US:Unemployment is the big issue in tomorrow's primary, writes Denis Stauntonin Marion, South Carolina
After more than 30 years at Creek Bridge High School, principal Burney Bell is proud of the school's 500 students and 37 teachers and of the school's highly disciplined, studious atmosphere. With good test results and a supportive administration, Creek Bridge is in many ways the sort of school many teachers dream of but Bell says they are leaving in droves.
"I lost 12 teachers last year out of 37, a third of them," he says.
"I can hire a teacher here and train her for the first year. She can then go six miles down the road to the next county and make $8,000 more a year." A small town near the border with North Carolina, Marion lies in South Carolina's "Corridor of Shame", a strip of poverty-stricken counties running along the I-95 interstate highway down to Georgia.
The region has been impoverished by a wave of lay-offs as dozens of factories have closed in recent years, moving their operations offshore to Central America, China and India.
All the candidates competing in tomorrow's Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina have invoked the Corridor of Shame as evidence of the destructive power of President George Bush's economic policies, and Barack Obama this week visited Dillon, a few miles up the road from Marion.
South Carolina's schools are funded through property taxes, so as property values in Marion County have fallen in recent years, the schools have become more impoverished. Bell says he not only cannot afford to pay teachers competitive salaries but cannot buy new books for the library or offer special classes for slower or more gifted students.
Some 95 per cent of Creek Bridge students are poor enough to receive free or reduced-price lunches and although nine out of 10 are black, Bell says the issue is not one of racial injustice. "It's injustice, period. When a town six miles down the road has more capital per pupil than our children, that's injustice."
Signs of deprivation are everywhere along Marion's main street, from shuttered shops to a string of offices offering short-term, "payday loans", often at 30 times the interest rates charged by credit card companies.
At Marion County's labour exchange, area director Cindy Rogers runs down a list of plant closures during the past 10 years that have left the county with an unemployment rate of 12.8 per cent, the second highest in the state. With official statistics showing 1,720 people in the county out of work and the real figure almost certainly higher, Rogers says there are currently 59 jobs available, many of them in fast-food restaurants paying the minimum wage. "In Marion County, we have not had an enormous amount of job creation."
Rogers, who has lived in Marion all her life, says the local community is doing all it can to mitigate the social impact of chronic unemployment but there is little they can do to change the school-funding system that channels money away from poorer districts and into prosperous areas.
"It's not equitable and those children in the lower part of Marion County are deserving of the same opportunity as that child who lives in one of the wealthier counties in the state. Why are those kids not being given the exact same opportunity?" she said.
Obama has drawn huge crowds in South Carolina, attracting almost 30,000 to a football stadium with Oprah Winfrey last year, but the gymnasium at Dillon High School was less than half full when he spoke there on Wednesday night.
I asked Olivia Hines, who was laid off by Honda last year, why more of her friends and neighbours weren't there. "A lot of people in Dillon County say he's not a Christian," she said. "They think he's a Muslim."
The internet is alive with postings claiming that Obama is a Muslim and his campaign is taking the rumours seriously enough to hand out leaflets quoting his statements about his Christian faith. A campaign flier handed out at Dillon showed him at a pulpit with an illuminated cross behind him and the words Committed Christian printed in big bold letters on the back.
Hines and her brother, Christopher, who told me he makes $6.15 an hour at a fast-food restaurant, were confident that Obama would tell them how he would bring jobs back to the region.
Clearly tired and perhaps a little disappointed by the small turnout, Obama gave his stump speech and took no questions, departing from the standard script for only a few minutes to refer to the crumbling school buildings in the district. A group of high school students standing next to me had waited for almost three hours to see Obama and were thrilled when he arrived onstage but halfway through the speech, they drifted away - along with dozens of others.
When Obama finished speaking and started shaking hands with supporters, I looked around for Olivia and Christopher Hines, but they too had left, fully informed about Obama's Christian values but none the wiser about his plans to improve life in the Corridor of Shame.