♪ [opening music] ♪ Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Welcome to Palmetto Scene .

In this episode we'll take a final look at education in the year of the pandemic with a visit to the Lowcountry, where a very creative college professor used a uniquely creative hands on approach to keeping students engaged in the process.

As ETV Lowcountry's Holly Bounds-Jackson shows us, it's all about getting the job done.

>> You're going off what we already have?

>> That's a very good question.

<Holly> Communication is the name of the game for University of South Carolina Beaufort's Dr. Caroline Sawyer.

You may recognize her name as the producer for ETV's show, By the River .

Straight from the start of the show, Sawyer taught her Lowcountry author series students how to make TV happen by putting them in the driver's seat for By the River's production.

Instead of reading about different production roles from a textbook, her students hold the actual gear in their hands and push the buttons that make it go.

They walk away from the class with experience that could help land them their first TV job.

>> They get to run cameras.

They get to run teleprompters.

They've written scripts.

This season they're doing editing and running the jib for it.

A lot of other institutions will offer a theory based.

They'll offer some skill based, but working on a professional level show is not something that a lot of them offer, and we're very proud to have that opportunity here.

<Holly> But when the Covid-19 pandemic forced people to distance, it meant students had to step away from the studio.

>> During season three of By the River , we really ran into some challenges with the pandemic due to restrictions by the CDC, South Carolina DHEC, also state entities, and the university itself, really limiting our ability to have students in the classroom face to face, so we were able to make some transitions to make that happen, and for By the River, what we ended up doing specifically was making sure that we had less people in here, so it was primarily essential only people.

<Holly> Once ETV found ways to keep the show alive safely though, Sawyer said she'd also find ways to keep the students involved.

When rethinking how we were going to offer the Lowcountry author series course and tape By the River, we really had to come up with some creative strategies.

We could definitely have not offered the course at all.

It would have been the easy way out, but that would have given a lot of students a lack of opportunity that we've been offering to them, and I didn't really want to see our seniors lose that opportunity, so we came up with a digital series that we've been working on with the podcast, moving a lot of the stuff that I do in post production, to the students to be able to do in post production, and giving them a different experience on what other professionals in the industry are doing during the pandemic, so they got to see, you know, we need to be flexible.

We need to be able to make changes, because the show does still have to go on.

<Holly> Jeremy Smalls is a senior at USCB.

He hopes to one day work as an editor or a filmmaker.

He's become a regular crew member for By the River and is glad his involvement did not have to end.

<Jeremy> See, I've been a part of the By the River team for three years now, and I've been doing a lot.

I did camera work.

I worked in the control room for technical directing, and I did floor directing at one point too, so like, just a variety of things.

I like being in the control room, because it's like behind the scenes is behind the scenes, and I like editing as well.

By the River is preparing to air its fourth season of the show, and thankfully under slightly looser restrictions than this time last year.

Because of that, Sawyer is allowing two students to assume hands on roles.

Senior Emily Firster is onsite all season running the clock and greeting guests as they come in.

>> It's definitely unique being able to actually be on a real set and working hands on with the equipment and working with people day in and day out just to be able to get that experience before I'm actually out of college.

<Holly> But without the students meeting in person in a group, this class is really getting a test of their inner communication skills.

With less face to face interaction, they're being forced to text, swipe, Skype, and type while hoping no one at home notices a difference.

<Caroline> During the pandemic, we did a great job of making a seamless transition, where the main difference that people at home saw was a little further distancing here on the set, lack of lapel microphones, instead doing microphones that were shot gun, so we did a really good job of making that transition very, very, seamless, so much so, that we have enjoyed this kind of more intimate environment.

It's made for better interviews.

Everyone on the set feels much more comfortable in that low pressure place, and I think that we've really adopted that as kind of how we're going to move forward with our production of the show.

In Beaufort, I'm Holly Jackson for Palmetto Scene.

The social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in higher levels of anxiety for many across the country.

But for artists like Kimberly Case, this moment in time became an opportunity for introspection and self-expression using their gifts to bring a sense of calm and stability to these uncertain times.

<Kimberly> I really like a warm, calm vibe, [camera snaps a shot] a vintage look.

Just whatever I do, whatever I shoot, [camera snaps a shot] usually I end up giving it somehow this vintage look.

[camera snaps a shot] I would describe my technique as rich and warm.

I like some shadows.

[camera snaps a shot] I'm not afraid of that, and I'll use that in my compositions.

But I've always enjoyed the arts.

I've always loved crafting and sewing and painting and just dabbling in whatever came to hand.

I got into costuming.

I love wardrobe.

I'm such a fan of vintage clothes.

I have quite a collection of my own, so I got into costuming, and this little group I was in, we were going to have a photo shoot.

It was so much fun.

It was such a circus.

I just loved it, and did just about anything I could do to stay involved with the studio, and one day one of the owners handed me a camera during a photo session for a family, and that was just all she wrote.

People ask me, they say "I love your work."

"I love your pictures."

"Can you take my portrait?"

"But I don't want to wear a costume."

And I say, "You don't have to."

"If you come get your picture taken at my studio, you don't have to wear a costume, but if you want to, I can help you out."

When it was obvious that the world was gonna start shutting down for Covid, I was sent home from my day job to work at home, but I could still come to the studio, and then I saw that the Koger Center for the Arts put out a call for art.

They said that they knew artists were still out there doing their thing, and they wanted to know what we were up to, so I sent my little portfolio of madness that I had been working on in to them, and they chose me as the main winner of their competition, therefore, I won a big exhibit at the Koger Center, which is there now.

It's over 70 pieces of art that I've worked on during Covid.

So today we are hanging the 1593 project, my series that I did.

I call it In the Time of Covid .

It's kind of a journey through Covid, of mostly self portraits.

There's a few still lifes in here.

A lot of it's reacting to... the images are reacting to what we are seeing in the news or what I was feeling personally, so this is what I produced.

<Artist 1> We thought back to history of 1593 when the bubonic plague was in Europe, and all of the theaters shut down, and we created the 1593 project, which is a call for art for South Carolina artists, and we received submissions from all over the state.

We received musical scores, plays, dances, animation, photography, oil paintings, sculptures, pretty much anything you could think of, we received, which was really fantastic to see the scope of the artistry in South Carolina.

<Artist 2> When I heard about the 1593 project, the one piece with the four sections to it had already been completed, and the title of the whole series is Nothing Stays the Same .

People give different interpretations of it.

I've heard somebody say, "Oh, it looks like a bunch of huts all put there together."

One woman just said, "Oh, it looks like a portal or a doorway to something," and I thought that myself too, and I thought, 'Should I add anything else?'

but then think, 'No, just leave it up to somebody's imagination what might be through that doorway.'

So it seemed like all the changes that were coming about as a result of Covid and the isolations, just seemed like the perfect item to enter.

<Kimberly> If you look at the whole series, there's a wide range of people that I show in the self-portrait series.

Some of them are real serious.

Some of them are wacky.

Some of them are one hundred percent me.

Some of them are just a little bit me.

Some of the characters I portray are not me.

Like, I'm not a nurse, but I did feel the weight that all the health care workers struggle with.

It's on TV.

You couldn't help but see it.

I kind of internalized that and brought that feeling out with an image of me as a nurse.

I do feel like I know what I want to do now.

I know that I want to make art for people, either using myself as a subject, using props for a still life, or using a client as a subject, but I want to give people the art they want.

I want them to see something familiar, something they can relate to, just a piece.

I want them to feel richness and texture, if you can feel those things.

I just want them to feel comfort.

There's enough stress, and that might be one of the things I learned in Covid, is you don't know what other people are going through, and maybe one thing art can do in some cases is to bring a comfort and a reassurance that things are okay, and you have the strength to get through it.

And now, turning to another health concern in our state... diabetes.

There are an estimated 34 million people in the United States who have diabetes.

Long-term complications of diabetes can include cardiovascular disease, nerve damage and eye damage.

Harvest Free Clinic in North Charleston serves as a safety net clinic for people who lack insurance or the financial resources to pay for medical care.

Volunteers at the clinic, with the help of doctors at MUSC, are helping to prevent blindness among diabetic patients.

>> I'm from Union, South Carolina.

My grandmother would get mad if I said just Union.

I'm actually from Santuc, South Carolina, which most people have no idea where that is, but it's wonderful.

It's just in the middle of the country, and so part of why I wanted to be a doctor was because of my family doctor, Dr. David Keith, who's still practicing, still taking care of patients, still loving on them, trying to practice as good a medicine as he can possibly give his patients, inspired me to want to be similar, that I want to care for my patients well.

I want to deliver to them whole person care, getting to know them, not just their medical problems, but their stories, to be able to love them, care for them, to provide excellent care as much as we can.

Harvest Free Medical Clinic is a safety net clinic for folks that do not have any insurance or ability to pay for their medical care, and the desire for us at the clinic here is to take excellent care of patients, to get to know them over a long period of time, to help them in the midst of this season of their life, and to demonstrate the love of Jesus as we do that.

♪ [somber music] ♪ There is somewhere on the order of 34 million people in the United States who have diabetes.

90 to 95% of those cases are type two diabetes.

In our population where we're caring mainly for 18 year old folks to 65 or older, that's a sizable portion of people who have diabetes.

>> So diabetic retinopathy in general is a leading cause of blindness among working age people in the United States, so it's very common in this part of the country because of the relatively high incidence of diabetes in the southeast.

Fortunately the worst forms of diabetic retinopathy are still relatively uncommon, but they are severe enough that they can lead to total blindness.

>> One of the things about diabetic retinopathy is that in the early stages patients may be asymptomatic, meaning they may not have any visual symptoms at all.

With that, that's actually a helpful thing in terms of screening.

If we can find it before symptoms start, then hopefully we can actually do something about it.

>> So Dr. McGraw, who's a colleague of mine, came to me as part of a project he was trying to propose about getting a camera to do diabetic screening locally, and I suggested that he apply for a Duke Endowment grant and potentially get cameras that we could scatter throughout this whole part of the state and engage the telehealth people at the institution, to develop a broader scale screening program that might include people who didn't have the resources to actually get screened otherwise.

>> First thing in the morning, I go through and identify every diabetic that we have on the schedule for the day.

I put in their order.

When they're finished seeing the physician, I bring them back to the retinal imaging camera, and they sit down and I explain to them the way it works, and the camera's actually color coded.

It's very sensitive, so we take the image, and then I explain to them that their images are going to be sent to MUSC.

>> The greatest benefit is that we've actually detected pretty severe disease in people that otherwise probably would have caused them to go blind, and at least have been able to identify that they're the ones that need treatment.

So the benefit of telehealth is capturing those people that actually may have disease, so we can try and treat them.

The people who are getting examined, are not as much the problem as the people that aren't getting examined, so people who see their primary care doctor for control of their diabetes may very easily escape an exam.

By using these cameras for telemedicine, we can try to get them examined, so to speak, at the point of care when they go in for their primary care visits, and then if they have severe disease or disease that would need to be treated, at least identify that, and try and get them to see someone who can treat them.

The real benefit of the program, I think, is that you don't have to find that many people who have really severe disease to make it worthwhile, so if you save three or four people in a year from going blind, that's a huge benefit overall, not only to them but to the healthcare system in general, because of the costs associated with caring for these people throughout their life with poor vision.

>> It's really rewarding to be able to work through that, and help out some of the patients, and they're so grateful.

>> It's a privilege to take care of people that often are just forgotten, then just left behind in some ways, and so that's part of caring for people as people.

For me, it's a joy, it's a privilege, it's a delight to enter into someone's brokenness and to offer some degree of hope and care and joy when they might have felt forgotten.

>> Finally, with the hope of returning to a sense of normalcy in our education system, we'll reprise a look at one of the gems in our state, the South Carolina Governor's School of Science and Math.

Located in Hartsville, this residential campus challenges our brightest students who are interested in pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering, and math with a rigorous curriculum that prepares them for a bright future in their chosen fields.

<Student> Coming here was actually a challenge for me because I wasn't good at making friends.

But since we're all in the same boat, it was really easy adjusting because everyone here wants you to succeed, so just don't be afraid and challenge yourself.

>> The South Carolina's School for Science and Mathematics is a public residential high school for 11th through 12th graders.

They apply in 10th grade.

It's a unique living and learning environment where the students take rigorous classes and get to have opportunities they would not otherwise have at other high schools in the state.

And they have the added bonus of living with their classmates and colleagues.

So there's that learning that goes on outside the classroom.

While the focus is science and math, we also offer very strong Humanities courses in history, English, and writing composition.

[teacher speaking to class] ...being released into the skeletal muscle the brachialis.

I can go back and forth.

<Teacher> This is a STEM school.

So we emphasize a lot on the concept of STEM.

Almost every STEM course that is taught in our school has a lab component, which many public schools don't have.

They spend sometimes two to two and a half hours doing lab work, so the lab sort of integrates into that theory class.

Our classes are pretty intensive.

We do teach at a much higher level than what you might see at the public school.

And we run it like a college.

[teacher speaking to students] ...covered another little section today.

How's the reading going?

Are you all caught up?

Are you doing what you supposed to do?

>> The virtual programs, as well as our outreach programs, allow us to reach more students in the state.

As you may know, there only 288 beds in the residential program, so we can reach many, many more students with our science and math programs, our engineering programs, so that more students are ready and interested in becoming STEM professionals.

>> At first it was a bit of a struggle, you know, after transitioning to being away from home all the time and living in your school is kind of...

It's a big deal, a big change.

And I think that it takes a few weeks to transition.

But after that, you kind of get in the groove of things.

You get used to it.

>> We do have the transition issues, especially for students who don't have siblings.

And so you've never had to share a room or a bathroom.

And now you're placed in an environment where you have 288 siblings, where you have to learn how to share, work with another person.

The values and morals that you come here with, sometimes you may find that they may change, because of course you're gaining that sense of independence, and so you begin thinking and developing for yourself.

And so that's the beauty of the Governor's School.

But I would say with the transition, that can be a little tough.

>> They really teach you how to best study, which is very, very helpful, because a lot of us that come here, we're like the best at our old high schools, never really had to study.

So coming here, we kind of think, 'Well, it's going to be the same way.'

'No one's gonna have to study.'

'We're just all going to be fine.'

But it definitely... they are college level courses, and the professors here take their teaching very seriously.

They're passionate about the subjects that they teach, and that transfers to the students.

So whenever we get passionate about it, we want to learn more about it, that encourages us to study more and more.

So it really prepares us for the college experience being able to handle the course load that we would have there.

[students cheering] >> It's a little tougher here, but the real interesting thing is right now in season, we have 72% of the student population participating in varsity athletics.

So the kids like the fact that they're gonna play.

The kids are so smart.

Sometimes it's hard to coach them, because if you show them a play, or you show them a technique, and it doesn't work, then they break it down.

They'll get really engrossed in it.

>> Everybody, no matter what their role is on the virtual team or in the school, it's focused on a well balanced student and making sure that academically, emotionally, socially, they're prepared to go out and be tomorrow's leaders.

>> Don't be afraid, because you are going to succeed.

I chose to come here because I wanted a challenge in my education.

At my old school, there weren't really many challenging courses I could take, but coming here I get to take classes that I'm interested in, and they're challenging, such as anatomy, AP chemistry, AP physics and I really enjoy taking them.

Just don't be afraid, and challenge yourself.

>> For more stories about our state and more details on the stories you've just seen, do visit our website at PalmettoScene.org, and of course, don't forget to follow us on social media, whether Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, it's at SCETV#PalmettoScene.

For all of us here at Palmetto Scene and ETV, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Good night, stay strong, and thanks for watching.

♪ [closing music] ♪