Beaufort County schools’ enrollment fell dramatically last year. Is this fall different?
Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect Superintendent Frank Rodriguez’s remarks on the first day of school that 500 more students were enrolled in classes than the previous fall.
Beaufort County School District hasn’t bounced back from last year’s historic drop in enrollment, gaining just 65 students back from a 1,173-student decrease, new data shows.
The school district, along with others across the state, measures attendance on the 45th and 135th days of school to calculate its average daily membership.
The South Carolina Department of Education uses those numbers to determine 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 entirely new schools.
It’s unclear what Beaufort County’s disappointing enrollment numbers will mean for its budget.
This school year, the district counted 21,294 students at the 45-day mark.
Last fall, the district counted 21,229 students on the 45th day of school. That was a 1,173-student decrease, or 5.2% of total enrollment, from the 2019-20 count. It was the district’s first decrease in enrollment in at least eight years, dropping the student population to the lowest it’s been since the 2013-14 school year.
Beaufort County’s drop in enrollment last year was twice as bad as the state on average. On the whole, South Carolina public schools saw a 2.6% decrease — a loss of 20,250 students — between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 45-day count.
Some of those losses were from families who opted out of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, which is optional in South Carolina. Others were from families who wanted to start the school year with full-time, in-person classes, which weren’t available until the spring semester. And others moved during the pandemic because of rising rents and job market turmoil.
This year’s numbers are far from Superintendent Frank Rodriguez’s prediction on the first day of school, when he said that the district was “looking at about 500 kids on the plus end” up from last fall.
District spokesperson Candace Bruder said Wednesday that “enrollment on the first day of school reflects the number of registered students,” but some registered students are no-shows. Schools will contact families before disenrolling them.
“As part of this process, it is not uncommon to find out families have moved to another county or state,” she said. “... This is a normal occurrence in schools and districts across the county each year. It’s why 45 day numbers are typically reported, instead of first day numbers.”
She added that seeing a decrease of this size from the first to 45th day is “normal ever since the chronic absenteeism law,” which prevents schools from disenrolling students before the 10th day of school.
Last year’s record lows
It’s unclear how these new numbers measure up to other large districts across the state, which saw enrollment drops last year that were slightly smaller than Beaufort County’s.
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%).
Last year in Beaufort County, most of the students who left were in elementary schools. Those schools 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.
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, returned to hybrid classes on Oct. 5 and offered 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.
This story was originally published November 10, 2021 at 3:06 PM.