Mike Couick
Verna Fewell.
Hearing that name can still make me sit up straight and search for the nearest blackboard. Mrs. Fewell was my seventh-grade math teacher, a no-nonsense, experienced instructor who ran her classroom with the discipline and efficiency of a drill sergeant.
Mrs. Fewell’s love of numbers and word problems would provide a good lesson now as South Carolina explores what to do with state-owned utility Santee Cooper and its massive nuclear construction failure debt.
In the fall of 1971, I was a talkative 11-year-old with a friend, Bobby Love, sitting beside me in her classroom. I had very little interest in tackling Mrs. Fewell’s word problems, that marriage of numbers and prose requiring more focus than rote application of multiplication or division tables.
On my second six-weeks report card—the old version where grades were entered by hand and required a parent’s signature prior to being returned to the teacher—she neatly penned in a conduct grade of “F” for fair, and then she kicked it up a notch by circling it with a red pen. Bobby got the same treatment. Our mothers were both teachers akin to Mrs. Fewell who did not countenance anything less than full student engagement.
I boarded the bus for home considering my options: 1) running away, 2) blaming it on Bobby or 3) forging my dad’s signature. The first two options were unappealing, and I was certain that Verna Fewell was a handwriting expert. I gave in and showed the report card to my mother. She called Bobby’s mom, and they both delivered a common verdict: Mrs. Fewell was a great teacher, what she was teaching was essential, and we needed to embrace word problems because life is a series of word problems. They were right.
I didn’t become an Isaac Newton, but I did come to believe that numbers were a gateway to a reasoned discussion of complex challenges. Absent numbers, conversations about the impact of climate change, the societal cost of our opiate pandemic, the long-term consequences of a failing foster care system, and the opportunity cost of crumbling infrastructure are little more than emotionally charged screaming matches.
Plugging in numbers gives policymakers a framework to consider the effects of deciding or failing to decide. The beauty of numbers in these complex word problems is the reassurance that we do not have to be bound to a single equation. Multiple models can be run with results being scored and compared. Still, numbers are guides, not gods.
In the closing hours of this year’s legislative session, our General Assembly embraced a search for an answer to one of our state’s most complicated word problems—what to do to shield ratepayers from Santee Cooper’s multibillion-dollar stake in the failed nuclear construction project at Jenkinsville.
We all should be grateful that policymakers are open to a numbers-based approach on three options for Santee Cooper’s future: 1) selling Santee Cooper to a buyer offering the best deal to the state and to all ratepayers, 2) hiring an outside company to manage Santee Cooper with an aim of achieving similar value to the state and Santee Cooper’s ratepayers or 3) internal reform at Santee Cooper bringing comparable value to the state and all ratepayers.
This word problem is complex. A host of variables means that working the problem will require full engagement. I am certain that our state is up to this challenge.
Somewhere, Verna Fewell is on the edge of cracking a smile and saying in that husky voice that could strike fear in an 11-year-old, “OK, folks, we’ve studied this. You can solve it. Keep your eyes on your own paper. Show all your work. Good luck.”
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