Beaufort, Jasper Co. schools reconnected with hundreds of students offline in spring
In May, Beaufort County School District reported that it had lost contact with 300-plus students during spring remote learning. But on Thursday, the district reported that fewer than 25 students are still offline.
In Jasper County, which in June had one of the highest percentages of offline students in the state, only 52 students — 1.9% of enrollment — remain unaccounted for.
That’s largely due to a statewide collaboration between school districts, the Department of Education and the Department of Social Services, said Mary Stratos, the district’s chief instructional services officer.
Families who lost contact with the district were reported to DSS, Stratos said, and the department’s employees and local law enforcement officials have been working to contact thousands of students across South Carolina who were offline during the spring school closures.
In June, the DOE reported that 16,085 students had not made contact with their schools since the March 16 closure of school buildings — about 2% of public school enrollment across the state.
According to reporting by The State newspaper in Columbia, the Department of Family Services told lawmakers Wednesday that number is down to 780.
DSS director Michael Leach told legislators on the state Senate’s Reopen South Carolina Children’s Services panel that during the past three weeks, his agency helped locate 2,295 of the remaining 3,234 students who needed to be contacted.
Of the 780 students who remain offline, DSS and local law enforcement agencies are working to locate 371 of those students before classes begin, The State reported. Officials have unsuccessfully tried to contact the families of 409 more students.
In May, Beaufort County School District reported 341 students had not made contact with the district since the March building closures.
Elementary schools across the district had the highest rates of no contact, superintendent Frank Rodriguez said at the time. The district’s Whale Branch cluster had the highest percentage of offline students, at 3%, while the Bluffton cluster had the largest number of offline students, with 167 not contacted.
“Initially, principals made home visits, along with school teams comprised of social workers, counselors, and bilingual liaisons, to make contact with approximately 300 Beaufort County students,” said Lakinsha Swinton, the district’s director of student services. “After these efforts were exhausted, DSS partnered with us to make contact with the remaining 78 students.”
Swinton said Thursday that 23 students remain uncontacted, 18 of which are elementary school students. Swinton added that some families may have relocated “due to loss of housing and/or employment associated with the COVID-19 pandemic economic downturn.”
“We’re hoping to utilize device distribution as another way of giving some sort of update and confirmation,” Stratos told school board members Wednesday.
She added that the district’s social workers are working on a “safety net” plan for students.
“We have not stopped trying to engage and connect with those kids since school ended,” superintendent Frank Rodriguez said. “We have continued our effort to do that, and we have been able to do that in many cases.”
In neighboring Jasper County School District, 297 students — more than 11% the district’s total enrollment of 2,683 — were unaccounted for at the end of the school year. The district had one of the highest rates of offline students in the state.
As of July 24, that number is down to 52 students, about 1.2% of total enrollment.
Jasper County School District spokesman Travis Washington declined to comment Thursday on updated numbers, or on any district collaboration with the DOE’s efforts.
Both Jasper and Beaufort County school districts are beginning classes with remote-only instruction. Jasper County schools began Monday, while Beaufort County will begin Sept. 8.
Both districts received word from the South Carolina Department of Education last week that “unless major health and safety obstacles exist, it will be a requirement” for districts to reopen buildings two weeks after their official start date, per DOE spokesman Ryan Brown.
Previously, districts were required to provide an in-person option by Sept. 14, about four weeks from the original start of classes.
According to an Aug. 17 report from South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control, both counties are currently considered “high-risk” for the spread of coronavirus, though both have seen a significant decrease in new cases in the past two weeks.
The DHEC classification system has three metrics:
Number of new cases in the past two weeks;
Whether new cases have increased, decreased or stayed level over two weeks;
Percent of positives among people tested for COVID-19 in the past two weeks.
Brown said the DOE will use DHEC’s risk-measuring system while evaluating districts’ in-person options, along with other documents.
This story was originally published August 20, 2020 at 3:28 PM.