York County voters Tuesday passed a $90 million bond referendum to build a new middle school and perform upgrades to a learning center in York County School District 1, in York.
The bond, which is expected to add $36 per $100,000 of assessed primary home value per year, was the smallest of three bond measures on the ballots in York, Lancaster, and Chester counties.
Voters in York County ultimately sided with the project, voting 10,508 to 5,875 in favor of the bond, according to unofficial results posted by the South Carolina Election Commission.
County voters also passed a 1-cent sales tax referendum to fund road and infrastructure projects, with 71 percent of voters saying yes.
Lancaster
Lancaster County residents voted on the largest of the referendums on the region’s ballots -- a $588.15 million package that would have funded four new schools, plus repairs and upgrades at others in the Lancaster County School District.
Two of the schools – and the bulk of the overall referendum allotment, $315.6 million – was earmarked to Indian Land, the fastest growing section of the county school district. Support was high in precincts in Indian Land, particularly the Harrisburg precinct, which voted 2-to-1 in favor of the referendum.
But voters in most of the county’s 36 precincts denied the measure. Opposition in the southern end of Lancaster County, where many voters said the school district’s plans unfairly overlooked schools there in favor of wealthier Indian Land, was especially strong. Facebook user Sharon Morris Stacks posted that schools in the southern part of Lancaster “don’t get what they need or deserve.”
Overall, the measure failed 30,759 to 20,869, according to unofficial results posted by the South Carolina Election Commission.
County voters also, but more narrowly, said no to a 1-cent sales tax bond measure that would have funded local roads and infrastructure projects.
Chester
Chester County voters, for the fourth consecutive time, voted against a Chester County School District bond referendum, -- this time a $227 million package that would have paid for the construction of two new high schools and repairs to a third.
As it was in Lancaster County, support for the project was high in areas where the new buildings would go – in this case, Chester and Lewisville – but fell off sharply in other parts of the county.
Overall, Chester voters rejected the measure 7,999 to 6,798, according to unofficial results posted by the South Carolina Election Commission.
School District spokesman Chris Christoff said last week that if the bond measure were to fail at the polls, the district would still replace the roofs at Lewisville High School – one of the provisions of the bond measure – and at Chester High School, but the district would pay for it with its own capital funds. Christoff said the projects are likely to total approximately $20 million.
Growth and Upgrades
Two of the school bond referendums were aimed at addressing growth in the South Carolina communities that are part of the Charlotte metro region. In September, the Charlotte Observer calculated that 117 people moved to the region every day between July 2022 and July 2023. That’s roughly one new person moving to the region every five minutes.
According to the U.S. Census, approximately 16,000 people moved to York County and approximately 12,000 people moved to Lancaster County between April 2020 and July 2023.
Chester County saw its population flatten over that same time period, but the district’s bond measure was less about growth and more about upgrades. Christoff said that Chester High School, for example, is a badly outdated building with far too many entrances – there are at least 70 – to meet contemporary school security needs.
But the building is also struggling with capacity, as is Lewisville, which would have received one of the two newly built high schools had the bond passed.
Christoff said part of the district’s plans, now that the bond measure has been defeated, will be to buy new modular classroom structures to ease capacity issues in Lewisville, which is the district’s fastest growing area.
This story has been corrected to state that the high schools in Chester and Lewisville are identified for roof repairs.
