EDITORIAL: Enrollment drop may be cause for alarm

It’s been far from the pages of this newspaper to say the Williamsburg County School District is a school district on the rise. Through prudence and long-term planning, the school district has set itself up for a brighter future than present. 

Which bring us to the present. 

The school district resides in what equates to a very poor and rural Williamsburg County. Statistically speaking, it’s one of the poorest counties in the state and just by taking a drive from Hemingway to Cades, it’s easy to see how it could be classified as one of the most rural. 

Williamsburg County isn’t growing any less rural either, as families and individuals continue to emigrate out of the county. This bring up an unusual problem for the school district. 

With families leaving the county, the school district’s enrollment has steadily dropped. While the drop has become more precipitous over the past few years, its overall enrollment has been dropping since the 1960s according to members of the district’s board of trustees. 

Taking a look at the numbers, the district is a relatively small one to begin with. In 2011, the district boasted 4,949 students, which is not that many for a district with thirteen primary, elementary, and high schools, a charter school, and a vocational center. 

While this number may be slightly alarming, the school district had 5,269 students in 2010, which means the district lost 320 students. Nearly five percent of its total enrollment. 

Over the years, though, the numbers are even more sobering as the past four years have seen the district lose 139 students from 2009 to 2010 and 138 from 2008 to 2009. In total, that leaves the school district with 597 less students than it had in 2008, with enrollment falling at a faster pace in more recent years. 

Some of the problems associated with the drop in enrollment are not just the drop in total population for the county, but the rural nature of it. The districts schools are forced to cover a very wide swath of territory and sometimes, this simply makes it easier on students to go to an out of district school. For instance, it may be easier for a child who lives south of Johnsonville, but still in Williamsburg County, to go to a Florence 5 school, rather than a Williamsburg County School. 

In the past, it may have been apropos to blame the poor standards of the school district, but as evidenced by the South Carolina Department of Education report cards, this is simply not the case. For the past three years, the district has steadily improved its overall ranking, moving from what is defined as an “At-Risk” district to an “Average” district in the span of only three years. 

Although its hands are sufficiently tied in this case, the Williamsburg County School District can do little more than continue to improve its academic standing and hope for the best when it comes to the population of the county.