Last year, Beaufort Co. schools lost 1,100 students. What first-day attendance looked like
Beaufort County School District appears on track to recover about half of the enrollment it lost during last year’s pandemic schooling.
Superintendent Frank Rodriguez said Monday that roughly 500 more students across the district showed up for the first day of school than they had at last year’s 45-day enrollment count.
Those numbers aren’t official yet — South Carolina’s Department of Education doesn’t take an official enrollment count until the 45th and 135th days of school. It uses those days to calculate a school district’s average daily membership, which determines how much money the district gets from the state’s Education Finance Act.
Average daily membership is also used to project population growth for schools, which can lead to school expansions, mobile classrooms or building new schools.
Last year, the district’s 45-day attendance total was 21,229 students, a 1,173-student decrease — 5.2% — from the 2019-20 count.
It’s the lowest the count has been in the district since the 2013-14 school year, according to historical data from the DOE.
Beaufort County’s 5.2% enrollment drop was higher than other S.C. school districts. District Planning Coordinator Carol 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%).
Most of the students who left were from elementary schools, which reported about a 9.3% decrease in enrollment on average, Crutchfield said at the time.
That percentage was significantly higher at Bluffton’s Red Cedar Elementary School, which saw an 18.3% drop in enrollment. Crutchfield said this was partly due to a rent hike at the Onyx Luxury Apartments, which is a feeder community for the school. Several families left the apartment complex after the price went up.
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 2019-20 and 2020-21 and a 192-student drop in pre-kindergarten enrollment.
A February survey of parents who took their children out of Beaufort County schools got hundreds of responses. In a presentation to the school board’s ad hoc Bluffton growth committee, Crutchfield referenced 316 responses from the parents of 487 students.
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, returning to hybrid classes on Oct. 5 and offering full-time, face-to-face options in January.)
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.
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.