At this York County school, a quieter kind of growth could force students to move
For schools, community growth isn’t just a matter of how many new students arrive. It’s where they arrive.
In Clover, a smaller, older elementary school in the district now has more students enrolled than it has capacity. And Superintendent Sheila Quinn with the Clover School District said Bethany Elementary School wasn’t the most likely spot to encounter that problem.
“We would have never thought this maybe five or six or seven years ago, that our Bethany Elementary School zone would be the first place we literally ran out of space,” Quinn said when the school board addressed the issue March 13. “But that has occurred.”
The Fort Mill School District announced enrollment freezes at three schools in February. The York School District repeatedly, though so far unsuccessfully, lobbied for new development impact fees to help fund growing school needs.
Capacity at Bethany is 408 students. It has 430 students.
School districts often use the opening of new schools to re-draw attendance lines. But Clover can’t wait.
The Clover district held a town hall Tuesday for families impacted by a proposed shift of students to Larne Elementary School. The district has a public forum at its March 27 board meeting and a town hall at Larne the following night.
A called board meeting April 10 could finalize a decision in time to let parents know ahead of spring enrollment for the fall.
Quinn said Clover’s recently passed bond referendum makes clear growth is happening. And issues at Bethany may not be isolated.
“We are going to be looking at all of our schools’ enrollments a lot over the next several years,” Quinn said.
Plans for new students
There’s no doubt growth is happening, but it’s a different type of spike in the Clover district.
In Fort Mill, the full opening of Fort Mill Parkway brought with it massive new subdivisions such as Massey, Waterside at the Catawba and the just beginning Elizabeth neighborhood. Each include 1,000 or more planned homes.
Catawba Ridge High School, Forest Creek and Banks Trail middle schools as well as Riverview and River Trail elementary schools all opened along the bypass. Just across U.S. 21, Kings Town Elementary School opened to serve the large Mason’s Bend development. Many of the newest 20 Fort Mill district schools are clustered along Fort Mill Parkway.
In Clover, school sites — high and elementary schools — date back on the Bethany property to the late 19th century. There are new home developments such as Shepherd’s Trace and on Tart Road now, but much of the growth involves privately sold land or subdividing family lots.
In those situations, where homes don’t come with years of notice in a large development, there can be surprises.
“It’s a little more difficult to track growth in Bethany,” district COO Mark Hopkins told the school board. “These happen a lot of times without our knowledge until that student shows up at school.”
In recent years Bethany added 10 to 15 students each summer. There’s ongoing work now to add four classrooms, which will bring capacity to 480 students. That work won’t be done until the middle of next school year at the earliest. Hopkins said it’s never comfortable to switch attendance lines for families, but a solution is necessary.
“We wanted to impact the fewest number of students possible,” Hopkins said.
Bethany to Larne plan
It’s been a half-dozen years since the last time Clover switched lines for capacity reasons. Then, students went from Crowders Creek Elementary School to Bethel Elementary on the Lake Wylie side of the district.
While Bethany is over capacity, Larne has space to spare — its capacity is 710 and it has about 590 students.
The current plan would carve out an area of the Bethany attendance zone east of S.C. 161, and south of Faulkner Road and send it to Larne. The move would impact all or portions of Beamguard, Lawrence, Nell Jane, Brian, Kehl, Pfaff and LH Hicks roads. The exact number of impacted students will be determined by a final decision in early April.
Keeping those areas at Bethany could work with the planned additional classrooms. But it wouldn’t allow for continued growth — something officials expect.
Would a freeze work for Clover, too?
Joe Burke, public information officer for the Fort Mill district, said earlier this month the three attendance zone freezes there would remain through the end of the school year and be addressed again this summer.
In a freeze, new students who typically would enroll at a school based on their address instead attend another district school that has more capacity. The district buses those students to and from schools, if needed. Fort Mill made its decision knowing plans are in place for new elementary and middle schools.
Burke said new schools are the ultimate fix for capacity issues, but a freeze is better than a widespread redistricting as an interim option.
“That would impact thousands of students in the district and would have to done multiple times over the course of several years,” Burke said of redistricting. “The freeze option allows the district to minimize the disruption while managing the growth until new schools come online.”
Plans to add school capacity in Clover continue. A $156 million bond referendum passed last fall to build a second high school. A larger bond failed in 2021 that included the high school and an eighth elementary school. Hopkins said the current decision at Bethany is something the district can do as it anticipates a new elementary school.
“This is a move that can give us the breathing space that we need to get us to that next step,” Hopkins said.
