American kids being raised in poverty, knows the stakes – as the daughter of sharecroppers, she was the first in her own family to break the cycle through education, attending college and paving the way for her son to do the same. Joining them are other representatives of the education system, including Pierre Brown, a teacher who tries to serve as a male role model for Rashon; and Harris DeLoach, a local businessman who has invested millions into improving the school system. While the film briefly addresses the national controversies around Common Core, and South Carolina’s own response, this is one area where it overextends itself, and ends up feeling too cursory. When they stick with their engaging central subjects, Jones and McLaurin successfully show, in microcosm, the challenges to our education system, and how they are compounded in underserved communities.
what (not) to doc 