Voters to Decide on School Dist. 3 Plan for New Middle School March 10
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The red-brick building sits low to the ground, with a flag out front and buses in order and cars lined up into the highway in the afternoon, the sort of mid-century architecture that has come to define the rural South’s idea of a school. Step inside, though, and the building begins to tell a different story: one of narrow hallways, small classrooms, and a daily schedule bent out of shape to accommodate the simple fact that too many people are trying to do too many things in a space that has not expanded since Dwight Eisenhower was President.
Starr-Iva, the current middle school for Anderson School District 3, was built, depending on which records you consult, in either 1953 or 1954, which makes it more than 70 years old. It is, as district officials like to note, the oldest building in the district, a temporal outlier in a system that has since added or renovated other campuses.
“It’s beyond its life expectancy,” said Dist. 3 Superintendent Kathy Hipp.
The age is not an abstraction. It reveals itself in dimensions. The hallways are narrow enough that the administration has to stagger class changes for its 640 students, sending some grades out a few minutes before others, so that the building’s arteries are not overwhelmed. The classrooms are about 700 square feet, roughly 150 square feet smaller than what architects now consider standard for middle school. The kitchen is “very, very small,” and the cafeteria is not much better, which is how the school has ended up running six lunch periods a day, from around 10:30 in the morning until 1:30 in the afternoon, to feed everyone. In a modern building with sufficient space, the same work might be done in an hour and a half.
The gymnasium, which doubles as the auditorium and assembly hall, is perhaps the clearest physical symbol of the mismatch between the building and the people it serves. The bleachers can hold about a hundred people. When the band gives its December concert, or when the entire school needs to be assembled, students sit on the floor. Parents stand in doorways, pressed against walls. The room that was designed to contain a community’s sense of itself is, for much of the year, palpably too small for the job.
For the past decade or so, the district has managed this situation with a series of allowances and workarounds. Schedules are adjusted; events are split into multiple sessions; classrooms are repurposed. But there is a point beyond which improvisation becomes a form of denial, and in District 3 that point appears to have arrived.
In response, the district has done something that small, tax-averse communities are often reluctant to do: it has asked its voters to consider replacing the building altogether. The plan, bundled under the optimistic rubric “Premier Progress Vision 2026,” calls for the construction of a new middle school beside Crescent High School, the district’s consolidated high school campus. Once built, the school would take a new name—Crescent Middle School—and create a contiguous grade-six-through-twelve complex on adjacent sites.
The idea of pairing middle and high schools next door to each other is not new, but in District 3 it marks a distinct departure from the old geography, in which schools are scattered across small towns whose identities are wrapped up in their mascots and gymnasiums. The proposed Crescent Middle would share some facilities with Crescent High, allowing for more efficient use of athletic fields and specialized classroom spaces. It would also, its backers argue, ease transitions for students, who would no longer have to move between entirely separate campuses at crucial points in adolescence.
The campaign for the new building has been in development for at least 18 months, a period in which the district’s leadership has quietly worked with architects and financial advisers to design a school, price it out, and map the tax consequences. To residents, though, the plan has become visible, as public meetings, social-media posts, and interviews have tried to compress a surprisingly long gestation period into a digestible narrative.
“What seems like something that’s happened quick has actually been two years in the making,” said Hipp. “We’ve been talking to the community about how we got here, what it will cost and what the future looks like.”
The mechanism for deciding that future is a referendum scheduled for March 10, in which voters in Anderson County School District 3 will be asked to approve the borrowing needed to finance the new school. The ballot question is, formally, about debt and millage, but the conversations leading up to it have been about more quotidian things: lunch schedules, band concerts, narrow corridors, and the quiet humiliation of having to tell children to sit on the floor because there is nowhere else for them to go.
In rural South Carolina, school bonds are as much cultural referendums as fiscal ones. Supporters of the Crescent Middle project have taken to describing it as an investment in the district’s long-term viability, a signal that District 3 intends not only to survive but to compete—for families, for teachers, for state funding—in a region where consolidation and closure are constant threats. Opponents, or the merely skeptical, worry about the weight of new debt on taxpayers whose incomes have not kept pace with construction costs.
The district’s argument, implicit in the design and explicit in its pitch, is that the status quo is already imposing a cost—paid in both dollars but in opportunities foregone. A child who eats lunch at 10:30 and has no real auditorium in which to watch a play is, by that logic, being taxed in a different currency. The Premier Progress Vision 2026 campaign asks voters to convert that diffuse, invisible tax into a visible one, levied in millage points instead of in lost square footage.
On March 10, when residents of Iva, Starr, and the surrounding countryside go to the polls, they will be voting on a building they have not yet seen, for children many of them do not know. They will be deciding whether to retire, at last, a structure that has stood long enough to outlast the people who planned it, and to replace it with something that might feel, for a time, improbably large. If the referendum passes, the old Star Iva Middle School will eventually come down, taking with it seven-decade-old hallways and a gym where parents once craned their necks to watch December band concerts.
In its place will rise a new Crescent Middle, next to a high school named, with characteristic rural optimism, for a moon phase. The decision to build it, like most local decisions, will be recorded as a line or two in an official minutes book. For the sixth-graders hurrying to lunch in a wider hallway in 2028, the vote will exist only as a rumor about the time the adults decided that sitting on the floor, in a 70-year-old gym, was no longer an inevitable part of going to school in Anderson County School Dist. 3.
Early Voting begins Monday and runs through March 6 at the Anderson County Office of Voter Registration and Elections, Monday-Friday 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.at 301 N. Main Street Anderson.
