Lawmakers eliminating Bamberg school boards; reducing debt is goal, Bamberg says

The two districts have already been sharing key personnel, with consolidation planned for 2022-23.

The new, nine-member Bamberg County School District board includes three members from each of the former BSD1 and BSD2 boards.

The members of the new, consolidated board were appointed by members of the Bamberg County Legislative Delegation, Rep. Justin Bamberg and Sen. Brad Hutto, and sworn into office in February.

BCSD Superintendent Dottie Brown said the monthly meetings of the former boards have been cancelled because of the lack of a quorum that resulted.

“You can’t serve on two boards. Once the new, appointed board members accepted their appointment and were sworn in in February, they had to resign that day prior to being sworn in, leaving those boards without a quorum,” Brown said.

“So their regularly scheduled meetings are being cancelled. However the consolidated board of nine members meets the first Monday of each month,” she said.

Brown continued, “They’ve had a series of meetings in late February and March for new board member training and approved a monthly board meeting calendar.”

The next board meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. Monday, April 4 at Bamberg-Ehrhardt High School.

Bamberg introduced a bill on March 9 which would provide “for the dissolution of the two present school districts’ boards of trustees” if the appointments to the newly consolidated school board resulted in the lack of a quorum for each board, which it has.

The bill has already passed the House and underwent second reading in the Senate on March 16.

“So there’s no quorum for the two prior boards. So, for example, with certain internal matters, as if a kid could get in trouble or something, or there’d be some issue that requires an appeal to the sitting board, you can’t do it because there’s no quorum for the old Bamberg 2, or the old Bamberg 1,” Bamberg said.

“So that’s where I went, since everything was on track, and filed legislation to go ahead and fix that, to go ahead and invest all of the authority into the consolidated board that it would have had,” the representative said.

Bamberg continued, “That authority is invested in them now so that we don’t have this issue of there are certain things that only the prior boards can do at this point, but there’s no quorum because of the way that we constructed the new board by taking those members.”

Bamberg said the consolidation efforts have gone forward very well, so well that the process of consolidation is “ahead of schedule” with the formation of the newly consolidated board.

“When the consolidation legislation was filed, there was a certain time frame where certain boards would stay in place until X date. Well, we beat the deadline and, because of that, those two prior boards still technically existed, and there are certain things that the consolidated board had not been yet been invested with the authority to do based on the original legislation and the time frames,” he said.

The legislator said the consolidated board is designed with one goal in mind.

“With the way that we went about putting the consolidated board together, we were trying to avoid some of the problems that befell other districts in the past when they consolidated. For example, people will say, ‘Well, nobody on the new board is publicly elected.’

“That’s not actually true. The legislative delegation, me and Brad, took three publicly elected sitting board members from Bamberg 1 and Bamberg 2, and we put them on the consolidated board because these individuals had already been dealing with consolidation,” Bamberg said.

He continued, “They’re familiar with their own individual prior districts. So you get the institutional knowledge of not just consolidation, but also of the actual district. … Then we picked some non-board members and put them on there. So that works out great for consolidation.”

The board chairpersons of BSD1 and BSD2, Janeth Walker and Beverly Bonaparte, for example, are both members of the new, consolidated board.

Brown said, “All decisions at this point that have to be made for the new fiscal year and the new school year (have been made). Our budgets are done for the year, our staff’s in place for this year, our policies are all in place.”

The superintendent said she is pleased with how well the process has flowed.

“It’s been going good. The board members have been very good and very patient. There’s mandatory new board training. They went through three weeks of meeting back to back to get some of that board training done,” Brown said.

Bamberg County voters will begin electing new members in 2024.

Working to reduce debt

The newly consolidated district has incurred debt, including bonds issued to build Richard Carroll Elementary School in BSD1 and a new BSD2 pre-K-12 school.

“If we’re trying to reach the point of lowering our taxes, we’ve got to get the bond debts paid down. So a lot of attention on my end on the state level is securing funding to help us reduce our bond debt. You’re talking about at least $50 million in outstanding bond debt,” Bamberg said.

The legislator said millions have already been secured in the effort to reduce bond debt, including approximately $8 million from the state Department of Education and $5 million from a $525 million settlement money the state received from a Savannah River Site settlement.

The settlement followed a years-long legal battle between South Carolina and the U.S. Department of Energy over the removal and long-term storage of plutonium at the SRS.

“That’s more money that our school districts have seen come in probably the last 20 years,” Bamberg said.

He is confident the bill will pass the Senate and reach the governor’s desk for signing.

“Oh, without a doubt. It’s just a matter of time … and then we’ll be good to go,” he said.