West Columbia school’s grand opening brings new traffic headaches

It’s 7:27 a.m. on a Tuesday, the second day of school for most students in the Cayce-West Columbia school district. It is also the second day for the new Riverbank Elementary School, which consolidated two West Columbia elementary schools into one.

At least 20 vehicles line the turning lane on Sunset Boulevard between Hook Avenue and Cougar Drive, right off U.S. 378 where Riverbank sits, next to Northside Middle School. These cars don’t block other traffic on Sunset, but it takes four and a half minutes to make it down that stretch from Hook Avenue to the light at Cougar Drive, where a school safety police officer is guiding vehicles.

Monday’s traffic, however, was much worse. One woman took to a West Columbia-Cayce Facebook group to gripe about how backed up U.S. 378 was. She said she was headed toward Columbia from Lexington.

“The inside lane is at a standstill,” she wrote.

Another woman commented on the photo, saying her child attends Riverbank.

“I don’t know who would ever think combining two schools and putting them next to another school would be a good idea,” she wrote.

On the first day of school, Stephanie Sharpe said she sat through 12 cycles of the light on Cougar Drive. She decided to park at a nearby bank and walk her kindergarten-age son, Connor, over to Riverbank.

But Tuesday was much better. It took only one cycle of green-yellow-red for her to get Connor to school.

Riverbank Principal David Sims stands outside at the drop-off area in front of the school and guides the cars.

“All the way down,” he says and motions with his hand for a parent to pull up to the end of the drop-off loop.

Sims said Tuesday’s traffic was more manageable, but all the traffic was to be expected. The first three days of school are usually the busiest. There is a lot of “newness,” he said, especially at a new school, and especially at an elementary school, where parents want to walk their children in on the first day.

On Monday, Sims said, only a couple hundred of Riverbank’s 1,100 students rode buses to school. It was almost 8:30 a.m., 40 minutes after the tardy bell, before things settled down, he said.

Some young students didn’t know which buses they were supposed to be on, so Riverbank staffers spent the morning of the first day calling parents to check, Sims said. Then at dismissal, staffers had to make sure the little ones didn’t get in the incorrect bus or car. That problem is being mitigated by requiring parents to have signs with their child’s name in the windshield of their car.

“It was a fun day,” Sims said. “I went home tired, I’ll tell you that much.”

As he and other teachers opened doors, greeted parents and instructed kids with backpacks bigger than their bodies on where to go, a familiar face walks by him.

“Much better off 378,” she tells him. “World of a difference.”

Sims chuckles. Then, his walkie-talkie chirps. Another staffer is updating him on the line of students still in the cafeteria at 7:44 a.m. Most of the students are in the building, but there are still some delays.

“We’ll just keep tweaking until we get it down to a science,” he says into the walkie.

By 7:47 a.m., traffic in the drop-off loop has slowed and just a few stragglers are hopping out of cars.

Even still, a white pickup truck pulls up to the front at 7:56 a.m. and a father and son get out. It was unclear if they were late because of traffic.

“What time does school actually start?” the father asks one of the teachers in the drop-off area. “Y’all are going to have a lot of late kids. I don’t think this is going to work.”

At 8:07, there are only a handful of cars left in the loops of Riverbank and Northside. Most of the school traffic on Sunset Boulevard has dissipated.

This story was originally published August 21, 2018 at 11:47 AM.