Newton Leaves School Dist. 5 to Take on Role as Consultant

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Kyle Newton has spent 13 years being the person Anderson School District 5 called when something went wrong. A shooting threat. A lockdown. A parent who needed to be told, at two in the morning, that her child was safe.

The job had a title — assistant superintendent for communications and community relations — but the actual work, was something closer to institutional connective tissue: the person who knew the sheriff and the city council member and the state legislator and the nonprofit director, and who understood, from long practice, that those relationships were not incidental to the work of running a school district. They were the work.

This spring, Newton left this position. He will remain in Anderson, remain a member of Anderson City Council, where he has served for 10 years and was just reelected to another four-year term, and will continue to show up at his usual haunts — Doolittle's, Magnetic South — extracting what he calls "the pulse of the people." What he will not do, for the first time since 2013, is answer the phone when something happens at a school.

"I won't be the school guy anymore," Newton said, with the tone of a man who has thought carefully about which parts of a job he will miss and which parts he will not.

He is moving on to a new role, a consultancy. Southern Growth Strategies, incorporated last year in Fort Mill with a loosely affiliated group of city, county, and school professionals from across the Southeast, takes on what Newton describes as the problems that fast-growing mid-sized communities face and typically lack the internal capacity to solve: impact fee studies, bond referendum strategy, GIS mapping, demographic analysis.

The timing, he said, felt right. Growth, which has been the defining pressure on every Upstate South Carolina community for the better part of a decade, is now arriving in places that were not built to receive it.

"You're seeing six, seven percent growth year to year in mid-sized cities," Newton said. "That can tax your system if you're not smart."

The consultancy's pitch is, in part, cultural. Newton is direct about it. Outside firms, he said — the ones that fly in from New York or Chicago to tell a southern county what to do with its land-use ordinance — tend not to land well.

"You've got to understand the culture of where you're at," he said. "Somebody flying in from New York telling people what to do doesn't go well. It really doesn't."

Southern Growth Strategies' competitive advantage, Newton said, is simply that its principals are from here, have governed here, and will still be here after the engagement ends.

The 13 years Newton spent at District 5 gave him a particular vantage on the county's evolution, and he is willing to be precise about what changed and what didn't.

The penny sales tax — the one-cent local option levy passed by Anderson County voters in November 2014, with collection beginning in 2015 — was, by his account, the single most consequential infrastructure event of his tenure. He was involved in the legislative groundwork from the beginning, sitting in the first planning meeting in December 2013 and working with the General Assembly through the following months to get the enabling framework in place.

The tax funds capital improvements for all five school districts in the county, and its signature project, the Anderson Institute of Technology, became what Newton called "the marquee" — proof that workforce development and economic development were not separate conversations.

"If you don't have a workforce, you can't attract business," he said. "County can't attract somebody to come in if there's not a workforce."

The tax has a 15-year life and will come up for renewal soon, and Newton said flatly that he expects to be involved in that campaign.

The other transformation he catalogued was less celebratory: security. When Newton arrived at District 5, school resource officers were present at the high schools and sparse everywhere else. Today, every school in the district has a full-time SRO; the high schools have multiple officers plus supplemental private security; and the district has deployed what Newton called "metal detectors on steroids" — evolved weapons detection systems that, he noted, catch a great deal more than weapons.

"Those guys have some funny stories," he said. "Don't even involve guns."

The cost of this posture, in dollars and institutional attention, is enormous. But what stays with Newton is not the hardware. It is a conversation he had with a student who admitted he had gotten into a fight at school — and then explained, with a logic Newton found himself reluctantly unable to dismiss, that he had chosen school precisely because he knew the detection systems meant no one would have a weapon.

"I don't know if that's the greatest thing in the world," Newton said, "but that's one way to think about it."

The pandemic reconfigured things in ways that have not fully reconfigured back. Newton said the majority of calls District 5 received when COVID first hit had nothing to do with education.

They were about food.

The district delivered just under a million meals during the pandemic and the following summer, and the summer feeding program continues.

"Education is important," Newton said, "but it's secondary. I've said that same thing when it comes to safety."

What the pandemic also accelerated was the disaggregation of school attendance from geography. Virtual learning expanded. School choice expanded. Families that once defaulted to their neighborhood school now routinely consider alternatives.

The result, Newton said, is that the intuitive relationship between housing growth and school enrollment no longer holds the way people assume. Anderson District 5, despite sitting inside one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, is currently at its lowest enrollment since Newton arrived.

"People see houses being built and they think it's going to lead to overcrowding," he said. "In some places it does. Not here."

The people moving into Anderson County, his mapping work suggests, are trending older. The birth rate in the area is down. The district's enrollment reflects those facts, even as the construction activity on Highway 81 suggests otherwise.

This is the kind of nuance Newton expects his consultancy to bring to communities that are, in his experience, frequently working from assumptions rather than data.

Impact fees are one example. He is neither for them nor against them categorically — he has spent enough time around the policy to know that the instrument is narrow, legally constrained, and easily misunderstood. In South Carolina, impact fee revenue is geographically locked to the service area where it was collected, restricted to capital improvements with a useful life of at least five years, and prohibited from addressing existing deficiencies.

"Impact fees are not magic money," he said. "They're very narrow in what they can be used for."

A community that sees houses going up and imagines that impact fees will solve its infrastructure backlog is, in Newton's view, operating on a wrong narrative — and wrong narratives, in local government, have a way of producing wrong decisions at considerable public expense.

What he believes in, with something approaching conviction, is local government itself — not as a residual category below the more glamorous levels of state and federal power, but as the tier where the actual work of community life gets done.

"If we're replacing a fire engine, that's not a partisan issue," he said. "If we're replacing a mile of sewer, that's not a partisan issue."

He invoked Tip O'Neill, the old U.S. Speaker of the House who famously shared drinks with Ronald Reagan after the day's battles were over, as a model for something that has become, at the national level, almost unimaginable and that Newton believes local government, at its best, still manages to approximate.

He mentioned that after a recent split vote on Anderson City Council, he and the members who had voted the other way talked it through afterward, without drama.

"I'm married," he said. "I understand that you don't always get what you want. That doesn't mean the other person is a bad person."

He will still be eating at Doolittle's. He will be serving on City Council. He will watch, with the particular interest of someone who helped plan it, as Main Street is finally paved — the water lines done, the sewer lines done, the fiber run, the bid for the paving approved — in the sequence that anyone who has ever watched a street get cut open and resewn knows is the only way to do it right.

"You can't pave a street and then come back and cut it all up," he said. "These are the things where in 20 years people will be glad."

He did not say he would miss the school. He said the kindergartners who started when he arrived are graduating this year. He found that worth noting.