The leader of Lexington County’s largest school district sat down with the Chronicle to discuss its current state of affairs.

Gerrita Postlewait is the superintendent of Lexington County School District 1, serving in an interim capacity beginning in July 2022 before being permanently appointed to the position that October. She talked about challenges facing the state’s sixth largest school district, which serves more than 27,000 students in and around the Town of Lexington, identifying issues such as the ongoing recovery from COVID-19, teacher retention, creating positive school conditions, and more.

“It's especially pleasurable to work in a community where people value public education so greatly and the board is committed to making progress for students,” Postlewait said. “It feels as though the teachers, principals, central staff, support staff, everybody wants to do the work. It's just a matter of getting organized to make sure we're all working together and moving in the same direction and working as efficiently as possible.”

One of the first challenges Postlewait focused on was gaining an understanding of how to serve students who had their educational years disrupted by COVID. The superintendent explained that they’ve had to learn the disparate impacts the pandemic had on various families.

Though they are still in recovery, Postlewait highlighted instances of progress, highlighting a conversation with an elementary school principal she had earlier this school year in which the principal observed this was the first time incoming kindergartners seemed as prepared as they had been before the pandemic.

She added that it seems like things have normalized to the point that these children are coming into the school understanding socialization, the need to sit and listen and how to play with one another.

Another challenge facing the district, Postlewait said, is one facing schools throughout the country: a shortage of teachers. She told the Chronicle that while the district has done an outstanding job at coming up with creative ways to recruit and retain teachers, it remains a difficult market.

“For education, when our recruiters go to colleges, there may be a need throughout the state for 150 math teachers and the colleges, compositely, in South Carolina and may be graduating 27,” Postlewait said. “So the pipeline simply is not sufficient for our current needs.”

Discussing her goals for the district, the superintendent said one-year goals include increasing the percentage of parents and teachers who feel that the district is a safe and nurturing environment to learn and work, improving overall achievement by looking at key performance indicators, continuing to monitor student growth and improving the graduation rate.

Per the latest SC School Report Cards, Lexington 1’s 2023 graduation rate was 88.2%, slightly better than 2022’s 88.1 and solidly better than the state’s overall graduation rate of 83.8%.

Looking forward further, Postlewait said the district hopes to complete a strategic plan by the end of this year that will shape its path for the next five years. She added that the district is getting ready to issue a bid for a thorough demographic and economic study to gather insight as to what the next five years should bring in terms of growth.

Postlewait said another five-year goal is to do a better job at helping teachers with curriculum work, claiming that coming back from COVID the district has tended to leave teachers in a situation where they are still having to put together their own curriculum and instructional materials. She added that a curriculum audit was recently completed, explaining that the district needs to improve on preparing core instructional materials for teachers and conduct interventions for students who didn't get the curriculum the first time.

The superintendent said she doesn’t know what to anticipate in 10 years, especially with artificial intelligence on the rise, telling the Chronicle that this is something she reflects on a lot.

While she acknowledges that computers can grind out a lot of answers for a student, Postlewait told the Chronicle that she hopes that schools will instead focus on ensuring students understand how the problem was solved and how people reach a particular conclusion.

She added that students will always need to be able to understand what it is they are looking for, giving the example that if you are looking for exponents you have to understand what an exponent is.

“I'm not sure where we'll be in 10 years, but I hope we don't lose sight of the need for people to learn the basics,” Postlewait said. “And know how to respect one another and get along with one another even though they may come from different walks of life and, and have some different beliefs about what is right or wrong.”

When it comes to how the district has grown, Postlewait expanded on the district's achievements and reputation within the state. The superintendent stated that Lexington 1 is known for its breadth of opportunities, saying it offers immersion programs for foreign languages, which many others don’t, and the district's variety of athletics and arts programs is breathtaking.

Postlewait said the district needs to grow the level of exposure students get to these opportunities, as they aren’t equally distributed to all students in the district.

District staff and employees aren’t the only people working to better their districts, the students are too, Postlewait said, explaining that the district meets with high school students, who are chosen as representatives of their schools, once a month, adding that this year that group has really taken off.

Postlewait added that some of these students have contacted her outside of these monthly meetings to express their thoughts on what they believe their schools need. She shared that one student even wrote a college level letter regarding their schools’ strengths and weaknesses and sent it in the mail.

“It's tremendously exciting,” Postlewait said of hearing from these students outside of those monthly meetings. “I think it’s Exhibit A that we are successful in teaching students how to think through, identify what they believe might be the root cause of a problem and be proactive in offering suggestions and take agency for that.”

Postlewait added that the district's instructional and communications teams are out in the district's schools daily, adding that the finance and human resource teams are also going out to schools to make sure they remain on target.

Libby Roof, chief communications officer for the district, told the Chronicle that some people fail to realize that running a school district is like running an extremely large and diverse corporation. She added that the superintendent is like the chief executive officer and that the district feeds, transports, provides triage medical services and educates students on top of providing counselors, social workers and more.

“Our main task is to make sure that all of them have a safe place to learn,” Postlewait said. “And then ensuring that safe place and the supportive environment that every child needs.”