Newest Bluffton neighborhoods won’t be sending kids to schools closest to them
New apartment complexes in the fastest-growing area of Bluffton are being rezoned out of their neighborhood schools due to overcrowding at River Ridge Academy and May River High School, which will put about 100 more students at Bluffton Elementary School by spring 2020, district officials estimate.
Beaufort County School District estimates the students will move into the Crowne at 170 Apartments within the first two months of its January opening, chief operations officer Robert Oetting said last week.
They’ll be zoned for Bluffton Elementary, H.E. McCracken Middle and Bluffton High, despite being built in the attendance zone for River Ridge Academy and May River High School, the district’s two newest schools, both of which are overcrowded.
Bluffton Elementary already gained about 100 students last year from the opening of Mystic Bluff Apartments, which was rezoned alongside the Crowne.
By the end of the spring semester next year, the district estimates, Bluffton Elementary will go from being at 79 percent capacity to 90 percent.
The gains are a result of a district compromise after more than a year of school board over redistricting, which stemmed from the rapid growth of Bluffton and a controversial plan to send students from overcrowded schools to the less crowded ones, both in-town and even potentially north of the Broad River.
The board authorized staff in January to reassign new neighborhoods in attendance zones that feed schools that are at greater than 95 percent capacity to schools that are at less than 90 percent capacity, Oetting said.
In 2018-19, only two of Bluffton’s six elementary schools were below 90 percent capacity: Bluffton Elementary and Michael C. Riley Elementary.
In fall 2018, Bluffton Elementary had 699 students, using 74 percent of its building capacity, according to the district’s December 10 year plan and capital budget. Now, the school’s enrollment is at 763, according to district spokesman Jim Foster.
If the district’s estimates of growth from the Crowne pan out, the school will have about 850 students by the end of the 2019-20 school year, putting it at 90 percent capacity.
“We may have to stop sending kids to Bluffton Elementary,” Oetting said Wednesday.
History
Nearly a year after the failure of 2016’s school bond referendum and sales tax proposal, which were together projected to generate upwards of $300 million for school district construction, then-superintendent Jeff Moss made two requests: to hold another referendum in 2018, and to redistrict overcrowded Bluffton schools, potentially sending students north of the Broad.
Both drew ire from the board and the community.
In the meantime, Moss held town halls in 2017, where parents were presented with two redistricting options:
Under the “Fair and Balanced” plan, students living in Bluffton’s Belfair Plantation and Eagle’s Pointe communities would travel across the Broad River to attend Robert Smalls International Academy for middle school.
The second plan, known as the “Option 1” plan, avoided students crossing the Broad River bridge, but still required some Bluffton elementary students to bus across the bridge to Hilton Head.
Board member David Striebinger described the options as seeming “designed for the shock value more than feasibility,” in an email at the time, and he wasn’t alone in his disapproval.
“I don’t want to keep juggling our kids because I know how hard it was on my own,” then-board member Evva Anderson, who represented swaths of Bluffton, said in 2017. A child of hers moved seven times in seven years — all while living at the same home address, she said at the time.
Bond referendums were presented to parents as an alternative to redistricting, but were met with similar resistance from voters, spurred on by board dysfunction and an ongoing FBI investigation into the district. The $76 million 2018 referendum was approved by the board with a thin 6-5 vote, and failed in April of that year with a 73 percent “no” vote.
New referendum, old investigation
River Ridge Academy and May River High School, which are at 105 percent and 97 percent student capacity respectively, are marked for a combined $26 million expansion if the 2019 referendum passes.
Both stand to gain classrooms that can hold up to 400 students, bumping May River’s capacity to 1,800 and River Ridge’s to 1,413 — or 1,573 if the district keeps mobile classrooms on campus, which Oetting said will depend on growth.
However, questions remain about the initial construction of both schools, which occurred under Moss’ tenure as superintendent.
Since the district was made aware of an FBI investigation into the construction of May River High School and River Ridge Academy in December 2017, at least five current and former district employees have been contacted by the FBI, through subpoenas or interviews.
While it is still not known what aspects of the construction of River Ridge Academy and May River High School are being investigated, two of the four subpoenas served on the district in December 2017 were for documents related to the schools’ costs and the procurement process.
Construction of River Ridge Academy was originally estimated at $25.5 million, but cost $32 million by the time the school was completed in 2015, according to previous reporting in the Packet and the Gazette. And May River High School, estimated to cost between $35 million and $43 million, cost a little more than $67 million.