E.L. “Ned” Nelson stands on a dirt access road in a tract of oak and pine in rural Calhoun County. There’s not much here, only a few paved roads that cut around a pie-shaped piece of land near the Congaree River, some houses and a plant that manufactures synthetic sausage casings.
Not the kind of spot where you’d expect someone to build a school.
Nelson, though, an elementary school principal, can see it. He’ll start with seven portables next year in a clearing. By the year 2000 there’ll be a permanent building.
“Our permanent campus will be somewhere off to the left a little bit,” says Nelson, pointing through the trees. “Everything’s in my mind right now.”
But it will be more than just another school, he believes. It will be the heart of Sandy Run.
Nelson and others in this northern piece of Calhoun County believe a new school will drive a future wave of growth for Sandy Run. They also see it as the cornerstone of a vibrant community. But they also concede they’re not quite sure that, if they build it, enough children will come.
Two generations have passed since anyone went to a permanent school in Sandy Run. A one-room schoolhouse closed in the 1950s. Twenty years later, integration prompted many parents to pull their children out of Calhoun County public schools. They chose private school or crossed the line into Lexington County, rather than have their children bused 15 miles or more to mostly black schools in St. Matthews.
Things changed three years ago when Nelson arranged to have two portable classrooms placed on the same piece of land where the old schoolhouse stood; there he started a satellite of Bethlehem Elementary, the public grade school he runs in St. Matthews.
Twenty Sandy Run children showed up for class the first year. Last year another portable was added and 19 more children, 4- and 5-year-olds, showed. This year 62 children came to Sandy Run Elementary.
The interest was strong enough that the Calhoun County Council agreed in December to spend the money for a new school for Sandy Run. No one has a precise dollar figure, but new elementary schools cost about $4 million to build.
Now the question is, will they come?
Districts build schools typically to absorb a rapid influx of students, or to replace buildings that are falling down. Sandy Run has neither.
The county is building, instead, on the belief that growth will come to Sandy Run, and on the hope that the parents will bring their children back to public school in Calhoun County, something even Nelson acknowledges is a leap of faith.
“I’m sticking my neck out a little bit,” says Nelson. “I don’t know if we’ll have 100 or 200 or 250 (pupils). In three years we’ve documented we can fill up four classes.
“We think we can get the numbers. If we don’t go the way we think, I’m going to look like a fool. If it’s true, everybody wins.”
Nelson says that getting Sandy Run parents to move their children out of Lexington schools or out of private schools won’t be easy. But he does have a good track record so far at the Sandy Run school.
He’s been able to add students and teachers each of the three years since he started.
Parents have overcome their initial wariness of the experiment and of putting their kids in portable classrooms. Nelson has also had very good success with test grades and first-grade readiness scores at Bethlehem Elementary, where nearly all the students come from low-income families.
“In the beginning I was very apprehensive,” says Delphine Mills. Her 5-year-old daughter Ediesha has been at the Sandy Run school for two years. Mills and her husband took a chance on the school rather than having her go by bus 15 miles to Bethlehem.
Mills is very happy with her daughter’s progress; Ediesha enjoys school and is doing well at Sandy Run. Mills is also happy because the school is racially mixed, about 68 percent white, 22 percent black. It tracks the region’s mix closely.
“When she comes home she doesn’t talk about one particular person. Everybody’s her friend and she gets along with everybody. It’s a good lesson.”
But while she’s a convincing saleswoman for the school, Mills acknowledges some neighbors remain “apprehensive.” People like the idea, but many aren’t convinced it’s worth uprooting a child from a school he or she likes.
Nelson for years had seen Sandy Run residents asking the school board for transfers to Swansea, Gaston or Cayce. The district, he says, estimates that as many as 100 students now in the Sandy Run area are in Lexington schools or in private school.
“People in this area felt like they didn’t have an ownership in their schools,” he says. Sandy Run residents were becoming more focused on Columbia and the metropolitan area, not St. Matthews.
Jane Porter was one of the earliest converts. Her son, Chad, was among the first class at Sandy Run Elementary. Her other son, Wade, is in kindergarten there now.
Without the Sandy Run school, her children probably would have gone to Lexington County schools, she says.
“We were real optimistic, and a lot of people in the area were not,” she says. The idea of school being so close, and the quality of the teachers Nelson brought to Sandy Run, convinced her. She hasn’t been disappointed.
She and others, though, also agree that it would be a hard decision to pull children from a school they like.
Tammie Outlaw understands that. Her children, Matthew and Ashley, go to Pair Elementary School in Cayce. She had been hearing about a school for Sandy Run for years, but when it came time for her children to go to school, the school wasn’t there. She doesn’t want to uproot them from Pair.
“They’re pretty content where they are. They’re doing well. The earliest I’d move is to change them from grammar to middle school,” she says.
If middle school is an option at Sandy Run when her children are ready, Outlaw says she would definitely consider it. Nelson and others at Sandy Run hope eventually to keep building on grades and classrooms until they’ve created a K-12 school. But that may not happen without enough elementary school students.
Nelson and others are confident they can make it happen. Taxpayers won’t be overly burdened. Council Chairman David Summers says the debt for the new school can be structured to come on as old school debt is paid off. New industry particularly an expansion at the Carolina Eastman plant, the county’s largest taxpayer will bring in more tax revenue.
School leaders have calmed fears that the new Sandy Run school will drain off middle-income students and high-quality teachers from Bethlehem Elementary in St. Matthews. A 1989 plan for a school at Sandy Run called for a building in 1995 and the eventual closing of Bethlehem, says Nelson. That caused a lot of dissension, but district officials have said Bethlehem will not close.
Superintendent Roy Holloway says the number of elementary school students could jump to 250 once the children are moved out of the portable and into the new site. There’s also another incentive: Calhoun County residents have to pay fees if they want to keep their children in Swansea or Gaston schools.
“Now people see we’re serious about it,” Summers says of the permanent Sandy Run school. “The property has been purchased, and they (parents) know it’s getting ready to happen.”
What happens if it doesn’t work isn’t clear. A building will be built that’s almost for sure. It’s an expensive bet to make.
“So much of what we’ve done here, we’ve done on faith,” says Nelson. But it’s something that needs to be tried. “We’ve lost really two generations” of public school students in Sandy Run. “We’re going to build it and hope they come.”
