1,000+ students left Beaufort Co. schools during COVID. Here’s what their parents said
Two weeks after Beaufort County’s school board sent a survey to the parents whose children left the school district during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s learning why they left. One-third of those who responded said their child needed face-to-face instruction five days a week. Another 21% worried about exposure to the virus. Seventy-five percent said they didn’t plan for their child to return for the coming school year.
Beaufort County School District saw a 1,173-student drop in enrollment this year, its first decrease since at least 2012-13.
The district’s total enrollment sits at 21,299 students, a 5.2% decrease from the previous year. It’s the lowest the count has beensince the 2013-14 school year, according to historical data from South Carolina’s Department of Education.
Elementary schools were hit the hardest. The district saw a 9.2% drop in elementary enrollment.
Pre-kindergarten and kindergarten aren’t mandatory in South Carolina; according to data from the DOE, the district had a 151-student drop in kindergarten attendance between last year and this year and a 192-student drop in pre-kindergarten enrollment.
Middle schools saw a slight decrease in enrollment, and high schools saw a slight increase, planning coordinator Carol Crutchfield said.
On Feb. 16, the district sent a survey to more than 2,000 email addresses associated with the parents of students who left, according to district spokesperson Candace Bruder and Crutchfield. Parents can still take the survey — there’s no planned date to close it, Bruder said.
As of Thursday, they’d received 316 responses from the parents of 487 students, which Crutchfield presented to the school board’s ad hoc Bluffton growth committee.
Parents were asked why they left Beaufort County schools, with the option to select more than one response:
111 said “our family needed a five-day face-to-face school.” (The district began the school year completely virtual on Sept. 8, and returned to hybrid classes on Oct. 5.)
66 said “our family was concerned about exposure to COVID-19.”
61 said “our family no longer lives in Beaufort County.”
146 said “other” and left written responses, which were not included in the presentation.
Crutchfield said the “other” responses were a “hodgepodge” that included personal hardships, concerns about mask-wearing and elaboration on the multiple choice responses.
Parents were also asked whether they planned to return to the district for the 2021-22 school year. Of the 316 responses, 229, or 72.5%, said no; 87, or 27.5%, said yes.
Robert Oetting, the district’s chief of operations, said that it was likely that more people would return than the survey indicated.
Superintendent Frank Rodriguez said the schools “are hopeful that we will see a good percentage of kids coming back this year, and then we’re hopeful that we’ll see it in subsequent years.” But full recovery, he said Thursday, “is over a couple of years, probably.”
Crutchfield added that the district normally sees a lot of families move during the school year due to the county’s military presence, but it hasn’t surveyed departing families before. Because of that, it’s difficult to know how much of this is normal and how much is pandemic-motivated, she said.
“We already know Beaufort County is a transient population,” she said. “Students leave and come all the time. And we haven’t really looked at what a typical loss is in a year.”
The enrollment total, which is typically calculated by taking attendance on the 45th and 135th days of the school year, has a huge impact on a school district’s budget and planning.
It’s used by the DOE to determine how much money the district gets from South Carolina’s Education Finance Act, and to project population growth for schools, which can lead to school expansions, mobile classrooms or building new schools.
Beaufort County’s 5.2% enrollment drop is higher than other S.C. school districts. Crutchfield said in December that Greenville County saw a decrease of about 2,000 students (2.5% of last year’s enrollment), Charleston County dropped 1,500 students (3%), and Horry County’s decreased about 1,250 (2.7%).
Richard Geier, a member of the ad hoc Bluffton growth committee, said he wanted to reach out to Realtors and to pre-kindergarten programs around the state to get a better handle on the enrollment decrease.
“Everything is so soft now that we’re not going to have hard data to make recommendations to the board until probably 45 days after the start of next school year,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that we should just sit around and not do anything.”