Students in School Dist. 4 will Find New High School, Other Schools Enhanced

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Anderson School District 4 is beginning the school year by witnessing several years of planning finally turn into something visible and, on schedule and under budget.

The new 240,000-square-foot Pendleton High School is opening in August, and with it comes the moving of Riverside Middle School into the former high school building, a reshuffling made possible by land purchased more than a decade ago and by a $115 million referendum approved in 2023.

Superintendent Dee Christopher traced the project back to 2014, when the district bought the land under Superintendent Lee DeAndrea, a decision he said now looks prescient. That property sits adjacent to the current high school site near Boscobel, which means the new high school and the middle school now share a contiguous campus, giving the district a more compact center of gravity at a time when Pendleton and the surrounding areas continue to grow.

Christopher said the district spent about a year and a half studying enrollment and facilities after he became superintendent in 2021. What they found was not surprising: aging buildings, rising development, and a district that could no longer postpone the question of how it would serve future students. Riverside Middle is roughly 75 years old; the old high school is about 72.

That study led to the district’s 10-year facility plan, adopted in early 2023, and then to the referendum later that year. The result is not just a new high school, but a districtwide renovation effort touching all six schools: Pendleton High, Riverside Middle, and the elementary campuses in Townville, Mount Lebanon, La France, and Pendleton.

Christopher said the district is in good shape to open on time, and that by the end of the week the remaining work at Riverside should be finished. The new high school is already in place, Riverside Middle has moved, and the district expects school to begin in the new location without delay.

The redesign is especially notable because it consolidates seven grades on one campus area, a practical advantage for families in a district that stretches from Slabtown along Highway 88 almost to Fair Play. For some students the new arrangement will simply make the school day a little easier to reach.

The old Riverside building, meanwhile, is not going away. The district intends to keep ownership of the property and will ask the board later this summer or early fall to approve a plan which will likely be divided into four uses: a community space, an anchor tenant, a section reserved for future educational purposes, and a possible new district office.

That last move, if it happens, would free up the current district office site for other uses in Pendleton. Christopher said the district owns most of the block, with only the town hall, the doghouse, and a fire-station parcel (old athletic fields) outside its control. The question now is less whether the property will remain useful than how it will be used.

Christopher was careful to emphasize that the projects have stayed both on time and under budget. Just as important, he said, the financial impact on taxpayers has been lower than projected. The district’s earlier estimates were intentionally conservative, but by last October officials were able to announce that millage would not need to rise further.

The tax impact, he said, was about $32 per $100,000 in assessed property value, not the $64 originally anticipated, and he expects that figure may go down again this fall. For a district overseeing a new high school and multiple campus improvements, that kind of fiscal breathing room is rare enough to draw notice.

Pendleton High School, built for 1,200 classroom seats and a core facility sized for 1,500, will open this year with about 950 to 960 students. That is below the building’s classroom capacity, which Christopher said was intentional; the district wanted room for growth without overbuilding before the need existed.

The broader enrollment picture is more measured than some earlier projections suggested. Growth is still happening, but not at the pace expected when the district began its long-range planning. Christopher said the district now believes it has capacity for many years to come, perhaps 15 rather than 10, unless a sudden surge changes the pattern.

Riverside Middle School is expected to serve about 750 students this year, with room for 1,000. The elementary schools also have substantial room for growth, Christopher said, with roughly 800 to 900 empty seats districtwide even after accounting for sixth graders moving on to middle school.

Anderson 4 serves about 3,100 students across six schools, a relatively small student body spread across a very large geography. That dispersion is part of why the new high school and middle school campus matters so much: it gives the district a more efficient center while preserving room for rural families who are used to distance being part of the school-day calculation.

Christopher said graduation rates have now climbed above 90 percent, reaching about 92.5 percent last year, and that the district expects similar numbers again.

The district’s college and career readiness figures are also moving in the right direction, he said, and the range of postsecondary paths remains broad: four-year colleges, two-year colleges, military service, and direct entry into the workforce. In a district trying to balance tradition and transition, that mix seems to matter as much as the numbers themselves.

Anderson 4’s partnership with the Anderson Institute of Technology continues to deepen with students benefiting from opportunities the district could not create on its own. The relationship with districts 3 and 5 has grown more comfortable over time, and the center is now part of the district’s larger identity rather than an auxiliary program.

The school year will also bring more emphasis on extracurriculars and student engagement. The district added boys’ and girls’ tennis last year as part of the new high school’s spring sports complex, which also includes baseball and softball fields and tennis courts. Christopher said the girls’ tennis team was the first to play on that campus, and that many of the players were new to the sport.

That, in Christopher’s view, is the point of the district’s work: not simply to add buildings, but to widen the range of what students can do once they are inside them. The high school’s JROTC program ranked ninth in the world in drone competition last year, the band has outgrown its trophy space, and every athletic team made the playoffs.

The district is also rethinking its instructional habits. Christopher said Anderson 4 has already pulled back on some screen-based routines, stopped sending elementary Chromebooks home, and plans to continue evaluating how much technology belongs in the classroom. His argument was not anti-technology so much as pro-teacher: screens, he said, should serve instruction, not replace it.