Voters approved $345M for Beaufort County schools 1 year ago. Where are projects now?

One year after the passage of Beaufort County School District’s $345 million bond referendum, two of its architects — district superintendent Frank Rodriguez and chief operations officer Robert Oetting — stood in brand-new classrooms at May River High School.

“It’s been an exciting year,” said Rodriguez, who joined the district in July 2019 and spent his first months in office conducting community listening tours in support of the referendum.

“Despite the complications caused by the coronavirus, we’ve made solid progress and stayed on track.”

Expansions at May River and neighboring River Ridge Academy were the first major projects of the 2019 referendum, which passed with 70% of the vote after two failed referendums in 2016 and 2018.

According to the district’s Citizen-Led Oversight Committee, referendum projects have stayed on schedule and on budget since their Nov. 5, 2019 approval.

So far, the district has approved $52.7 million in construction and renovation contracts.

Of that, $30.2 million has already been paid, district spokeswoman Candace Bruder said Friday.

Referendum work is expected to wrap up in August 2023, when all six of its major projects are expected to be complete.

In addition to those six projects, nearly every school in the district is getting upgrades to security, painting and HVAC.

Oetting, meanwhile, is holding out hope for more.

While last year’s $345 million referendum was the largest in the district’s history, it represented only part of the $629 million in projects a citizens’ committee identified as needs.

“The goal is to have a referendum in four years,” he said Thursday, with planning discussions beginning in 2022.

What was the 2019 school bond referendum?

The November 2019 referendum was the school district’s first successful referendum since 2008, following failed attempts to pass a bond issue in 2016 and 2018.

Once the referendum passed, the school district began the process of borrowing up to $344.6 million in 25-year bonds to begin paying for the projects, which will be spread out over the “next three to four years,” according to the district.

In South Carolina, school bond referenda are limited to funding capital projects, such as construction and land purchases. They cannot be used to increase staff pay. Salaries and benefits make up the majority of the district’s $254 million annual budget. The district is also bound by state law to use the money from bond referendas only for what’s listed on the ballot.

According to a tax calculator on the Beaufort County School District’s website, a primary resident with a home valued at $200,000 will pay an additional $56 in taxes annually.

Whether that amount would change over the 25-year life of the bonds depends on a number of factors, including future property tax reassessments, other bonds being retired and new industry moving into the county.

A secondary homeowner with a property of the same value will pay an additional $84 annually in taxes.

Bluffton school expansions

Around 1,500 students are enrolled at May River High School, which has capacity for 1,400 students in the building.

The school has mobile classrooms parked on campus to accommodate the overflow and increase capacity to 1,600 students, still 8% above the district’s ideal 85% building capacity.

When the school’s new 400-student capacity wing opens in January, the school will have the same number of classrooms that it does teachers for the first time since its opening in 2016.

Currently, there are 67 classrooms for 90 teachers, principal Todd Bornscheuer said Thursday.

Construction workers for MB Kahn are expected to finish the May River addition by Dec. 15, with the fire marshal inspecting the work Dec. 16. After that, teachers will have winter break to claim and set up their classrooms.

A similar 16-classroom expansion at the K-8 school River Ridge Academy finished last month, and teachers moved into their new classrooms last week, Oetting said.

Even with the expansions, Bluffton’s student population is growing faster than schools. In 2018-19, only two of Bluffton’s six elementary schools were below 90% capacity.

In February, Oetting said that the Bluffton school cluster would need upwards of 100 mobile classrooms in the next five years to house students if the district didn’t approve construction outside of the referendum.

But due to COVID-19, the school’s population projections are less clear than they were a year ago. That could change on Tuesday, when the district will take its annual 45-day attendance count to track school populations and inform future construction decisions.

Future projects

The next major referendum project to wrap after May River will be renovations at Beaufort Elementary School, which began last summer and will end in November 2021.

Renovations at Hilton Head Island Middle School will begin in summer 2021 and wrap up by August 2023.

The district’s school board took a big step on the next two major projects last month, when it voted to approve contracts totaling $99 million for North of the Broad renovations and construction.

The board awarded Kansas City-based JE Dunn Construction a $53 million contract to demolish and rebuild Robert Smalls International Academy, a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school in Beaufort.

According to a Beaufort County School District press release, construction at Robert Smalls will begin in summer 2021, and the new building, located at the site of the current school, will be completed in December 2022.

The school will also get new athletic facilities, slated for completion by August 2023.

Rebuilding Robert Smalls was the highest-ticket item of the 2019 referendum, with a total estimated cost of $71 million to design and carry out the project.

Charleston-based LS3P Associates LTP was selected as the architect for the new building in May, and will hold a second virtual community feedback meeting for the building’s design on Thursday at 7 p.m.

Columbia-based firm M.B. Kahn Construction was awarded a $46 million contract to carry out the “complete renovation” of academic and athletic facilities at Beaufort’s Battery Creek High School.

The renovations at Battery Creek, which will revamp HVAC, bathrooms and hallway lighting and add capacity for career classes, are scheduled for completion by August 2023.