About 120 Pritchardville students will be switching to new schools in August

Some 120 Pritchardville Elementary School students will say goodbye to campus this spring, destined for other schools in August after a redistricting proposal was approved Tuesday to relieve overcrowding at the Bluffton school.

The Beaufort County school board voted 8-1 to approve an option that would transfer about two-thirds of those students to Michael C. Riley Elementary next year, with the rest making a shift to Bluffton Elementary.

Next year’s fifth-graders would be allowed to finish their elementary days at Pritchardville. In addition, students in Pritchardville’s Advanced Math, Engineering and Science program would be allowed to stay via school choice. Affected families will be given a two-week extension to register.

The plan was one of two rezoning options presented to parents as part of last week’s “town hall” meeting at Bluffton High School with superintendent Jeff Moss. The other would have sent all of the affected students to Bluffton Elementary.

Moss told the board that parents showed no strong preference for one option over another, as long as it meant their students didn’t have to meet in portable classrooms.

“From the questions that were asked, they understand the plight that we have,” Moss said. “But they also understand the need to do a referendum so Bluffton will have schools to handle the growth.”

Pritchardville Elementary, in Bluffton’s booming New Riverside area, is operating at 7 percent over capacity in 2016-17. Projections show that overflow could more than double for the upcoming school year, creating a need for six additional classrooms.

M.C. Riley, meantime, is operating at 78 percent of capacity this year. The influx of Pritchardville students would raise that to around 90 percent. Bluffton Elementary would move from 68 percent of capacity to about 72 percent.

The racial makeup at each school would change slightly, with Pritchardville losing about 5 percent of its Hispanic population to M.C. Riley.

Bluffton Elementary is projected to hit 84 percent capacity if it were to absorb the entire influx, but Moss explained that splitting the group made more long-term sense.

“M.C. Riley is not projected to grow as quickly as Bluffton Elementary,” the superintendent said.

Additionally, he said the split would help balance numbers as those students moved on to middle school. H.E. McCracken Middle School, which receives Bluffton Elementary students, is forecast for a population boom in upcoming years.

M.C. Riley students feed into Bluffton Middle School. “When we look at our projections,” Moss said, “it will help bring that number down by putting them at Bluffton Middle.”

JoAnn Orischak cast the lone dissenting vote, preferring to see a plan in which students could finish out at Pritchardville but new ones from the affected neighborhoods would be funneled to M.C. Riley or Bluffton Elementary.

“I would have liked to have seen the kinder, gentler approach where you’re not uprooting students,” Orischak said. “You’d just be preventing new students from beginning there. ... There must be a way, I think, to make it work.”

Moss countered, though, that such an approach would not solve a potential crisis next year.

“If we do nothing, we would have to look at how to create six classrooms at Pritchardville,” he said. “We’d really have to put modulars there. It doesn’t make financial sense for me to put modulars there for two or three years.”

This story was originally published March 8, 2017 at 8:18 AM with the headline "About 120 Pritchardville students will be switching to new schools in August."