Fort Mill freezes enrollment at two schools. See where new students will go instead.

Starting Sept. 1, two more Fort Mill school district facilities will have an attendance freeze.

The district announced Wednesday that enrollment at Tega Cay Elementary School and Banks Trail Middle school will be frozen.

The move is due to increased student enrollment figures. The announcement comes a day after school board member Patrick White posted on Facebook that total student enrollment just topped 16,000.

According to the district website, Doby’s Bridge Elementary School already is under a freeze for this school year. Gold Hill Elementary School is scheduled to be frozen Sept. 1, too.

For the freezes starting that date, any new student who isn’t enrolled at the schools by Aug. 31 will be enrolled at a different school. The plan was to send additional Gold Hill Elementary students to Tega Cay. Now new Tega Cay students will go to Pleasant Knoll Elementary School.

New students who ordinarily would go to Banks Trail would go to Fort Mill Middle School.

Students are going from Doby’s Bridge to Springfield Elementary School on that freeze.

Students who ride the bus to a frozen school still will do so, with the district shuttling those students to and from the school they’ll attend daily.

“These freezes will be in place for the current school year,” said Joe Burke, district spokesperson. “As with the freezes last year we will reassess them prior to the next school year and offer students the option to return to their zoned school based upon enrollment date and space availability.”

Enrollment in Fort Mill schools has been on the upward trend for decades. It’s getting faster in recent years. Enrollment last school year was 15,165. In the past three school years the number of students increased between 6.71 and 7.4 percent.

In the past decade, heading into this school year, enrollment is up 71 percent. An enrollment of 16,000 would be three times the number of students served by the district as recently as 2006-07.

“The enrollment freeze was enacted due to the growing student population numbers caused by new growth and development in the area,” Burke said. “This action was taken to allow class sizes to remain at acceptable levels and not overload the building capacity.”

This story was originally published August 29, 2018 at 1:25 PM.