Voters to Chart Future of School Dist. 2 Middle Schools May 2
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
For nearly three quarters of a century, the buildings that house the middle schools of Anderson School District 2 have stood where they are now—brick embodiments of another era’s idea of adolescence, retrofitted over decades with ductwork and wiring they were never meant to carry. Their cinder-block corridors, built in the early 1950s as high schools, have watched generations file through homerooms and gymnasiums, even as the educational world beyond them has shifted toward robotics labs, engineering electives, and the quiet glow of laptop screens. This spring, voters in Belton and Honea Path are being asked whether it is time to start over.
In May, District 2 residents will decide a single, pointed question: should they authorize up to 65 million dollars to build a unified middle school, directly behind Belton-Honea Path High School, that would replace the aging Belton and Honea Path Middle campuses. The special referendum is set for May 2, with early voting to begin April 20 at the Anderson County Election Board in downtown Anderson.
Superintendent Jason Johns said the matter before voters is less as a choice between old and new than as a question of what kind of school experience the community wants to offer its 11-14-year-olds in the coming decades.
The process of seeking solutions began in 2021, when the district commissioned a facilities study to take stock of its seven schools, all built in the 1950s and all now roughly 70 years old. The report identified the two middle schools as needing the most urgent attention, a finding Johns and his staff then carried into focus groups with parents, community meetings, and regular gatherings of local faith leaders, where pastors in both towns studied the same charts and line items. Across these groups, Johns says, “there was a desire unanimously…to explore the option of building a unified middle school,” in part because of the sheer cost of maintaining two separate aging facilities instead of one new one.
A second, more detailed study in 2025 narrowed the focus to the middle schools alone, costing out what it would take to bring each up to current educational standards. The answer: between 43 million and 57 million dollars, and this without adding capacity for the growth that is already arriving in the district’s attendance area.
“Our trustees just did not feel that that was a smart economic decision to put that much money into two aging facilities,” said Johns.
In District 2, the phrase “unified school” carries a particular charge. Belton-Honea Path High School, created by consolidating the two towns’ high schools decades ago, has become, in Johns’s term, “probably the most visible facility in our community,” the place where the largest crowds gather for fine arts performances, basketball games, and wrestling matches. It is, architecturally and emotionally, a kind of civic capitol: the one building everyone in the district knows how to find.
District leaders bought land behind that high school in 2007, anticipating the growth they now see in the form of new subdivisions approved by Anderson County Council. A unified middle school on that site, Johns argues, would be built for long-term enrollment increases and would allow the district to ask taxpayers for money once, rather than returning in a few years to request additional funds to expand two separate campuses. “We felt it would be better to just ask them one time to fund a building that could hold that growth,” he says.
If the referendum passes, the new Belton-Honea Path middle school would open with a projected enrollment of a little over 800 students, which Johns said is roughly the size of an average South Carolina middle school. That scale would support separate seventh- and eighth-grade teams in sports like football, volleyball, and basketball, creating more athletic opportunities than either existing middle school can now offer. Its proximity to the high school would also give middle-school athletes and band students easier access to fields, practice facilities, and the established high school program that many of them aspire to join.
Perhaps more quietly, district leaders imagine a different kind of academic continuity. With a single middle school, Johns says, teachers would “actually be living together professionally,” which, in his view, turns a loose pipeline into a true feeder system. High school math teachers could work vertically with middle school colleagues to ensure that students arrive in geometry or Algebra I with the necessary skills, while chorus and band teachers choreograph joint performances and rehearsals that blur the line between middle and high school.
The alternative—renovating the existing buildings in place—turns out to be both costly and disruptive in ways that are less immediately visible than a new brick façade. Both Belton and Honea Path middle schools were originally built as high schools, one in 1951 and the other in 1954, and have, over the years, been expanded with additions that did little to modernize the original structures. The 43 to 57 million dollars estimated for upgrades would mostly disappear below the surface: electrical systems, plumbing, and “below-grade” work, Johns notes, that would leave the buildings looking much the same to anyone pulling up to the front door.
That work, he estimates, would take three to five years, during which time both campuses would be construction sites. To make that possible, the district would have to create “swing space” for students, moving them into mobile classrooms, cordoning off areas with fencing, and, in some cases, repurposing cafeterias or gymnasiums as temporary instructional spaces. A sixth-grader entering during that window, Johns points out, could spend an entire middle school career in a building wrapped in scaffolding and orange plastic.
There is also the matter of staffing. South Carolina schools carried 706 teacher vacancies this year that remained unfilled, a statistic that has superintendents across the state uneasy. District 2 has been relatively fortunate, which Johns credits in part to an “incredible” maintenance staff that keeps the interiors of its aging buildings as functional as possible. Asking new teachers to sign on for three to five years in a construction zone, he worries, could make recruitment and retention “very challenging” and, by extension, directly affect instruction and students’ experiences.
At bottom, the renovation-versus-new question is about the environment in which District 2 will prepare its children for a labor market being reshaped by technology and automation.
“We’re preparing students for jobs now that don’t even exist,” said Johns, noting the spread of artificial intelligence across industries over the past decade and a half. He sad a new building is not only about better wiring or working restrooms but about room for advanced computer science, engineering programs, and even the chance to start foreign-language instruction in middle school, giving students a head start on the skills needed for manufacturing and other high-level industrial jobs in the region.
Referendums, in South Carolina as elsewhere, are rarely about facilities alone.
“No one wants to increase taxes,” said Johns. “I don’t want to increase taxes.” Act 388, a mid-2000s state law that limits how districts can raise revenue for operations, leaves large capital projects like schools almost entirely dependent on voter-approved debt.
For this referendum, the district has tried to translate millage into something more concrete. The average owner-occupied home in District 2 has a taxable value of about $102,000, and the district has used $100,000 as a reference point. On such a house, the annual increase would be $84, or roughly $7 a month. When voters last approved school construction in 1999, the annual tax burden per $100,000 of home value was $148—nearly twice what the district is asking now, a fact Johns says he still finds striking in a world where very few services have become cheaper in 27 years.
Then there is the matter of memory. Honea Path Middle School sits, quite literally, in the middle of town, its brick and block a familiar backdrop in countless family stories. Both middle schools once served as high schools; Belton Middle was Geer-Gantt High School, the African American high school, and Honea Path Middle was Honea Path High, each with its own banners, jerseys, and rivalries. For alumni and longtime residents, the idea of closing them can feel less like routine consolidation than like a small act of erasure.
Johns is promising that any unified middle school would carry that history forward rather than papering it over. He imagines display cases with old jerseys and letter jackets, and a state championship trophy from Geer-Gantt High School, arranged in a way that turns the new lobby into a compact museum of Belton and Honea Path’s separate and shared past.
“One of the exciting things that we’ll be able to do with this new unified middle school is celebrate the history and the tradition for both of those schools,” said Johns.
If voters say no in May, the district will still face the same structural problems, only with fewer obvious tools to address them. It could attempt another referendum, repackaging the question in light of whatever objections parents and taxpayers voice in the months ahead, perhaps proposing a smaller bond focused on renovations rather than a new school. Or it could forgo a referendum altogether and rely on the 8 percent of assessed value that districts are allowed to borrow annually for capital projects, patching the buildings over five or six years until, as Johns puts it, they are no longer suitable to be fixed up. Every one of those options, he notes, involves some kind of tax increase.
In the event that the referendum passes and a new middle school opens behind BHP High, the old buildings will not face the wrecking ball. Officials in both Belton and Honea Path have expressed interest in acquiring the campuses as recreation centers, repurposing auditoriums, cafeterias, competition gyms, and football fields for town use. For small South Carolina towns, Johns said, having a rec center with a fully functioning kitchen and irrigated athletic fields would be “a huge benefit…to both populations.”
There are other ideas under discussion. District 2 has “very few child care options,” said Johns, and has explored leasing a wing of each building for affordable child care. One town has floated the possibility of converting part of a campus into housing for retirees, folding an aging school into the life cycle of the community in a different but no less intimate way. In these scenarios, the buildings would be retrofitted rather than razed, their classrooms and corridors reimagined as spaces for toddlers or seniors instead of eighth-graders.
In the weeks leading up to the vote, the district has mounted something like a civic tutorial on school finance, building design, and the sociology of adolescence. A “Building for Tomorrow” section on the district’s website offers floor plans, site drawings, frequently asked questions, and a breakdown of the tax impact. Johns and an architect recently spent an entire day meeting with middle school teachers, soliciting input on the location of faculty restrooms, collaborative spaces, and the orientation of the gymnasium—details that, in his telling, will determine how the building actually functions once the ribbon is cut.
District staff will also hold information sessions at each of the four elementary schools, folded into literacy nights, STEM nights, and “step-up” events for rising middle schoolers. There will be presentations at churches and fire stations, those other nodes of community life. Every Friday, parents receive an email from Johns, sometimes with renderings of the proposed school, sometimes with links to the same presentations he has given in person— “probably more than they want,” Johns said.
The superintendent speaks about the issue with the dual perspective of administrator and parent. He has six children, three of whom are still enrolled in District 2 schools; his fourth grader and her classmates would be among the first to attend the new middle school, should voters approve it. When he and his staff met last year with parents at all four primary and elementary schools, he says, “almost, you know, without exception, there was excitement and there was an understanding that this is something that would be very beneficial for their children.”
On May 2, residents who have watched the district’s cafeterias become the largest restaurants in town and its gymnasiums the largest gathering places will be asked to decide whether to extend that role into the next generation. The timing—a Saturday with, theoretically, fewer obstacles than a weekday for voters—echoes the district’s last successful referendum, in 1999, and reflects a community group’s insistence on choosing a day “where there were nothing in the way of someone participating.
For Johns, the vote is both a test of fiscal appetite and a referendum on the district’s capacity to imagine itself not just as it is, but as it might need to be when today’s fourth-graders have children of their own.
