As Elgin’s population has grown, Blaney Elementary School has tried to grow with it, adding temporary, mobile schoolrooms. But now, the expansion has progressed so far that there’s no more room left in the school.

By MARGARET B. SPROTT
Camden Bureau

ELGIN

The addition of 80 students at Blaney Elementary School this year has revived the possibility of replacing the Elgin school, which is becoming overcrowded because of the area’s expanding population.

Kershaw County School Superintendent Bob Falls said recently the county schools board seemed to favor building a new school to replace the 26-year-old Blaney Elementary because an enrollment of 550 students this year had surpassed projected figures for the 1985-86 school term.

The increased enrollment apparently is another indication of the continued growth of Elgin area, said Blaney Principal Leslie Stover.

The town’s population has grown from 374 in 1970 to 595 in 1980, and most of the new students this year have come from families who have moved to Kershaw County from the Columbia area, he said.

The area’s growth, Stover said, was evident when he traveled the school’s attendance zone to establish bus routes for kindergarten students this year. He said many new housing developments had sprung up in the Elgin area and that “there are just roads cut everywhere.”

Falls said replacing Blaney Elementary was an “immediate” priority and “definitely the board’s next building project.”

However, funding for the project will be a problem. “We don’t have the bonding potential to fund” a new building, he said.

In the meantime, to accommodate the additional pupils, five protable classrooms have been placed on the school grounds, but authorities say space again will become scarce if the student body continues to grow.

Stover said the 80 new students this year weren’t expected because enrollment hadn’t increased dramaticcally in the past few years. He said he had expected enrollment to level off or decline after it increased by 40 students during the 1983-84 school year, when 462 students enrolled.

The portable classroooms were added to two that already were in place, and, Stover said, the additions have eased the crunch for classroom space.

But the portables, even though they are the only air-conditioned classrooms at Blaney, take up playground space, don’t provide more storage room and expose students to inclement weather when they leave for other areas of the school.

In January, the parents of more than 100 Blaney students came before the school board asking that the school be renovated.

The parents sought six more classrooms, a multipurpose room, a library with office space, storage and work space, kindergarten and child development areas of adequate size, a teachers’ workroom, office storage, a new vault and improved heating and air-conditioning systems.

Architects since have told the board that renovating and expanding the existing building would cost more than $2 million. But the architects said engineers who studied the Blaney school told the facility didn’t meet the state Education Department’s minimum-square-footage requirements.

Acting on projected enrollments at Blaney, architects on June 5 recommended the construction of a new school building, to accommodate 700 students at a cost of $2.7 million.

Blaney Elementary sits on 11 acres in the center of town and fronts White Pond Road, which carries truck traffic to nearby Interstate 20.

“It’s not a desirable location for a school,” Stover said. “At the time it was built, it was.”

The school, built in 1958, once housed 1st through 12th grades and had about 350 students with “a couple of empty classrooms,” said Stover, who became the principal in 1960. The last high school class graduated in 1971, he said.

Older students in the Elgin area now attend the separate campuses of Lugoff-Elgin Middle and Lugoff-Elgin High schools.

The middle school enrollment this year is 670, which is below a projection of 740 students. The current high school enrollment of 813 students is above an anticipated enrollment of 775 pupils.