Action Heating & Air Conditioning in North Charleston, SC

Our mission is to surround students with a community of support empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life.

Name of organization: Communities in Schools of South Carolina

Year established locally: 1987

Top local executive: Jamie Cooper, President & CEO

Contact information:
1691 Turnbull Ave., Suite 200
North Charleston, SC 29405
Phone: 877-920-3633
Website: ciscofsc.org.org

Corporate giving contacts:
Latasha Taste, Regional Director of Development - Midlands
1691 Turnbull Ave., Suite 200
North Charleston, SC 29405
Phone: 803-254-9727
E-mail: Latasha Taste

Average number of volunteers in 2020: 250

Total operating budget (2019-2020):
$3.9 million

Percent of revenue dedicated to program services: 80%

Geographic area or specific population served: Statewide.

Greatest need
Students are struggling to adapt to a variety of changes in their day-to-day and academic lives as the pandemic continues. The increased need of our particular program, Communities In Schools, is focused on three main areas of support:
1. Additional funding to expand into high-need communities
2. Mentors and tutors to support our case-managed students
3. Individuals and businesses to partner with us for school supply, clothing closest and holiday drives.

In January 2021, Communities In Schools in South Carolina merged three pre-existing CIS affiliates, Greenville, Midlands and Charleston, to form Communities In Schools of South Carolina. This merger was designed in an effort to strengthen, deepen and grow our student impact across the state. Within our first year of merger, we have served an additional three school sites in the state and added four new staff members, allowing us to increase our impact to more than 18,000 South Carolina students. In the Midlands, the merger afforded us the opportunity to expand into Fairfield County by serving Fairfield Middle School's 400 students in 6th and 7th grades.

2022 Goals:

Following the lead of our 2021 merger, CISSC is excited to fulfill our strategy of strengthening, deepening and growing our program throughout the state of South Carolina. Our intentions are to expand to additional rural markets, launch our alumni engagement program providing additional college and career supports to CIS program alumni after highschool graduation, and continue to build our network of partners to ensure our program's success. Additionally, our student outcomes are measured annually by grade level advancement, graduation, and CIS’s ABC’s (Attendance, Behavior and Course work). By the end of the school year, we expect to achieve the following:

By June 2022, 85% of case-managed students will have maintained or improved adequate school behavior as measured by the number of out-of-school suspensions.

By June 2022, 75% of case-managed students will demonstrate positive gains in social emotional competencies from pre- to post-testing on DESSA or SEAD social emotional assessments.

Fundraising events:

Illuminating the Power of One
Join us from 5-6 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 14, at the Statehouse. Together, we’ll shine the light of over 4,000 luminaries on the Statehouse steps to honor students we work with in the Midlands, and raise funds to strengthen, deepen and grow our programming. If you would like to be a regional partner, purchase luminaries on behalf of your organization or learn more, visit cisofsc.org or contact Latasha Taste at ltaste@cisofsc.org.

2022 Corporate Giving Opportunities:

Individuals, corporations, foundations and civic groups and churches are encouraged to participate in the following programs: 1. Corporate Program Partnerships ranging from $1,000 to $100,000; 2. Regional event sponsorships for Illuminating the Power of One luminary event (ranging from $500 to $1,000); 3. Midlands Gives May 2022 Individual contributions, one-time, monthly, or stock donations. To make a tax-deductible gift, please contact Latasha Taste, Regional Director of Development at ltaste@cisofsc.org.

Charleston County School District, the second-largest district in South Carolina with about 50,000 students, has become a testing ground for the school privatization movement — and 2022 is bringing a new battle.

South Carolina’s schools have long been among the worst-performing in the country, “saddled with a legacy of apathy and low expectations” that leave students “unprepared for the world that awaits them,” according to a 2018 Post and Courier investigation.

School choice — including charter schools, private academics, specialized magnet schools and other options — has siphoned the best-performing students from struggling schools “while children with the fewest resources get marooned in failing institutions,” the newspaper said.

“North Charleston High loses more than half the students in its attendance zone to a host of magnet, charter and private schools, leaving behind a core of poor Black students,” said the investigation by a team of reporters including the award-winning Paul Bowers, who wrote the piece below.

Since desegregation efforts decades ago, the Charleston district has returned to de facto segregation at many of its schools, accelerated by a boom of magnet schools in the 1990s and early 2000s. It currently sponsors nine public charter schools and two public-private partnership schools, in addition to multiple schools within the county sponsored by statewide authorizers.

On Monday, the school board is scheduled to vote on a proposal that would allow the takeover of 23 lower-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black neighborhoods by an “innovation management organization,” which would be allowed under law to hire some of its teachers without a state teaching license.

In this post, Bowers looks at what Charleston’s public schools are up against. A parent of three public school children in North Charleston, he was the Post and Courier’s education reporter from 2016 to 2019 and was part of a team that won the 2018 Eddie Prize from the Education Writers Association. Find him on Twitter at @Paul_Bowers and read his work at brutalsouth.substack.com.

Every few years, South Carolina becomes a battleground for school privatization. It looks like 2022 is going to be one of those years.

Back in the 2000s, the New York real estate investor Howard Rich backed a series of South Carolina candidates pushing school vouchers, which would funnel public education funds into private schools. More recently, we have seen efforts by Gov. Henry McMaster and the state legislature to create a Tennessee-style “turnaround district,” to deregulate for-profit online charter schools via authorizer shopping, and to divert federal covid-19 relief funds from public schools to private schools. Teachers and parents have had to fight these advances tooth and nail and have so far kept most of the damage at bay.

Lately it seems like the tip of the spear for privatization efforts in South Carolina is the Charleston County School District, a starkly segregated and unequal district anchored by a world-renowned tourist destination. The Charleston County School Board is scheduled to vote Jan. 10 on a proposal called “Reimagine Schools” that would allow a private third party to make decisions at 23 predominantly Black schools. I thought now would be a good moment to revisit the history of school board power struggles and dark-money campaigns in Charleston County.

Efforts to privatize the governance of public schools have been supported by, among others, two South Carolina billionaires — Anita Zucker, head of a chemical manufacturer, and Ben Navarro, chief of a debt collection agency. Sometimes working in tandem, sometimes independently, Zucker and Navarro tend to promote charter schools and private takeovers of public schools.

Zucker and her advocacy organization, the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, were involved in a 2015-2016 effort to create a “turnaround district” at the state level, modeled after failed efforts in Tennessee, Louisiana and Michigan. The proposal involved lumping the state’s lowest-performing schools into a new district and bringing in third-party operators to manage them. Similar bills were introduced in Georgia and North Carolina around the same time, but the idea never received serious discussion in the South Carolina Statehouse.

Navarro is known nationally for his failed 2018 bid to buy the Carolina Panthers team in the National Football League. In the financial world, he is known for his Sherman Financial Group, a privately owned firm that filed more lawsuits against defaulted credit-card debtors than others in the industry during covid-19 lockdowns, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.

In the arena of education, Navarro is known for his private Meeting Street Schools, which are sometimes lauded as a model for improving the standardized test scores of low-income students from at-risk communities. Since 2014, Meeting Street Schools has entered unique public-private partnerships with South Carolina public school districts, starting with the takeover of two elementary schools in North Charleston.

With a boost of private funding, the schools invest in wraparound services for students and their families, offer additional psychological support, place two teachers in each classroom, and operate on an extended school day and academic calendar. Those practices have a proven track record of success, but most schools in South Carolina lack the funding to carry them out.

Meeting Street Schools also heavily recruit staff from Teach for America and the KIPP charter network, and they preach the trendy mid-2010s gospel of “grit” — in fact, the disciplinary model is so gritty that one Meeting Street-run elementary school suspended one-quarter of its students in a single school year. Before opening the schools under new management, Navarro sought and received a special exemption from the state’s employment protections for teachers. As a result, Meeting Street principals can hire and fire teachers at will.

Navarro is also closely associated with the Charleston Coalition for Kids, a dark-money group that emerged in 2018 and immediately outspent all other donors combined on advertising for a slate of school board candidates.

Much of the coalition’s funding and spending is hidden from public view thanks to state election law and the group’s nonprofit status, but FCC records reveal it spent at least $235,000 on TV commercials alone in the run-up to the 2018 school board election — four-and-a-half times what all of the candidates combined raised for their own campaigns. (Local activists estimated the coalition’s spending on Facebook ads, billboards, and other media might have cost additional hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

The coalition spent big on the school board election again in 2020, investing $306,000 on TV commercials, including attack ads against two Black incumbents, the records show. Today six of the nine sitting Charleston County School Board members have received backing from the coalition.

A number of national organizations have taken an interest in Charleston school politics as well, including 50CAN (formerly StudentsFirst) and the Broad Foundation. After failing to create a statewide turnaround district in 2016, the 50CAN affiliate SouthCarolinaCAN shifted its focus to the local level — specifically to Charleston County. When I interviewed then-executive director Bradford Swann in December 2016, he said his organization would be focused on “grass-roots organizing” via a five-month fellowship program for parents.

The result was Charleston RISE, a parent advocacy group that also operates a parent help hotline. Billboards advertising its services have appeared all over the county, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Charleston RISE trainees were among the founding members of the Charleston Coalition for Kids when it launched in 2018. Some RISE members said they helped vet school board candidates for the coalition.

Currently the Charleston County School Board is deciding how to spend its share of the covid-19 recovery funds provided under the American Recovery Act’s ESSER III program. Multiple local nonprofits submitted proposals on how to spend the money, but only one has gotten a public hearing.

On Monday, Jan. 10, the school board will vote on a proposal called Reimagine Schools that would target 23 low-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black parts of the county. Leaning on a “Schools of Innovation” law recently expanded by the state legislature, the proposal would authorize a takeover of individual schools by an unidentified “innovation management organization.” The Schools of Innovation law also allows a school to hire up to 25 percent of its teachers in certain subject areas without a state teaching license.

The organization that proposed the Reimagine Schools plan is the Coastal Community Fund, a relative newcomer to school board lobbying. The fund and its CEO, Darrin Goss Sr., have promoted the Meeting Street Schools public-private partnership model, which exempts them from “bureaucratic” regulations. (Complicating matters further, the Coastal Community Fund also administers an investigative fund and Education Lab for the local daily newspaper, the Post and Courier.)

The nine-member school board gave the Reimagine Schools proposal initial approval by a 6-3 vote in December without holding any community input sessions. All six members who voted to approve for the proposal had been endorsed by the Charleston Coalition for Kids.

Whatever the Charleston County School Board decides, the privatization push will continue in parallel at the state level. The state superintendent of education post is up for grabs this fall, and the first candidate to announce her run was Ellen Weaver, a charter school advocate with the conservative Palmetto Promise Institute. A central proposal in her platform is the creation of education scholarship accounts, a modified private school voucher program.

Hot Properties highlights recently sold or leased commercial properties in the Charleston region. Send in your transactions using our online form.

Benjy Cooke of Oswald Cooke & Associates represented the seller, Buck Investments, in the sale of 1.4 acres square feet of retail space at 1195 Remount Road, North Charleston, to Drayton-Parker Companies for $2,550,000. Edward Oswald of Oswald Cooke & Associates represented the seller.

Jenna Philipp of Palmetto Commercial Properties represented the landlord, James Island Business Park LLC, in the lease of 10,510 square feet of industrial space at 1750 Signal Point Road, Charleston.

Vitre Stephens and Taylor Sekanovich of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the seller, Floyd Enterprises LLC, in the sale of 5,857 square feet of commercial space at 7890 Dorchester Road in North Charleston. Michael White of Brand Name Real Estate of SC represented the buyer.

Vitre Stephens and Taylor Sekanovich of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the tenant, Go Earn It Apparel, in the lease of 7,440 square feet of retail space at 7611 Old State Road in Holly Hill from Allen M. Bilton. Will Phillips of DESETA Group represented the landlord.

Vitre Stephens and Taylor Sekanovich of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the landlord, Tupelo Two LLC, in the lease of 2,042 square feet of retail space at 2121 N. Main Street in Summerville to Quantum Heat LLC. Jon Boisins of Morrow Hill Group represented the tenant.

Benjy Cooke of Oswald Cooke & Associates represented the buyer, Time to Shine Car Wash Inc., in the sale of 1.26 acres square feet of retail space at 539 St. James Ave. in Goose Creek from 539 St James LLC for $3,800,000. Blake Easterling of Eastport Development represented the seller.

Benjy Cooke of Oswald Cooke & Associates represented the buyer, 7351 Rivers Ave LLC, in the sale of 1.02 acres square feet of retail space at 7351 Rivers Ave., North Charleston, from Barbara and Harvey McCormick for $1,680,000. Will Sherrod of NAI Charleston represented the seller.

Brooke Eyrich of JLL represented the tenant, Heart of Hospice, in the lease of 6,740 square feet of office space at 57 Hasell St. in downtown Charleston. Reid Davis of Lee & Associates represented the landlord.

Jeremy Willits and Gerry Schauer of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the seller, Satchel Construction LLC, in the sale of 3,296 square feet of office space at 2133 Dorchester Road in North Charleston to Rom Association LLC. Jody Hancock of J. Hancock Real Estate represented the buyer.

Gerry Schauer of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the tenant, Caldwell Partners International Ltd., in the lease of 1,648 square feet of office space at 11 Broad St. in Charleston from RBBM LLC. Charlie Carmody of CBRE represented the landlord.

Jeremy Willits, Gerry Schauer of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the landlord, Three Broad Inc., in the lease of 300 square feet of office space at 3 Broad St. in Charleston to Elyon Massage & Boutique Spa.

Jeremy Willits and Gerry Schauer of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the landlord, Three Broad Inc., in the lease of 230 square feet of office space at 3 Broad St. in Charleston to CLI Accounting Services LLC.

Gerry Schauer of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the tenant, Lighthouse Therapy Solutions, in the lease of 500 square feet of office space at 1031 Chuck Dawley Blvd. in Mount Pleasant from CCBG RE Group, FBO SB, LLC. Dan Henderson of represented the landlord.

Jeremy Willits of Avison Young - South Carolina Inc. represented the landlord, 5900 Core Avenue LLC, in the lease of 150 square feet of office space at 5900 Core Ave. in North Charleston to Merrimack Valley Trauma Services.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – The owner of a pay-what-you-can restaurant who was forced to move from their location in North Charleston received a major donation on Wednesday.

Destiny Community Café had to leave its location by the end of October and nearly closed for good after the property manager raised the rent. But members of the community came together – in true Charleston fashion – and helped collect donations for the organization.

Ragina Scott Saunders, the James Island native who founded the café, has been serving up healthy and delicious food to those who need help for almost seven years. Food is donated by local farms, nonprofits, and community partners.

She said the need intensified during the pandemic.

But Saunders learned in October that she and other small businesses would have to leave their location because of a rent increase.

“We tried to negotiate and talk with the manager and the only thing they tried to do is push contracts in my face,” she said.

Since then, there has been an outpouring of support from the community. During a special event on Wednesday, Seacoast Church and the North Charleston Dream Center presented her with a $50,000 check to go towards purchasing a new food truck to better serve those in need across the Lowcountry.

“In 2009, the Seacoast Church and The North Charleston Dream Center had a dream to make an impact in this community. And just like you, we ran into obstacles and a lot of trials. But the generosity of the community coming together through their finances and support helped us maintain and serve thousands,” said organizers with the center.

But that wasn’t all. The owner of Swig and Swine was also at the event and handed over the keys to a second food truck to Saunders.

“I’m a firm believer in the fact that everyone’s giving gifts in order to do God’s work. When I saw the story that you had lost your restaurant, I knew that you needed a new set of tools to help give back to the community like you always do, so we have a truck for you.”

Saunders was named a News 2 Remarkable Woman finalist earlier this year. She thanked her community for their willingness to give back during today’s surprise.

“I thank God, I thank the community for having faith and coming together because this is what it’s all about. This is making it even better to happen for us, even before the new year. We were getting calls from people who are handicapped, disabled, unemployed, sick and a meal is the number one thing they are asking for right now,” she said,

Saunders went on to say, “I thank you all for getting us back up and running on the road with not just one, but two food trucks – the beginning of a fleet – this is God’s work, y’all. Thank y’all.”

Saunders said getting out to the communities will be very beneficial to those who are facing hard times and worried about transportation. “We can feed double, triple, what we’ve been doing,” she said. “We even have people that are disabled so we can come to the apartments, low-income communities – this is a blessing.”

Others in the community have donated $25,000 to the Saunders and Destiny Community Café.

A sports apparel business previously located in the Northwoods Mall was raided last month by federal authorities investigating the sale of counterfeit clothing.

Homeland Security Investigations’ Charleston office executed a federal search warrant on Dec. 14 at Game Over Sports as part of an investigation into allegations the store’s owner was selling counterfeit sports jerseys, according to federal records filed on Jan. 10 in U.S. District Court.

A variety of jerseys seized from the business were determined to be phony, records show.

Criminal charges have not been filed.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Derek Shoemake said he could not comment, saying only, “The filings speak for themselves.”

Lanard “Larry” Smith, the owner of the business, said in an interview on Jan. 12 he did not know the sports jerseys were counterfeit.

“The person that I was ordering stuff from, they said everything was legit. I had no clue until they came into the store,” Smith said.

Smith and his brother were previously convicted of trafficking in counterfeit apparel in 2008. Both men were sentenced to three years probation.

An operator at Northwoods Mall said Game Over Sports closed on Dec. 16.

The S.C. Secretary of State’s Office first alerted HSI in August that the business was suspected of selling counterfeit goods, according to an application for a federal warrant to seize property.

A federal cargo tracking database showed that four dozen shipments of clothing arrived at the business earlier in the year. The cargo came from countries such as Japan, Malaysia, China and Hong Kong.

Similar international cargo addressed to the brother and another man was also shipped to a Summerville apartment from June 2019 until May, records show.

At least seven of the international shippers were associated with intellectual property rights violations, according to the records.

An employee of the Secretary of State’s Office purchased suspected counterfeit apparel, including a Kobe Bryant Los Angeles Lakers basketball jersey purported to be made by Nike, from the store on Sept. 28.

An investigator with a private company that specializes in intellectual property rights inspected the basketball jersey, purchased for $150, and determined it was a knock-off, records state.

Investigators determined other jerseys seized in the Dec. 14 raid were also counterfeit, according to records.

In addition to the jerseys, federal authorities seized more than $100,000 from the business’ bank accounts, records state.

Lanard Smith said on Jan. 12 he planned to retain legal counsel.