Beaufort County schools to close 6 buildings, renovate 20 this summer with referendum funds
Beaufort County School District will close six school buildings this summer for renovations, officials announced Monday evening.
The six - Beaufort Elementary, Beaufort High, Bluffton Elementary, Lady’s Island Middle, Whale Branch Elementary and Whale Branch Middle - are part of the first wave of summer work from November’s $345-million school bond referendum, which will be executed over the next four to five years.
Though students have been learning remotely from home since mid-March as a result of coronavirus, maintenance staff had been cleaning buildings, and other staff have returned to work while social distancing.
The six closed schools’ operations will be relocated to other schools in the district from now until Aug. 7, district spokesman Jim Foster said in a press release:
Beaufort Elementary operations have been moved to Port Royal Elementary.
Beaufort High operations have been moved to Beaufort Middle.
Bluffton Elementary operations have been moved to Bluffton Early Childhood Center.
Lady’s Island Middle operations have been moved to St. Helena Elementary.
Whale Branch Elementary operations have been moved to Joseph S. Shanklin Elementary.
Whale Branch Middle operations have been moved to Whale Branch Early College High.
Altogether, 20 of the district’s 30 campuses will be renovated this summer, with projects that include safety, technology, playground and athletics renovations.
Four construction companies — Thompson Turner Construction, Contract Construction, H.G. Reynolds Co. Inc. and M.B. Kahn Construction Co. — have been approved by the school board to complete the renovations for a combined maximum price of $51.3 million.
About $40 million of these safety, technology, playground and athletics renovations are funded by the $345-million school bond referendum, which was approved in a landslide by voters in November 2019.
The rest of the projects are “8%” work, funded yearly by allowing the school district to borrow up to 8% of the county’s assessed value for building maintenance.”
Both Robert Oetting, the district’s chief operations officer, and Rob Corbin, a project manager with CBRE Heery who was contracted to oversee the school district’s referendum projects, said combining the 8% and referendum projects timelines means “considerable savings.”
“Some of the general condition cost from having management oversight from a superintendent can be shared and taken advantage of there,” Corbin told members of the district’s Community-Led Oversight Committee Wednesday.
While some of the projects will be completed before school starts, others will roll over to next summer, Oetting said — namely IT projects that are “tracking a little behind schedule.”
“We may do a lot of the infrastructure this summer, but not be able to switch it over to the new technology packages with cameras and everything until next summer,” he said.
Architect selected for Robert Smalls
On May 19, the school board selected an architect to design the new building for Robert Smalls International Academy, jump-starting the single largest project of the district’s November school bond referendum.
The district estimates tearing down the current building for the pre-K-8 Beaufort school and building a new school on the same site will cost a total of $71 million, about 20% of the referendum’s total cost.
Charleston-based LS3P Associates LTP will design the new building, per a May 19 vote by the board.
Oetting, said Monday that the district will seek community input on the new school’s design through early fall of 2020, though the district is determining now “how that’s going to happen in this era of COVID-19.”
He said the district will have bid documents in late spring 2021 and aims to have the initial building done in December 2022, with the school transitioning to the new building “over winter break so we can start tearing down the old building.”
Once the old building is torn down and athletic fields are renovated at the school site, the project should finish in July 2023, Oetting said.
The school board also approved West Columbia-based Jumper Carter Sease Architects to design renovations at Battery Creek High School.
The Battery Creek renovations, which will revamp HVAC, bathrooms and hallway lighting and add capacity for career classes, are expected to be completed by the start of the 2023-24 school year, Oetting said.
Update: This story has been updated to amend the location of Whale Branch Elementary’s summer operations, per a Wednesday district announcement.
This story was originally published June 9, 2020 at 3:05 PM.