Why kids in this new Bluffton development likely won’t go to school across the street
It is part of the new American dream. Buy a house in a nice development and send your children across the street to the neighborhood elementary school.
It is a dream until it doesn’t happen.
Student overcrowding will likely prevent children in a new Bluffton community from attending the elementary school less than a mile away.
New Riverside Village, planned at the southeast corner of New Riverside Road and S.C. 46, is expected to have 174 residential units. Its website advertises that children can attend Pritchardville Elementary, a three minute drive across May River Road. While this would normally be the case, Pritchardville Elementary is over capacity. Students living at New Riverside Village will likely be bused about seven miles away to Bluffton Elementary, according to preliminary conversations by the school board.
“It’s putting us in a tough situation,” Board Member Rachel Wisnefski said at the meeting Tuesday night. “When these people move into these homes they get this expectation that they’re going to be zoned for that school. That’s not our policy.”
The discussion will go back to the board operations committee and then be voted on in a future board meeting, though they didn’t say when. Currently, five neighborhoods in the school’s normal attendance zone have students bused to Bluffton Elementary School.
There shouldn’t be an issue with students in New Riverside Village attending their normally zoned middle and high school: H.E. McCracken Middle School and May River High School, according to Chief Operations Officer Robert Oetting.
Construction for New Riverside Village began in 2021, but there isn’t any indication of when residents will move into the townhouses.
.png "Screenshot (165).png")
New Riverside Village representatives didn’t immediately respond to phone calls for comment.
Overcapacity
From 2010 until the last U.S. Census report in 2021, Bluffton’s population has increased by over 150% from 12,530 to 31,191, and the district is reacting to the population growth. In the Bluffton area, Pritchardville Elementary opened in 2010 and River Ridge Academy opened in 2015.
“(Busing the students) is not something we’d like to do because (the development) is so close to Pritchardville,” Oetting said. “But we need to do something to give some relief to Pritchardville from the overcrowding.”
Pritchardville Elementary School is currently at 126% building capacity without considering its mobile units, and 87% building capacity considering mobiles. For program capacity, which considers curriculum and program offerings, it’s at 161% capacity.
Bluffton Elementary, where the students will be bused to, is at 77.4% building capacity and 84% program capacity.
Students who already attend Pritchardville Elementary shouldn’t be worried about getting re-zoned, according to Oetting. He said the school board can only change attendance zones for areas without people already living in them.
“If there are residents living there then it’s off the table at that point,” he said.
Another option instead of busing students would be to add more mobile classrooms. The school has fourth and fifth-grade mobile buildings, installed in 2018 and 2022. The fourth grade building has six classrooms and the fifth grade building has eight classrooms.
According to Oetting, it would be more expensive to add mobiles than to bus the students to Bluffton Elementary, especially because there are already similar bus routes servicing nearby communities. He also said that Pritchardville Elementary doesn’t have much more room for mobile classrooms.
Typically the school district finds out about new buildings and potential student influxes from zoning notifications developers submit to the town or the county, according to Oetting.
He said they’ve tried to reach out to New Riverside Village multiple times to understand when they can expect students from the development to be in schools, but haven’t received any response.
“We need to talk to them about removing or putting an asterisk on their advertising pamphlets where they list the schools they’ll be going to because that’s not for certain,” Oetting said.
