All for Stono and Stono for All!

It’s been two weeks since the Charleston County School District changed its mind and decided it would rebuild Stono Park Elementary, and still the mood is celebratory when the Ladies of DuWapp get together.
Even though only one of them, Latoya Bennett, actually has kids at Stono, it’s all hugs and high-fives for Bennett, Meredith Demetre, Frances Waites, and Carmen Nash when they got together at the former campus on Friday.
Eight decades ago, Charleston County built Stono Park for the littlest kids in West Ashley. And as the jokes went, that’s when the school district stopped maintaining the facilities.
Weak air-conditioning, mold, undulating floors, and a trailer park of mobile classrooms out back at the school was evidence that something had to be done.
The school district included the school several years ago for funding on its current local options sales tax referendum for rebuilding and renovation, not tipping its hand as to which it preferred.
Confronted with ever-increasing needs at the nearby high school and across the district, the School Board announced that it wanted to scrimp.
The district recommended rebuilding the school, which does an impressive job getting its kids up to snuff despite them hailing from some of the toughest neighborhoods in West Ashley.
One of the arguments was that the school’s population was below 300 students, and the specter of closing the school altogether and reassigning the students to other schools began to creep into discussions.
And that’s when the Ladies of DuWapp swung into action. Already involved, informed, and organized on other issues facing the neighborhoods and commercial areas surrounding the intersections of Savannah Highway and Dupont and Wappoo roads, they just added saving the neighborhood school to their to-do list.
And, by gum, they squeaky-wheeled loudly and long enough that the district bent to their wishes. But it wasn’t easy.
Endless hours were spent attending governmental and school meetings, making up flyers, calling other families, meeting with City Councilmembers regularly for morning coffee klatches; they did it all.
Demetre is the ringleader of the loose coterie, and praised her friends for the “countless” hours they’ve put in.
“The district and the School Board did the right thing, which they should have done in the first place; I just wish it hadn’t taken so much time and taken so long,” says Demetre, who serves on a capital improvements committee in the district.
“We were unsure what was going to happen after the district came back to us with so many different proposals, from a $6 million renovation to a $9 million renovation” that got rid of the trailers.
School district chief operating officer Jeff Borowy, who until recently has been in charge of all district construction, said he asked for and was given just short of $25 million for a new school on the same site.
It will be a two-story school that won’t have trailers, but will have space for 500 students. Borowy said he expected the Dist. 10 Constituent Board, which oversees some operational matters of schools in West Ashley, would soon redraw the enrollment borders for the school.
The Dist. 10 board recently unanimously recommended the new school.
Currently, Stono Park students are being taught in a swing-space in the former St. Andrews High School, along with two other schools.
A new head of construction projects for the district, Reggie McNeil, will be named next week, “but he will work for me,” said Borowy, who had been the district’s liaison to West Ashley this year.
Borowy described a complicated path the district will have to take to raise the money for the new school. On top of the $6 million already set aside for the scrapped renovations, the district is giving up on an enhanced bus parking lot on Azalea Drive in North Charleston to redirect close to an additional $6 million to the new Stono Park project.
Borowy said that the district would depend on continuing increases in sales tax revenues and saved monies, and borrowing for the rest of the money.
Designing the school will take the next year, with construction expected to be completed by fall of 2019.
Demetre said she would consider sending her youngest child to the new school, but worries that Stono Park will still be in a swing space that has some problems, like too-high toilets and sinks.
Demetre said all three of her kids asked her why she and the other ladies were so committed. “They kept asking why do all the work of we don’t go there; and I said it was just the right thing to do.”