Cockroaches, mold and sewage: SC rural schools are falling apart

Children attend schools in deteriorating conditions in many of South Carolina’s rural areas. Unable to pay for the overwhelming costs of fixing the problems, districts often resort to patch work in the hopes their buildings can last a little longer.

Chester County knows this situation well.

Rev. Angela Boyd remembers the wafts of sticky tar. More than three decades ago, when she walked around the Chester Senior High School campus as a student, the smell was a sign — of roof work.

The school’s flat roof, a design prone to water damage, got some attention. But Boyd remembers seeing other parts of the campus needing improvements. Built in 1974, the building already showed some age by the 1980s. Some concerned aesthetics, from worn-down hallway carpets to walls needing new coats of paint. Other issues, such as the large cockroaches occasionally scuttling by, were of the ickier sort.

Boyd has changed plenty since she graduated high school in 1987. She became a teacher at the Career Center next door. She had three children and sent them to Chester’s schools.

In that same time, Chester High and many other schools in the rural, lower-income Piedmont region district saw few updates. Issues persisted.

When Boyd’s children started high school in the 2010s, the building’s conditions had deteriorated further.

Today, years of rain pounding the flat roof have left water damage. Ceiling tiles — some falling out of place — show evidence of leaks in classrooms and the cafeteria. Sandbags get stacked outside the doors to prevent water from pooling into the gym during storms. Occasionally, the sewer system backs up with rain, too; odors emerge from sinks in a science lab. The heating, venting and air conditioning system, at 20 years old, has reached its expected lifespan.

Yet attempts by district leaders to overhaul some of Chester's neediest school buildings have largely stalled.

Districts across the country typically pay for construction projects by borrowing money via bonds. Voters have the opportunity to approve or reject the increases that they would see added to their property taxes.

For Chester County residents, though, fixing and building new schools presents a difficult choice. Researchers have found that high-quality school buildings improve attendance and academic performance. But approving bonds would load residents with more taxes, which some feel they can’t afford.

Residents of Chester County aren’t the only ones who struggle with such a dilemma. Over the past decade, bond referenda have tended to fail in smaller districts across South Carolina, according to a Post and Courier analysis. Many of these areas simply don’t have the tax base to support the cost of paying off a bond.

To make matters worse, school districts across South Carolina receive almost no help from the state to pay for work need to fix or replace dilapidated schools. Between 2009 and 2019, districts covered 99 percent of those costs, according to the 2021 State of Our Schools Report. State leaders have yet to produce a sustainable and equitable solution to address all school project needs in South Carolina.

These factors have coalesced into a perfect storm for many schools in rural areas.

Since 2018, Chester County residents have rejected three bond referenda. But as the community continues to defer renovation and construction plans, the bill grows higher.

As more time passes and the fundraising burden continues to lie with districts, Chester County’s school buildings — and students’ educations — will only continue to deteriorate.

Cracks, leaks and outdated technology

Like many rural areas, echoes linger of Chester County's role in a once-booming region.

For much of the 20th century, textile mills dominated the local economy. The industry began leaving, starting in the 1980s and taking one of its last gasps in the early 2000s when Spring Industries shuttered its Eureka Plant.

In historic downtown Chester, a city about 30 minutes south of Rock Hill and an hour north of Columbia, the fading paint of a Coca-Cola sign remains on the side of a brick building. It still advertises the drink’s cost as just 5 cents. One of Chester’s claims to fame, the rock that former U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr is said to have jumped on in 1806 while being transported for his federal trial for treason, sits along a main street sidewalk.

Many buildings on the Hill, or city center, stand empty. Most have boards or paper covering the windows of their Victorian facades. A peek inside reveals dusty ladders, overturned tables and boxes swollen with papers, evidence of moves half completed.

Small businesses, from thrift stores and antique shops to a wine business and sporting goods store, dot the town’s main street. Diners flow in and out of Gene’s Restaurant, a local meat-and-three stalwart with a rotating menu filled with offerings like chicken pot pie, meatloaf, and macaroni and cheese.

Chester County is on the smaller side, home to about 32,000 of South Carolina's 5.2 million residents. The local school district served around 4,800 students last year. Nearly a fifth of residents live in poverty, a slightly higher rate than the rest of the state, according to the Census Bureau. Manufacturing now leads as the dominant industry.

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Resources are tight in the county — something that’s evident in many of the school district’s classrooms, and something that Boyd saw up close as a teacher.

Boyd returned to Chester after graduating in 1995 from Winthrop University with a master’s degree in education. She landed a position teaching business classes at the district’s Career Center, next door to Chester High.

Boyd loved teaching, especially working alongside the educators who taught her when she was a student. She had a good rapport with her students. She liked that she was tasked with preparing them to enter the workforce with hands-on experience.

But she felt that wasn’t always possible during her dozen years at the Career Center.

Ceilings had leaks. The walls and building foundation had growing cracks. And then there was the building’s technology, which presented the biggest and most pressing issue for Boyd.

The center, built in 1968, had been retrofitted for computers and other equipment. Boyd needed that technology; she taught classes on business applications, introduction to computers and keyboarding. But as computers continued to advance in the late 1990s and early 2000s, equipment in the center increasingly faltered with the building’s old wiring system, she said.

Servers crashed. Devices overheated. Sometimes the computers would work during the morning period and not during the next class, or vice versa. She had to often rely on worksheets or textbooks to fill her class periods.

Boyd left teaching in 2008. The Career Center has changed little since then. The building still leaks, and the cracks in the foundation continue to grow. The center’s welding booths are hand-me-downs from a nearby school district.

Other schools in Chester County also struggle.

At Great Falls High, dry rot has eaten away at one corner of the wood floor in a weight room.

At Lewisville High, outside portable classrooms lack bathrooms and can be only accessed by stairs — making them difficult to use for students with disabilities.

At Chester High, many classrooms lack windows — cultivating a less-than-inspiring environment for student learning. Pete Stone, a 1999 graduate, described the classrooms in one word: depressing.

Stone now is an English and public speaking teacher at Lewisville High. He sees the district’s buildings deterring both teachers and students when surrounding counties have newer schools. How do you compete when some schools, as he described, have college-like campuses?

“No one really wants to live here to send their kids to these schools when you can go to small colleges in York County 30 minutes down the road,” Stone said.

Boyd understands that frustration. Her three children saw the disparities traveling to other schools for band.

For Boyd, what needed to be done was clear — the district’s high schools needed new facilities, even if that meant raising taxes. She saw it as a necessary investment in the area’s education system.

“We need to come into the 21st century,” she said.

But for others in the community, the district’s attempts to raise funds through bonds stirred up resentment.

Rejected again

In the months leading up to the bond referendum vote on May 14, 2022, Chester school officials went on tour, presenting their plans to residents in the area’s high schools and community centers. The fractures in the community became apparent quickly.

District leaders explained the need for construction and showed images of other schools in comparison. They walked through the building plans. The bond, if passed, would fund nine projects: two new high schools, a new Career Center, additions and renovations to two elementary schools and one high school, and new construction and upgrades to athletic facilities.

All for the cost of $263 million.

The leaders broke down how that cost would hit residents. For a home valued at $100,000, the estimated annual tax increase would be $406. For a vehicle valued at $10,000, the tax increase was estimated to be $60.90 a year. They tried to assure residents that those tax increases would amount to just a dollar or so a day.

Tensions ran high.

Some residents struggled with the idea of increased taxes, especially as the plans brought forward by the school district grew in cost each time.

With the first referendum brought in 2018, the district proposed a $38 million plan centered on replacing the Career Center. Two years later, in 2020, the next bond referendum grew much bigger in scope. The plan brought forward would have built a new Career Center, a new Chester High, a new performing arts center and updates to the area’s other two high schools for the cost of $116.5 million.

Now district leaders had suggested a plan more than double that cost.

During several community meetings leading up to the 2022 vote, some attendees suggested the district should save money by renovating the high schools instead of building new ones.

One person at the meeting held at Lewisville High said comparing Chester schools to those in surrounding communities wasn’t fair. People in those areas have higher incomes.

Superintendent Antwon Sutton, who led the meetings and handled most of the public questions, appeared sympathetic to concerns about cost. But he and the other district leaders stood firm. Their high schools hadn’t been updated in 50 years. They needed to be replaced.

Plus, with renovation cost being just slightly less than those of new construction, the district felt new schools offered the best long-term value.

Breaking the plan up to reduce costs was also difficult, Sutton said.

“You start cutting things from the plan, then you lose the entire community of voters,” he said. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

For other residents, trust emerged as an issue.

Many in Chester County already lack faith in the local government after years of mismanagement and corruption. A former councilman, suspended over past felonies, continued to help himself to taxpayer funds. Local law enforcement officials have been sentenced to prison for abuses of power. A former county supervisor sold meth out of his car. The corruption in Chester County echoes the issues many areas see when newspapers dry up and fewer reporters, if any, are around to report on crimes and inefficiencies.

That corruption begets distrust. During another community meeting before the 2022 vote, one resident shared concerns that passing the bond would hand the district a blank check.

Some felt betrayed that after the second bond failed in 2020, officials went ahead and used district savings to buy the property where they wanted to build a new Career Center.

Many residents didn’t hide their frustration. At the final meeting in late April 2022, Sutton tried clarifying the questions and claims circulating about the bond referendum. Multiple attendees interrupted to criticize the plans and officials.

You need to listen to your constituents, one man told district leaders.

“If we say no, we mean no,” another woman said.

One woman walked out halfway through the meeting. “My vote is no,” she said as she got up from her seat.

Two weeks later, votes rolled in for the district’s third referendum in four years. About 3,500 people voted against the $263 million bond referendum, with just under 1,800 supporting it.

Compounding pressures

That a rural school district such as the one in Chester County struggles with declining building conditions doesn’t surprise Mary Filardo. She has been steeped in the world of finance and school buildings for roughly four decades. As executive director and founder of 21st Century School Fund, a national nonprofit that advocates for improving public school facilities, Filardo has seen districts across the country struggle to pay for construction.

At the crux of the issue is that most school districts across the country bear the burden of finding the funds for building projects.

In fact, between fiscal years 2009 and 2019, school districts on average paid 77 percent of the costs for school facility construction and renovation, with states covering 22 percent, according to the 2021 State of Our Schools Report.

Filardo’s 21st Century School Fund jointly published the report with several other building organizations to highlight the conditions of the country’s educational facilities and the inequities surrounding them. Students of color and those in low-income communities, the report noted, are more likely to attend school in deteriorated facilities.

The organizations’ report partially fills a void — the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t have any program or office providing support to schools or offering data and research on school infrastructure.

Among the report’s findings was how little South Carolina paid for school construction projects compared to the national average. The state contributed just 1 percent, and the federal government contributed 0.2 percent during the past decade.

Still, plenty of other states find themselves in a similar dynamic. Local districts in 28 states paid between 80 to 99 percent of the costs between 2009 and 2019. Eleven states provided no funds for school capital projects.

Paying for building projects, then, is almost entirely a function of the wealth of a school district, Filardo said.

For many lower-income and rural districts, she said, when they try to raise funds via bonds, the property taxes often have to be so high to generate any significant amount of funding for a comprehensive project. Lower-income districts often can’t pursue those projects as a result.

“When you’re poor, you’re poor,” Filardo said.

In South Carolina, purse strings in many district are often even tighter because of tax abatements for businesses, further complicating the situation.

State leaders ushered in property tax breaks, such as fee-in-lieu-of-tax incentives and multicounty industrial parks, in the 1980s, as a way of attracting businesses to the Palmetto State. With the incentives, large businesses can pay a reduced fee to counties instead of property taxes.

But as a result, school districts, which rely on commercial property taxes, lose out on those dollars. Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that researches and tracks corporate subsidies, found South Carolina’s public schools lost $534 million in revenue in fiscal year 2021 to abated property taxes. Those are among the highest losses seen in the country.

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In Chester County, tax breaks have brought companies such as the Singapore-based company Giti Tire and wine giant Gallo to the area. But in fiscal year 2021 alone, the school district lost $20.3 million due to abatements.

Those lost dollars hurt students, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, and the impact ultimately ripples across communities. Fewer dollars in schools, leaving students more unprepared, could reduce the supply of skilled labor over time.

“Undermining your schools in the name of economic development is shooting yourself in the foot,” LeRoy said.

One way of reducing the impact of these tax breaks on school districts would be shortening how long they last, he said. Ultimately, that would require state leaders to change the rules that counties follow.

Overall, addressing South Carolina’s school building needs and the disparities that exist will require state leaders to act. Even then, no single, magic bullet may exist.

Seeking a solution

Helping South Carolina’s poorest districts build or renovate dilapidated school buildings was among Molly Spearman’s biggest pushes during her eight years as state education superintendent.

Spearman knew the struggles of rural schools personally; she grew up in Saluda County, the state's sixth smallest, and later taught music and worked as a principal in the area’s schools.

Through a joint effort with the General Assembly, she doled out roughly $260 million in state dollars and pandemic relief funds to 11 districts — each smaller and poorer than the one in Chester County, which is the 28th smallest of South Carolina's 46 counties.

Spearman and the Department of Education chose those districts based on a number of factors, including their tax-paying ability, the age and condition of schools, and maintenance costs. The provisos that allocated the state funds also explicitly called for districts that were consolidating to be prioritized, as well as districts that had been taken over by the state.

That last detail added a bit of a catch. For some districts, consolidation can be a controversial policy, with areas sometimes resisting the push to shut down or merge schools. In Chester, for instance, some feared approving bonds for construction would lead to consolidation. Still, Spearman pushed the policy during her tenure, as well as district takeovers, with the aim of improving academics and opportunities for smaller districts.

Of the 11 districts allocated funds by Spearman, at least six had consolidated either districts or schools, or were in the process of consolidating.

Ultimately, Spearman and the General Assembly’s infrastructure funding effort marked South Carolina’s first major school building program since Jim Crow days. In the 1950s, the state introduced its general sales tax to fund the building of new Black- and White-only schools to circumvent desegregation.

Ellen Weaver, since taking over as state education superintendent this year, has followed Spearman’s steps and requested from the General Assembly state allocations to help school districts with building costs. The Legislature budgeted $120 million for capital funding for schools this year, with consolidation again set as a priority. Unlike the allocations under Spearman, up to $20 million of that total will be set aside for school security updates, including bulletproof glass windows, door locks and window covers.

Weaver did not respond to requests to comment for this article. She previously told The Post and Courier about the need for assistance in many rural areas.

“Our rural communities simply do not have the tax base or bonding capacity to repair or replace crumbling infrastructure,” Weaver said. “This request would allow the department to continue to knock out high-priority projects in the highest area of need.”

Still, these one-time allocations represent just a drop in the bucket in addressing the total cost of school building needs in South Carolina.

In December, the state Department of Education released a capital needs report. The estimated cost of new and renovated facilities in the state for the next five years will total more than $6.1 billion. State and local funds will cover more than $5 billion of those costs, leaving a projected $1.1 billion shortfall.

South Carolina’s school districts need more money. But a clear, long-term solution hasn’t formed yet.

While superintendent, Spearman suggested that the state create an infrastructure bank as a more sustainable and continuous way of assisting districts. All districts could apply for loans from a revolving fund for capital projects. Repayments and interest rates would depend on the district’s tax base.

Democratic state Sens. Thomas McElveen, of Sumter, and Ronnie Sabb, of Williamsburg, filed a bill first in December 2020 and again last winter to create such a bank.

McElveen said he’s been working on the idea for about a decade. He thinks a certain percentage of the money from the fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreements granted to big companies could be fed into the bank, so taxes don’t have to be raised to finance the plan. When the state has a budget surplus, money could be put into the fund as well.

Still, the bill never left committee either time it was introduced. McElveen said the state Legislature has instead prioritized other issues, such as private school vouchers. But the state senator called the issue of school building costs “a brewing storm” for both rural areas and the entire state.

“If we don't start figuring out more creative and proactive ways to fund infrastructure, especially in small counties, then we're going to allow those places to fall further and further behind,” McElveen said.

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Jeff Vincent, the director and cofounder of the Center for Cities and Schools at University of California, Berkeley, has seen the idea of an infrastructure bank float around the country before. But he also sees no single quick-and-easy solution to resolving the skyrocketing costs of construction and the vast disparities between districts.

Some states have created more equity-driven policies, he said. Even those have run into issues.

“The problem is the amount of money that the state has to work with each year tends to be relatively low compared to the challenge out there,” Vincent said. “So it's a sort of a very slow process.”

Filardo believes addressing school building project costs will take some time too.

She sees addressing that $1.1 billion shortfall as “absolutely doable,” but it will require a concerted effort, with state and local governments working together with the federal government.

At a standstill

A year after the district’s last referendum failed, Chester County School District officials have no money from bonds and no intention of attempting another referendum.

Officials are now trying to do what updates and renovations they can with what money they have, piece by piece. They’re looking for other funding avenues, even half-hoping someone might notice the district and donate the needed money.

Otherwise, many of the bigger issues that they wanted to remedy with new construction will persist as a result, with costs potentially increasing.

Boyd's last daughter graduated from Chester High last month. Her daughter, while a student, would tell her about the school's conditions from time to time.

The mother wishes her child had gotten the chance to experience a different environment. She didn't like hearing that her daughter saw water leaks and damage in her school. At one point, Boyd even heard the school had bed bugs. Cockroaches, which Boyd also saw when she was a student, continued to pop up.

“They’re the same family, just different generations,” Boyd joked about the bugs.

When the bond failed to pass last May, Boyd said her daughter was disheartened, even though she wouldn’t have experienced the changes herself. Her daughter, Boyd said, wanted the people behind her to have better schools.

Now, a year after the bond vote, Boyd said she doesn’t hear much talk about the state of local schools. She still hopes for the best for the students, but when she visits the Chester High School campus, she looks around and sees there’s no putting a Band-Aid on this any longer.