Beaufort Co. school board wants new-school talks to include town of Bluffton, county
Beaufort County School District’s leaders are taking a harder look at growth in Bluffton and the possibility of building new schools — and they’re hoping to include Town of Bluffton and Beaufort County Council officials in those discussions.
The school board voted at its meeting Tuesday to establish a task force on growth in Bluffton, following a warning from district officials that every school in Bluffton will be at full capacity by 2022 and that the district “should be building a new school every two to three years” to keep up with the town’s growth.
Without rezoning or new buildings, the district predicts it will need to add more than 100 mobile classrooms to Bluffton schools in the next five years.
Bluffton and Pritchardville’s representative, Rachel Wisnefski, introduced the idea of a task force as a result of the district’s warning. She said she wanted to revive district conversations about building in Bluffton that “fizzled out a few years ago” due to “internal issues” — among them an FBI investigation, two failed referendums, controversial rezoning discussions and board dysfunction under then-superintendent Jeff Moss.
‘The powers that be’
Wisnefski suggested county councilman Mike Covert, Bluffton mayor Lisa Sulka and Bluffton town manager Marc Orlando as potential committee members, enabling the school board to have “high-level conversations with the powers that be.”
She said Wednesday that she has not talked to Orlando or Sulka about the committee, but that Covert reached out to her supporting the idea after Tuesday’s meeting.
Covert, who serves the same district as Wisnefski but on the Beaufort County Council, said Wednesday that he was interested in serving on the committee to “really drill down to the root cause” of Bluffton’s population growth and the schools’ overcrowding.
He said he doesn’t see the “growth bubble” bursting for at least another 10 years.
“Nowhere else in the county do we have the extremely limited space we have in southern Beaufort County,” he said.
Board chairwoman Christina Gwozdz, who represents the May River area of Bluffton, said Wednesday that she would assign interested board members to the committee. As board chairs typically don’t serve on committees, Gwozdz said she would not be part of the committee.
“I think it’s really good to get the decision makers in one place,” she said. “We all know that high quality schools are going to make a high quality community.”
Two board members — JoAnn Orischak and John Dowling — voted against establishing the task force, and William Smith abstained from the vote. Smith asked for the task force to focus on the whole county, and Orischak and Dowling cited potential “conflicts of interest” for outside officials.
“I just want to urge caution that sometimes it’s better to talk to an independent demographer than it is to talk to a cheerleader government council that’s comprised of Realtors,” Dowling said.
The only elected official at Bluffton Town Hall who is a real estate agent is mayor Lisa Sulka, who works for Carson Realty. In 2017, she was cleared of a State Ethics Commission investigation instigated by watchdog Skip Hoagland, who accused her of voting in favor of land purchases that financially benefited Carson Realty.
Wisnefski said Wednesday that she intends to talk to Dowling and Orischak about their concerns.
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New schools on the horizon?
Robert Oetting, the school district’s chief operations officer, said Tuesday he’d “really advise” the board to purchase new land in Bluffton to build schools once the land purchased around May River High School is developed.
“We know that the next school we do will probably be on the May River campus,” Oetting said. “There’s room there for two additional schools. But for the most part, that need is coming very quickly, and after we fulfill that need, we don’t have the next item.”
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.
However, the district predicts its reassignment plan will fall apart by 2022, when all the schools in Bluffton are at 100 percent capacity.
“You can’t do any reshuffling at that point,” Gwozdz said Wednesday.
Covert said Wednesday he thinks the board’s task force will bring depth and speed to the discussions due to the inclusion of other elected officials.
“What we don’t want to see is that the school system is constantly having to play catch up, or they’re constantly behind the eight ball,” Covert said. “This is forward-thinking.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 3:56 PM.