CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The Charleston County School District says a technical glitch by a vendor is to blame after 80 students on the waitlist for the upcoming school year were offered a spot in an early childhood education program.

A first initial email was sent to families Tuesday and said that a seat was available for their child.

“So, I was in my room at 7:11, and I will never forget, I got the email, and I ran down the stairs and I was like, ‘You got into big girl school!’ and we literally celebrated until bedtime,” Kristin Graf, mother to one of 80 students offered accidental enrollment said. “She didn’t even want to go to daycare the next day but I told her she needed to say goodbye to her teachers because they were so wonderful and that Friday would be her last day. She has just been so excited.”

Then a follow-up email was released the next day, saying that the available spot could no longer be honored.

Graf contacted Harbor View Elementary School, the school in which her daughter was enrolled, and she was told that an error had been made in enrollment. She spoke to a woman from the district on the phone who Graf said was just profusely apologizing.

“I just feel like they should have done a little bit more for us,” Graft said. “Just in general, it’s been a nightmare. The last few days have been a nightmare for me.”

In Graf’s situation, she was fortunate enough to reenroll her daughter into her previous daycare, but other families have not been so lucky, especially with school beginning next week.

Andrew Pruitt, Charleston County School District Director of Communications, said that the school district has no control over the email being sent out since they use a third-party vendor. He also said that this is the first time that something like this has occurred since he started in this position seven years ago.

The district released this statement on the incident.

The message was sent in error. The seats offered through this most recent communication cannot be honored as, again, it was in error. All seats offered prior to 5:44 p.m. on Tuesday, August 9, 2022, WILL be honored. On behalf of the District’s School Choice vendor, we regret the confusion.

If your family was offered false enrollment, contact the district’s school choice office via email at school_choice@charleston.k12.sc.us, or call (843) 937-6582.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC/AP) - Tropical Storm Danielle has formed Thursday in the Atlantic and is expected to become a hurricane in the next two days.

Click here to download the free Live 5 First Alert Weather app.

Despite the forecast that it will reach hurricane strength, the storm is not a threat to land.

“Do not be worried about this whatsoever,” Live 5 Meteorologist Joey Sovine said. “It’s going to eventually run into some chillier waters and fade away.”

The storm’s maximum sustained winds were near 40 mph.

The storm is centered about 960 miles west of the Azores and is moving east near 2 mph. The National Hurricane Center said the storm is expected to meander in the Atlantic over the next few days.

Forecasters are still watching two other areas in the Atlantic, one of which has been monitored for several days.

“It is still showing a high chance of development, but it is just slow in doing so,” Sovine said.

Of the two, the westernmost disturbance, an area of low pressure several hundred miles east of the Leeward Islands, is producing showers and thunderstorms.

Forecasters say there is a 60% chance of it developing into a tropical depression over the next 48 hours, and say the chance increases to 80% over the next five days.

It is expected to move slowly west-northwestward.

Sovine says computer models continue to have the storm make a northerly turn away from the southeastern United States.

The second system, meanwhile, is in the eastern tropical Atlantic over and to the north of the Cabo Verde Islands. It shows poorly-organized showers, but there is the potential for it to become a short-lived tropical depression within the next day or so before the environment would make it difficult to develop further.

The National Hurricane Center places the chance of formation at 40% over the next two days and at 40% over the next five days.

August tied a record for inactivity during hurricane season despite the official forecast of an above-normal season. Meteorologists cite unusual persistent dry air and a few other factors as working against warm ocean water, a lack of wind shear and La Nina, which usually work together to create a busy hurricane season.

This year marked the first time since 1941 that the Atlantic went from July 3 to the end of August without a named storm, Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzback said.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - A school principal in Charleston County has left the district after multiple investigations revealed she attempted to use her position to keep her son out of trouble and violated a number of district policies – including a policy dictating how special education students should be handled.

Former Principal Shanitra Deas worked at Deer Park Middle School since 2019. That changed this year after a series of parent complaints and multiple internal investigations. Deas was demoted in June but decided to resign as of Aug. 25.

Deas was investigated by the district twice in the last year. The first investigation started in October when there was a fight in which her son, who attends the school, was involved. The documents in Deas’ employee file say he was helping break up the fight, but that Deas should have recused herself from the student discipline process.

The documents say she became more involved and interfered with the district’s discipline procedure.

“The extend of your involvement was such that a deadline to submit a required DAP packet was not met and standard protocol was not followed regarding the consequences to students,” the documents read.

She was given a formal reprimand in January.

In June, she was placed on administrative leave as the district began another investigation. Much of this investigation has been redacted, but the documents say she again violated the district’s nepotism policies.

However, this is not the only charge levied in the investigation material. The district also noted they received several complaints from parents about excessive suspensions for their children. It says a number of special education students had been put out of the school for an excess of 10 days – violating federal law.

“Days in which administrators have sent these students home for behavioral issue have not been coded as days of suspension as required, and no measures appear to have been taken to provide the special education services the students have missed by being sent home,” the documents read.

The district demoted Deas and she was offered an assistant principal position at Stall High School. She was allowed to keep her principal-level salary of $102,931.20 a year. Deas formally resigned on August 25.

Deas did not respond to a request for comment.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized an Omicron-specific booster, marking the first redesign of coronavirus vaccines since they were rolled out nearly two years ago. The Omicron variant has been the dominate strain since early this year, with the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants being especially transmissible.

It is anticipated that on Friday, Sept. 2, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will sign off on the authorization. After that, it’s all systems go.

“Once it’s given the OK, we’ll put in an order, and it should ship pretty quickly. The entire process should take about a week, meaning we should have it available to anyone who wants it the week of Sept. 12, maybe sooner,” said Danielle Scheurer, M.D., MUSC Health System chief quality officer.

The new booster comes at a point in the pandemic when approximately 90,000 infections and 475 deaths are being recorded daily in this country. Though hospitalizations have become much rarer, COVID-19 is still the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Though this targeted booster should help to slow the spread of the virus, Scheurer is skeptical that it will fly off the shelves.

“My guess is the uptake will be low. So many people have gotten COVID at this point, and many just aren’t getting that sick. I think people are just over it. I hate to say it, but I think a lot of folks are going, ‘I’ll just take my chances,’” she said.

But Scheurer cautioned that people who are at higher risk, such as older Americans or those with preexisting health conditions, should seriously consider getting this booster. And for those who aren’t in the higher-risk category, one motivator to get this booster might be to avoid getting long COVID, when virus-related symptoms can linger indefinitely beyond an infection.

As for the science behind the new booster, Scheurer said it was synthesized in the same way the first vaccine was, only it’s bivalent, meaning the encoded messenger RNA targets two spike proteins, instead of one: the original virus and Omicron and its known subvariants. Additionally, the dosage for this one is a little lower.

“I think it’s important that people know that this is intended to act as a booster, not a stand-alone vaccine,” she said. “Meaning that for people who haven’t been vaccinated, the course of action is to get your original two doses and then this.”

Two boosters will be available: one by Pfizer BioNTech, for use in people age 12 and up, and the other by Moderna, targeted to those 18 years and up. MUSC expects to receive the Pfizer booster.

Though MUSC is in the process of decommissioning all of its stand-alone vaccine sites, the new booster will be offered at the MUSC Health Pharmacy at Rutledge Tower as well as by most, if not all, MUSC Health affiliated primary care physician sites.

Though things seem to be trending in the right direction in this country, Scheurer still remains vigilant.

“Given the volume of people who have gotten Omicron, I’m kind of surprised we haven’t had another rapidly evolving variant,” she said. “I think we’ve been pretty lucky. But then again, this might just be the new normal – a world where we coexist with COVID and life goes on.”

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - It is no secret temperatures in the Lowcountry can get hot during the day, but a group of organizations, including the city of Charleston, are looking at how heat impacts the health of a downtown neighborhood.

City of Charleston Chief Resilience Officer Dale Morris said Wednesday that heat kills more people than any other natural disaster.

“We don’t have a hot day. We have hot months here,” Morris said. “People sort of get used to that, but if you don’t get cooling at nighttime, the heat manifests and causes health problems.”

A group of scientists came out to the Gadsden Green neighborhood over the weekend during a cloudy day, and they measured the temperature of the pavement to be 118 degrees Fahrenheit, which they say reaches dangerous levels.

There are 11 organizations, including the city, that are involved in the Charleston Heat Health Research Project, which is fully funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The study first started in 2020. It identified Gadsden Green, the medical district and the Union Pier Terminal as having the most intense heat on the peninsula.

Scientists will be looking at how the direction of the wind, tree shading, building materials and even the paint on the buildings contributes to that heat.

“What we’re trying to understand is what’s going on here in the neighborhood outside of the buildings,” Morris said, “and eventually, inside of the buildings to see what we can learn from that and what kind of solutions we would be able to offer to the housing authority and to a bunch of other folks around the city as the city gets redeveloped.”

Charleston Housing Authority CEO Art Milligan said there are around 400 units in the neighborhood.

“We’ve heard that constantly, that the heat is exhausting,” Milligan said.

Milligan said the housing authority already had plans to either rehabilitate or reposition the buildings, meaning they would tear them down and redevelop the area in phases over the next four to five years. He said the results of the study could help them decide where to place those buildings.

“We wouldn’t do it all at one time,” Milligan said. “We would phase it out, and that way we would be able to give residents a place to stay until the units were rebuilt.”

Morris said the community will play a big part in the neighborhood’s future.

“How they may like us to improve the buildings, to improve the streetscape, to put more trees and things like that, so they’re going to be a part of this process going forward,” Morris said.

Scientists expect to have the results from this study in October. That is when they will share those recommendations on how to further cool down the neighborhood.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.