Could new charter school near Columbia force district staff cuts or tax increase?
Lexington-Richland 5 school district leaders could be faced with a tough choice next year: try to raise more money through local taxes, or find savings by making cuts elsewhere.
The school district expects that the opening of a new campus for Gray Collegiate Academy in Irmo next year will have an impact on the district. The state uses a per-pupil formula to allocate funding for local school districts, and the expectation is that the new Gray campus will pull students out of Lexington-Richland 5 schools. But as the district looks over its budget plans for the 2025-26 school year, officials can’t know what that formula will look like. The state Department of Education will set the formula based on attendance figures from the fifth day of school next fall.
While the exact impact is unknown, district leaders do expect there will be one.
“There’s a good chance we’re going to lose kids,” board member Catherine Huddle said at Monday’s budget workshop. “Even if the state doesn’t know about it, we know about it.”
After this story was published, Gray Collegiate principal Brian Newsome posted to the school’s Facebook page that Gray expects to enroll 600 students at its Irmo campus next year, and Lexington-Richland 5, which has around 17,000 students, will not be negatively affected.
“This represents an extremely small percentage compared to LR5’s enrollment, and the reality is the plurality of students who attend the Irmo campus will not live within the LR5 boundaries,” Newsome wrote.
He said 85 students currently attending the school’s West Columbia campus reside in Lexington-Richland 5.
“Schools and districts have many choices to construct a responsible budget, and those decisions lie in the hands of the LR5 school board,” Newsome said. “But in my decades of experience in school leadership, a new school opening with just a small sliver of the capacity of a large school district is not a significant cost driver for the next budget.”
The board didn’t come to any decision on next year’s budget at the workshop, but heard how much it would cost the district to reach certain goals.
In total, 64% of Lexington-Richland 5’s funding comes from state appropriations. The state also mandated a 2% increase for school bus drivers, which will be an additional $385,683, plus an additional $4.8 million to increase teachers’ starting salaries to $49,000. About $1.3 million would be needed to hire 16 additional teachers in order to reduce class sizes. The district is also working with Lexington County to update its tax assessment, which is expected to allow the district to raise the rate at which it collects taxes locally, if the board thinks it needs to. The district has an expected unassigned fund balance of between $36 million and $43 million.
But Superintendent Akil Ross warned at the budget workshop that the district couldn’t attempt to factor any expected loss of students into its planning for the next budget year.
“We have to prepare for every child,” the superintendent said. “I worry if there’s an arbitrary piece in there, and then we aren’t prepared to take them. We can’t just make up a number without a rationale.”
Huddle said there are areas the district can look to save money if it needs to. She said the district could look at the FIVE program, originally set up during the COVID pandemic to provide a dedicated teacher for students who preferred online lessons after schools reopened for in-person learning. She said the program may have outlived its original purpose. Some smaller-enrollment, in-person classes could also be cut, she said.
“If the class size is small, should it exist?” Huddle asked. “There are many alternatives for students who want a virtual education.”
She also questioned the number of administrative staff the district has in its main office, away from the classroom.
“We’ve added several net positions since I’ve been on the board, we’ve added ... a lot of people with the title of ‘secretary,’” she said. “If we want to put a focus on teachers, we have to look at our spending on anything besides teachers.”
While Huddle said she was “not proposing to put someone out of a job,” Ross said that would likely be the impact of looking for savings in the district’s office staff.
“We can’t take a secretary and turn them into a teacher,” Ross said. He added he also doesn’t “want to say to a family, we cut this program, go find it somewhere else.”
Board member Mike Satterfield, who previously served as the principal at Chapin High School, told the board, “I never had too many secretaries or bookkeepers.”
“I always had the minimum, and I tried to compliment them as many times as I could and buy them Chick-fil-A sandwiches and things like that, because they really worked overtime and did a great job,” he said.
Rather than cut positions, board member Kevin Scully said the district may have to look to new ways to raise revenue, if that’s what’s necessary to meet the schools’ academic goals.
“If you don’t invest in education, you’re not going to get the results you desire, you’re not going to maintain competitiveness with other districts, and you’re going to fall behind,” he said. “If you think we’re in bad shape today, wait until we fall behind academically.”
But Huddle argued that the district had become too dependent on emergency funding dating from the pandemic, which has now expired.
“If that means a millage increase, then that’s what we need,” she said. “But we need to treat this way we would our family or if we owned a business. ... Before we go to our taxpayers and business owners with a millage increase, we need to be able to say we left no stone unturned.”
This story was originally published April 10, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
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