Bluffton will need 100-plus more mobile classrooms in next 5 years, school official says
The school district’s current solution for overcrowding in Bluffton schools will fall apart in 2022, when chief operations officer Robert Oetting predicts every school in Bluffton will be at full capacity, he told board members Wednesday.
According to Oetting, the district “should be building a new school every two to three years” to keep up with growth in Bluffton.
Without rezoning or construction, he said Bluffton will need between 108 and 152 new mobile classrooms just to house students in the next five years, depending on participation in the district’s school choice program and actual classroom uses, or programmatic capacity, versus building capacity.
That prediction takes into account the 400-student classroom expansions currently being built at both May River High School and River Ridge Academy. That extra capacity only delayed the district’s prediction by a year, according to a draft of the district’s 10-year capital improvement plan that Oetting presented to the school board’s operations committee Wednesday.
Since last January, the district has been reassigning new Bluffton neighborhoods from attendance zones with schools using over 95 percent of their capacity to schools that are at less than 90 percent capacity, Oetting said.
“This is the only thing we have, the ability to zone these areas out,” Oetting said Wednesday.
But Oetting maintains that the new neighborhood zoning is a stop-gap measure. Even with the additional classrooms coming to River Ridge and May River, which will hold an estimated 800 additional students, the Bluffton cluster, including the schools not yet completely filled, will be at 100 percent capacity by 2022, he told board members Wednesday.
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.
Since then, students at new Bluffton developments the Crowne at 170 Apartments and Mystic Bluff Apartments have begun attending Bluffton Elementary, despite both complexes being located in the River Ridge attendance zone.
As of the fall semester, Bluffton Elementary’s enrollment was at 762, putting it at 81 percent building capacity and 87 percent programmatic capacity, which refers to the actual use of classrooms.
Oetting identified several spaces the district currently owns for expansion: M.C. Riley has room for four new classrooms, and Okatie Elementary and May River High School are both built next to large swathes of property.
‘A delicate conversation’
The neighborhood reassignment was the only redistricting solution the school board approved after more than a year of debate on how to handle Bluffton’s rapid growth.
Another plan proposed by the district — to send students from overcrowded schools to the less crowded ones, both in-town and even potentially north of the Broad River — was shot down.
“Anything that has to do with additional schools is going to be a delicate conversation that needs to be had,” Bluffton school board rep Rachel Wisnefski said in a phone call Friday. “... We don’t want to create any rivalries that are unnecessary between schools a few miles apart.”
Wisnefski said her top priority in conversations around new schools would be community input, which “in the past, might not have been the case.” She added that many of her constituents were against rezoning.
Board member Earl Campbell, who represents Sheldon, Lobeco and Gray’s Hill, said Thursday he’d prefer building new schools to rezoning students after watching the fallout of the district’s suggestion to send Bluffton students to Battery Creek.
“With the referendum, we have enough money to build new schools,” he said, citing the $345 million school bond referendum voters approved in November. “And that’s what we should do.”
The referendum is, in part, funding expansions happening now at May River and River Ridge.
However, questions remain over the original construction of both schools, which opened their doors in 2016 and 2015, respectively.
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, including Oetting, 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 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.