Charleston Co. School District lays out financial priorities, including vaccination van

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – Charleston County School District staff are laying out a list of construction priorities for the next school year.

On Tuesday, those priorities were looked over by the school board’s audit and finance committee.

The largest construction projects are part of the Phase 5 Capital Program, funded by a 2020 referendum to extend the one-cent sale tax.

Those projects include a slew of new and renovated schools along with a number of improvements to buildings and athletic facilities.

On the list is the completion of the Hursey Montessori School, which is slated to be finished in the summer of 2023 and is expected to accommodate 600 new students. It’s budgeted at $51 million.

Other projects include a new Ladson Elementary School, expected to house 900 new students and to cost nearly $50 million. A new John’s Island Elementary School is expected to cost around $35 million and serve 600 new students. Both schools are expected to be completed in 2024. Portions of those budgets have already been allocated.

The plan also calls for the demolition and rebuilding of Lambs Elementary School. The anticipated Lamb and Early Ed Center will provide a home for 1,200 students and another 300 at the early ed center. Lambs is a $90 million project with no completion date yet.

The board will vote on $60.6 million worth of Phase 5 projects on Feb. 28.

During the meeting, the audit and finance committee approved $50 million on a number of projects listed as fixed cost ownership projects.

“We have a list of projects that are also funded with what we call our fixed cost ownership,” Ron Kramps, with Facilities Management at CCSD, said. “It’s a bond sale that’s made every spring, and that list is a very long list with a significant backlog.”

To address that backlog, the district recently moved a number of projects off of the fixed cost ownership list and opted to pay for them through a lawsuit settlement.

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“So with the anticipated settlement money, we identified a few other projects that were good candidates for this funding and good candidates meaning, this funding as we understand it doesn’t have a time constraints associated with it,” Kramps said.

Those other projects pulled out include track improvements at various schools, upgrades to several athletic facilities and the redevelopment of the Harborview Elementary School rider loop.

The list, approved on Tuesday, includes millions of dollars for new software systems aimed at helping and evaluating students, as well as a number of smaller facility upgrades and bus purchases. Also on the list is a request to purchase a van that could be used by the nursing staff to administer vaccines.

“This is not for COVID-19; we are probably the only school district in the entire country that has a federally approved program called Vaccination for Children,” CCSD Chief Operating Officer Jeff Borowy said. “We have a nurse that is authorized to give any of the vaccinations that are needed for schools by law. We store those vaccinations. We distribute those vaccinations. This van would allow that nurse to get around the district.”

Borowy says there are roughly 1,500 students in the district currently without all the state’s required vaccinations.

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