Still segregated in 2019, Hampton County school systems apply to merge
Hampton County’s two school districts have applied to merge, the state Department of Education confirmed Thursday.
Hampton 2, which had just 719 students in 2017-18, was eligible to apply for department of education grants that could bring in millions to help alleviate the costs of a merger with Hampton 1. The state set aside $50 million to equalize teacher salaries, pay off debts and update facilities in merging districts with less than 1,500 pupils.
Due to its small size, Estill’s Hampton 2 led the state in per-pupil spending on district administrators with $2,455 per pupil in 2016-17, according to the Post and Courier.
Both Hampton 1 and 2 are tiny, with just 2,286 students enrolled in the former district for the 2017-18 school year. But there’s a vast difference between the racial makeup of the county’s school systems.
Hampton 2 was a plaintiff in the 20-year suit Abbeville County School District v. State of South Carolina, in which the state supreme court ruled that the state was guilty of providing “minimally adequate” resources to poor, rural school district’s, immortalized by the 2005 documentary “CORRIDOR OF SHAME: the neglect of South Carolina’s rural schools.”
According to a 2018 report by ProPublica, Hampton 2’s students are 97 percent non-white, compared to 57 percent of students in Hampton 1. This percent is up from 1988, when Christian Science Monitor published an investigation into white flight from the then-94 percent non-white Hampton 2 after integration.
According to SC Department of Education spokesman Ryan Brown, school districts in six counties applied to merge with other districts using state funds. Brown said that the amount of funding each district will receive is undetermined so far, and that the next step for Hampton 2 and others is to work with their local legislative delegation to begin the merger process.
Brown said that Hampton 2’s application is to merge within the next two to three years.
This story was originally published August 1, 2019 at 4:52 PM with the headline "Still segregated in 2019, Hampton County school systems apply to merge."