The SDOC Long Range Building Plan has received public comments at the last few school board meetings. I was one of the commenters at the meeting on 9/11. The focus of most of those comments and a couple recent news articles has been the proposed consolidation of Keowee and Tamassee-Salem elementary schools. However, in my public comments I tried to get the school board to look more broadly at the practice of closing schools as they age and rebuilding in new locations, as well as the issue of larger versus smaller schools. Here I have organized my thoughts on those issues further.
Responsibility to Maintain
There is a certain responsibility that comes with building a large structure like a school, hospital, stadium or the like. As they age they cannot simply be discarded like an old article of clothing. There have been a number of glaring problems over the years in Oconee County resulting from such "throw-away" thinking with older facilities:
The old Oconee County Courthouse was back in the news recently. County Council has been trying to offload that structure to private developers for years. Nothing panned out, and now it is reported that the building has reached the point that trees are growing inside it and material from it is breaking off during high winds and hitting nearby parked cars.
The site of the former Kellett Elementary School has now finally been cleared, but for years there were news articles about proposed uses of the old building which were not deemed suitable and then about its deterioration and resulting problems.
In some cases former school facilities have successfully transitioned to other uses and continued to be assets to the community. In at least two other cases though, the former Salem Middle/High School and Code Elementary School in Seneca, even with some continued use, they might be considered more like liabilities than assets.
Once large facilities are built, we should do everything possible to keep them going. Just walking away and leaving them empty, or transferring them to some smaller organization, often causes problems.
Advantages of Smaller, More Numerous Facilities
There are advantages to smaller, more numerous schools generally, not just because parents think their particular relatively small school is great. A small school, closer to the homes it serves, has advantages in terms of parental involvement, school staff being able to get to know every student, parent-teacher interaction, etc. and these factors benefit academic performance, behavior issues, etc. Much of this is simple common sense, but I have discovered recently there is a great deal of research on this subject which bears it out. The studies show for instance a considerably higher rate of violence in large schools versus small schools.
Schools further away lead to longer bus rides and more kids riding buses because they can no longer walk or their parents can no longer just drive them around the corner to the neighborhood school. People's time has value. Bigger schools are likely to have longer wait times in drop-off and pick-up car lines. Other people just trying to drive past the school wait longer in traffic.
Another advantage, one that is a little less obvious, of smaller, more numerous schools is flexibility in assigning students to schools, for both the district and for parents (school choice). When you have large, widely separated schools at near capacity, and one is aging and needs major updates, the tendency in our school district has been to build a whole new school. When you have smaller, more numerous schools, some of which have a little extra space, it becomes more feasible to temporarily shift students around to allow maintenance rather than replacement.
Cost Considerations
One rationale given for consolidations past and present is cost efficiency. Yes, smaller schools likely lead to cases of smaller class size, which adds to staff costs. On the other hand it is generally more cost effective to maintain buildings than to build brand new ones. In the private sector, you don't often see buildings totally demolished and cleared away. It just makes more economic sense to maintain them over time, with major renovation if needed. For example, there is a very large home currently on the market in downtown Seneca for $1.2 million after a major renovation. The listing says circa 1900.
The cost of new school facilities can be hard to fathom for most people. Most of us don't ordinarily deal in figures in the millions. A thought experiment I did back at the time the new Walhalla High School was being built, ten years ago or so, might help with perspective. As I recall the bill for that one was $54.5 million. I think about $35 million of that was the main building, the rest land, ball fields, etc. Enrollment there is about 1150 students. Consider just the $35 million building. Most of us don't really have a good idea what you can build for $35 million, but might have a rough idea of what kind of house you can build for $1 million. Remember this was 2013; at that time $1 million would buy a lot of house. Particularly if it's not on the lake, and we're not putting schools on expensive lakefront property. So 2013, $1 million, inexpensive land, probably means a 6000+ square foot home, lots of bedrooms, bathrooms, perhaps a pool, etc, etc. You could build (or buy) 35 of those for that $35 million. This is not meant to be a realistic option, but suppose you built 35 small schools with that money, $1 million each; how many students would need to be taught in each one of those? Well, 1150 divided by 35 is about 33 students. So you would be teaching 33 students in a building comparable in space to a 6000+ square foot home. How luxurious would that be? Again, going that small is not realistic, but I think it brings home how much we are spending per student on buildings when we keep building brand new ones.
Summarizing, the smaller school model will likely cost more for staff, but less on building infrastructure when connected with a "maintain rather than build new" model, which is also more responsible, causing fewer problems with abandoned sites.
Logistics of Maintenance
Now we come to the problem of logistics. The following discussion focuses on how to deal with Keowee Elementary because that comes first in the Long Range Building Plan, but the ideas apply more generally. Steve Hanvey has been quoted in the paper as saying "Keowee is definitely going to need a new school," and "We don't have a facility where we could bus 365 kids while we built a school on that site, if we tore down that building." I question that line of thinking, that a whole new school must be built in a new location, for the following reason. If you look at more urban school districts, they don't have the option of just abandoning an existing school site and building a new one some place else. There simply is no alternative site available. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. The three public schools I attended there, 50 to 60 years ago, are all still operating in the same locations, the same building footprints in fact, where they stood at that time 50 to 60 years ago. So they do it other places. They have to. So one input I have is that we should be looking at how they do it in other places. School board members and staff could call their counterparts in Greenville, Columbia, or Atlanta and ask them how they manage maintenance of older schools. It could be that they do most large maintenance projects during the summers. Perhaps small annexes are built so that there is enough classroom space to handle all the students while one portion, then another, of the existing building is closed off and updated. Sometimes these take the form of "portables," modular building structures. I'm not an expert on any of this, but it doesn't take an expert to see that the paradigm we're following here is not the way things are done in many other places.
That's my preferred solution for Keowee Elementary: figure out how to do the maintenance needed there while keeping it open. Here's a fallback though, in case that just seems to be too difficult to work out. Go back to the statement "We don't have a facility where we could bus 365 kids while ..." Imagine Keowee disappeared immediately and you redrew the elementary attendance zones. The 365 kids currently at Keowee would not all go to just one "facility." Those in the direction of Tamassee-Salem would go there, those closer to Walhalla would go there, etc. Perhaps the spare capacity still doesn't add up to 365. Surely there is some spare capacity among the neighboring elementary schools though. Let's suppose that the total of those spare capacities is 150. In that case you could build a relatively small new school with a capacity around 250, perhaps somewhere midway between the three just mentioned (T-S, K, and W). Close Keowee temporarily for renovation, and reassign its students to the newly built school and the existing nearby schools. When renovation is complete, reassign students to the existing schools including Keowee in the natural way, so that most kids are traveling shorter distances to their nearby school. You have spare capacity in the elementary schools across this part of the county, flexibility that could be helpful when another of those schools needs updates.
The fallback solution just outlined moves the district further toward the smaller schools model. The reason maintenance-while-staying-open is the preferred solution in this case is that as Mr Hanvey has pointed out, both Tamassee-Salem and Keowee are already below average enrollment for the district. I haven't studied other parts of the long range plan in as much detail, but if a school slated for a complete rebuild later in the plan has above average enrollment, then something like the fallback solution described above might be preferable for that case; i.e. instead of planning to build a large complete replacement school, build a smaller additional school, and then renovate the existing school, in sections if needed logistically.