School Dist. 2 Plans Upgrades at Both Middle Schools
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The voters of Anderson School District 2 said no, and Anderson County School District 2 Superintendent Jason Johns, would like folks to understand that he is grateful for the community engagement which will help set the course for the next few years.
Not grateful in the reflexive, face-saving way of an administrator managing a loss — though there was, plainly, a loss. A $65 million referendum to consolidate the district's two aging middle schools into a single new facility overwhelmingly failed at the polls, and Johns is now left with the task of tending to buildings that were already overdue for attention before the campaign began. Johns means gratitude is a more precise way.
"All feedback is a gift," said Johns. "Our community very clearly gave us information that we desire to have middle schools in both of our towns."
That information, delivered by ballot, now shapes everything the district does next. The two existing middle schools — Belton Middle and Honea Path Middle — will receive immediate attention this summer: roofing replacements at Belton, switch gear, switch panels, boiler repairs, and additional roof work at Honea Path. The money will come from the local option sales tax, a one-cent levy passed by Anderson County voters in 2015 that directs infrastructure dollars to all five school districts in the county.
District 2, Johns said, sits in the middle of the county by size but at the bottom by industrial tax base, which means the sales tax delivers it considerably more than it contributes — a little over $3 million dollars annually, directed entirely toward capital improvements and facilities maintenance.
"The funds that our school receives are well above the actual tax burden that our community has," he said, with the measured satisfaction of a man who has done this arithmetic many times.
The sales tax has roughly three years remaining, and in 2028 all five districts will return to voters asking for its renewal — a campaign Johns anticipates with something closer to optimism than anxiety. In the meantime, he and the district’s board are assembling a 10-to-15-year capital improvement plan, one that will account for all seven of the district's campuses and pair each with a defined scope of work and a funding mechanism. The plan, when complete, will describe a district in which no building's needs are treated in isolation — a meaningful shift for a system whose oldest structures predate the administration's most seasoned employees and whose newest school, Belton Honea Path High, was built in the 1960s.
Whether any of that work eventually requires another referendum depends on what the plan reveals.
"Maybe there's a referendum we would go out for to address the immediate needs of our middle schools," Johns said, "and then maybe a second referendum a few years later that would address some of the issues at some of our other facilities."
He described this as "scaffolding" — a provisional architecture of financing, assembled piece by piece as the community's appetite becomes clearer. A $65 million ask, he acknowledged, was more than District 2's voters were prepared to support. The question now is what number they would get behind, and for what.
Johns praised his teachers, many of whom had allowed themselves some excitement about the prospect of a new middle school.
"Nothing replaces being able to move into a new home and being able to make it yours," he said. But he was quick to reframe the referendum's failure as something other than a defeat for the classroom. The district's real work, he argued, is culture — recruiting and retaining talented teachers, supporting them visibly, recognizing them. A state-of-the-art facility is one instrument toward that end; it is not the only one or even the most powerful. "If we do that," Johns said, "then our teachers and our schools and our children are going to be okay."
The land the district acquired for the proposed consolidated campus will remain in the district's inventory. Growth is coming to Anderson County — Johns said this without hedging, and without a timeline — and any parcel a district holds today is an asset it will be glad to have later. For now, the land sits, patient as the plan being built around it, waiting for a future the community has not yet agreed to imagine all at once.
