A plan to build a new Southeast Bulloch High School and repurpose two other schools remains on course but can no longer be, by itself, a mid- to long-range solution for the Bulloch County Schools’ growing need for more classrooms, Superintendent of Schools Charles Wilson said Wednesday.

Since Hyundai Motors announced in May that it will build an electric vehicle and EV battery plant that will employ almost 8,100 people at the Bryan County Mega Site near Interstate 16, Statesboro and Bulloch County leaders have begun talking strategically about the resulting population growth. The plant is slated for construction beginning in January 2023 and production in the first half of 2025.

Wilson now expects that the Board of Education will need to work with the community to plan for more new schools in the next few years. He wouldn’t even rule out a fourth high school as a possibility, he said in a phone interview.

“I think it’s fair to say what we thought was a mid- to long-range plan on the south end of the county might now be a short- to mid-range plan,” Wilson said. “We’re obviously going to have to start looking at what else we’re going to do. As it sits currently, I don’t think we need to change the plans we have, I just think the plans we have now are a phase of a larger plan.”

Fastest growth

Bulloch County’s traditionally rural southeastern section was already experiencing rapid residential growth. County Manager Tom Couch recently noted that U.S. Census projections, prior to the Hyundai plant announcement, showed the Nevils-Stilson area growing by as many as 4,000 people by 2030. The Mega Site is in that same direction, about 30 miles from downtown Statesboro but just five miles from the Bulloch County line in the Ellabell area of Bryan County.

“We think the growth will occur in the Southeast Bulloch area, primarily Brooklet to the south toward the Bryan County line,” Couch said. “Bulloch County will be an attractive option for workforce housing and spin-off business growth as the Savannah Metro area continues to saturate.”

For more than a year now, Wilson and staff have been planning, with the Board of Education’s backing, to build a new, larger Southeast Bulloch High School as the key to a strategy for creating more space for students at all grade levels in the Southeast Bulloch zone.

Current strategy

When the new high school is built, the current SEB High School building would become the new home of Southeast Bulloch Middle School, and the current middle school building would house a new entity, Southeast Bulloch Upper Elementary School. The upper elementary, 16th school in what is now a 15-campus system, could house fourth and fifth grades. By giving up those grades, the Brooklet, Nevils and Stilson elementary schools would then have more classrooms available for prekindergarten through third grade.

“I don’t see us changing any of what we’re doing,” Wilson said Wednesday. “Again, I think it’s just more of a short-term step in a longer direction, as opposed to thinking it was going to be something we could buy time with for a while.”

Asked if the longer-range solution would include additions to those three elementary schools, he said Bulloch County’s leaders and citizens will have to look beyond additions to existing schools.

“We’d be fooling ourselves if we think it won’t involve discussions about new schools throughout this community and county, more schools,” Wilson said. “We can expand schools all day long, but if you start expanding beyond the core capacity of those schools, you’re going to have such problems that you’re better off just building.”

So another question was whether a fourth high school is a possibility.

“I don’t think anything is off the table, let’s put it that way…,” he said. “It’s definitely in the realm of possibility of what we have to discuss.”

Site purchase

Meanwhile, steps continue for Southeast Bulloch High School to get a new building at a location just south of Brooklet, in keeping with the long-established tradition of that school.

By a unanimous 8-0 vote in March, the Bulloch County Board of Education contracted to buy an 89-acre tract on Brooklet-Denmark Road immediately south of SEB Middle School as the site for the new high school. A 109-lot residential subdivision had previously been planned for the tract.

The school board agreed to pay the current owner, Mac’s Landing LLC, $2.35 million for the property when the deal is completed. Meanwhile, the school district was to pay $103 a day from March 1 until the deal is final or the board terminates the contract, which it could due until the end of a 120-day “due diligence” period, around July 1.

An amendment to the contract was listed on the agenda for the board’s monthly meeting originally scheduled for June 9, but that meeting was postponed until June 23 at 6:30 p.m. Now expected to be on the June 23 agenda, the amendment affects “only timing and other details,” Wilson said.

But the price and location remain the same, and an environmental study the school district was required to have done has been successfully completed.

“That’s all still on track and we’re moving forward,” Wilson said.

The actual schedule for the school’s construction remains to be determined, but Wilson said that he and the board are looking at the project “optimistically” in terms of a three-year plan. This now implies a target date for opening at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year.

A new consideration is the current “inflationary bubble” where fast-tracking the project right now could result in higher costs than waiting for the economy to correct itself, he said. He thinks the Hyundai plant might also compete with school projects by “gobbling up available resources” for construction in the area.

Next E-SPLOST

The existing Southeast Bulloch High School building has a rated capacity of 1,227 students. Proposed for 1,601 students, the new SEB High was projected, more than a year ago, to cost $50 million to $60 million. About $15 million was expected from state facilities funding and the current Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or E-SPLOST.

But the majority of the funding would have to come from a five-year extension of the E-SPLOST beyond its Dec. 31, 2023 expiration date. A county referendum must be held by November 2023, at the latest, to extend it without interruption, and Wilson said he hopes to plan for an earlier referendum.

The one new high school would take up most of the revenue from a five-year installment of E-SPLOST, so how any additional schools would be funded becomes another topic for planning.