Can Whale Branch arts center hit the right notes with school board?

Whale Branch community leaders could not have asked for a much better warmup act when Beaufort Middle School’s choir stood before the school board to perform at the start of the board’s last meeting.

With the final notes still fresh in everyone’s memory, talk turned from the singing to where songs could be sung.

“If those students that sang so beautifully attended Whale Branch Early College High School, guess what?” said Joseph Klein, one of five community members to address the board Feb. 7. “Their music would be (diminished), because we do not have the facilities.”

Whale Branch — which is in rural northern Beaufort County and serves a community that is mostly African-American — is the only high school in the county without a performing arts center, a sore point for a community still waiting 15 years to see its campus fully completed.

A competition gym also left out of the original construction fell into place this month when the board voted 6-2, with two abstentions, to absorb the $4.4 million project into its “8 percent” borrowing capacity that doesn’t require voter approval.

A similar proposal for the $12 million arts center now is up for examination. Though the project figures to play prominently into discussion on Tuesday night's board agenda of the district's 8 percent funding scenarios, no vote was scheduled.

After years of languishing on the back burner, the projects’ swift thrust to the forefront has been notable. It’s also hit a few sour notes with fiscal watchdogs, who suggest the move is an end run around voters’ rejection of last fall’s $217 million bond referendum.

“You can’t ask this school board to override what the voters said in November,” said Richard Bisi, co-founder of Citizens Advocating Responsible Education. “This, to me, is not logical at all. We feel very strongly that the board has to take a hard look at this.”

State law allows school boards to authorize capital improvement bonds below its 8 percent threshold without having to take it to a ballot measure. Without that funding, the performing arts center likely would go into a scaled-down referendum to underwrite a five-year building plan.

But with the public antipathy that has plagued the board and superintendent Jeff Moss for the better part of two years, there’s no guarantee any bond measure gets voters’ blessing.

“I do not believe any referendum will pass in the next four or five years,” said board member Earl Campbell, who along with board member Bill Payne have been chief advocates for the Whale Branch additions. “There’s too much personality involved in (board governance), and there shouldn’t be.”

The last board meeting brought an accusation of political threats, stemming from the Rev. James Moore’s impassioned plea before the board.

If the board doesn’t pass both projects, the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church pastor promised he would “do everything in my power to cause the next referendum to fail. I’ll use every penny I’ve got — because it’s wrong (to wait), and you know it’s wrong.

“When the citizens vote, you should do everything that you can to cause that vote to be fulfilled,” Moore went on. “I beg of you, do what is right and we in turn will support you. If you don’t, we won’t.”

That brought a sharp response from Bisi. “He was the only one who made the threat,” Bisi said, “but I think it’s clear that leaders in that community are going to be up in arms if it’s not approved with the 8 percent money.”

Campbell saw no threat, suggesting Moore’s words were no stronger than those heard in opposition to last November’s referendum. “What’s the difference?” he asked.

Said board member Joseph Dunkle, who voted against the gym: “I didn’t find his comments threatening. I found it unfortunate that he’d pit the whole against what they’d get now.”

In a sense, the performing arts center finds itself between two competing factions asking the board to listen to Beaufort County voters — 16 years apart.

A referendum to build Whale Branch was passed in 2000, then held up by nearly a decade of political wrangling and legal paralysis. It took a judge’s order to finally get construction underway, and the school opened in 2010.

Costs had skyrocketed by then, though, prompting officials to pull the gym and performing arts center off the construction list.

That’s how things stood for six years, despite frustration amid the Whale Branch community. But with last summer’s completion of May River High — a $70 million project, including an auditorium and two gyms, built entirely through the 8 percent funding mechanism — Whale Branch wants action too.

“When folks can go to Bluffton and see what’s happened in the past couple of years,” Campbell said, “they not only get frustrated, they get angry about it.”

“Voters did not pass a piecemeal referendum to build that school,” Moore said when contacted last week.

Board members generally agree Whale Branch should get its performing arts center. The speed at which the proposals have risen has some uncomfortable, though, as well as uncertainty about the impact they would leave on millage rates and the district’s credit rating.

“The rapidity in which (the gym) went through was a bit much for me,” said Christina Gwozdz, who is one of two new members elected in November and, along with board member JoAnn Orischak, abstained in the vote.

Said member David Striebinger, who voted against the gym: “I’d really like to see something in writing from the bond consultant. I’m really not going to get swayed by a PowerPoint presentation.”

Moss and district staff will have those numbers available Tuesday night as part of a larger analysis of the 8 percent funding mechanism.

“It seems like we’ve thrown all this planning out the window to facilitate public outcry,” Dunkle said. “It’s needed, but it’s needed in the right way.”

This story was originally published February 20, 2017 at 1:19 PM with the headline "Can Whale Branch arts center hit the right notes with school board?."