Berkeley 01 - EdTribune SC - South Carolina Education Data

Nearly Half of SC Districts Hit Record Lows

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Richland 01^↗ enrolled 21,468 students this year. That is fewer than any year since at least 2014-15, a loss of 3,088 from its 12-year peak. It is not alone. Thirty-eight of South Carolina's 81 school districts recorded their lowest enrollment in at least a dozen years in 2025-26, and 64 of 81 declined. Only seven districts are at all-time highs. Two of those are charter operators.

The 2025-26 school year erased South Carolina's post-COVID recovery in a single stroke. The state dropped from 796,780 students to 789,086, a loss of 7,694 students (0.97%). That is the largest non-COVID decline in the data window. But the state-level figure understates how widespread the damage is: nearly four out of every five districts shrank, and the losses span every region of the state.

The districts that hit bottom

The 38 districts at record lows are not a homogeneous group. The list includes large suburban systems like Beaufort 01^↗ (20,819 students, down 7.0% from peak) and Lexington 05^↗ (16,452, down 6.0%), mid-sized districts like Sumter 01^↗ (13,314, down 22.6%), and rural districts that have been emptying for over a decade.

The deepest losses, measured as percentage decline from peak enrollment, concentrate along the I-95 Corridor. McCormick 01^↗ has lost 42.2% of its students since its 12-year high, falling from 835 to 483. Lee 01^↗ is down 42.1%. Williamsburg 01^↗ lost 41.6%, Allendale 01^↗ lost 40.3%, and Colleton 01^↗ lost 30.3%. These are the same communities named in the landmark Abbeville v. State of South Carolina lawsuit over education funding adequacy.

Six districts have declined every single year in the 12-year data window, an unbroken 11-year streak of losses: Colleton 01, Darlington 01^↗, Fairfield 01^↗, McCormick 01, Marion 10^↗, and Williamsburg 01. Three more districts are in 10-year decline streaks. For a district like McCormick, which now enrolls just 483 students, each year of further loss raises an existential question about whether the district can sustain independent operations.

The flippers: growth reversed overnight

Seventeen districts that grew in 2024-25 reversed course and declined in 2025-26. The largest flippers were among the state's biggest systems. Charleston 01^↗ gained 458 students last year and lost 800 this year. Horry 01^↗ gained 457 and lost 649. Berkeley 01^↗ gained 319 and lost 97. York 04^↗, a Charlotte-metro spillover district that grew 50.5% from 12,256 to 18,445 between 2015 and 2025, lost 321 students in a single year.

These are not rural systems in long-term decline. They are coastal and suburban districts that had been carrying the state's enrollment recovery. Their simultaneous reversal in 2025-26 signals something more structural than a one-year fluctuation.

Horry County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation with 3.8% population growth, is losing public school students even as residents pour in. Horry County Schools reported 3,353 student withdrawals since the start of the school year, with the largest share of departing families citing a desire for "more options."

Where the students went

The seven districts at all-time highs tell part of the story. Charter Institute at Erskine^↗ gained 2,362 students to reach 28,376, making it the fastest-growing district entity in the state. Limestone Charter Association^↗ added 1,263 to reach 8,650. SC Public Charter School District^↗ gained 732 to reach 22,115. Together, the three charter operators added 4,357 students in 2025-26, absorbing 57% of the 7,694-student net state loss.

Charter operator enrollment has grown from 17,024 in 2015 to 59,141 in 2026, a 247% increase. That growth accelerated sharply after 2020: charter operators enrolled 30,764 students in 2019-20 and nearly doubled to 59,141 by 2025-26.

The only traditional districts at all-time highs were Spartanburg 02^↗ (12,143), Spartanburg 05^↗ (11,230), Anderson 04^↗ (3,113), Spartanburg 04^↗ (3,007), and the Governor's School for Agriculture at John De La Howe (91 students). Three of the five are Spartanburg County subdivisions.

South Carolina's Education Scholarship Trust Fund, launched in 2024, adds another channel. All 10,000 scholarships for 2025-26 were awarded, each worth $7,500. The program cap rises to at least 15,000 for 2026-27, with eligibility expanding from 300% to 500% of the federal poverty level. Not every ESTF recipient is a former public school student, but the program's rapid scale-up coincides precisely with the sharpest enrollment contraction in the state's recent history.

Fiscal pressure follows the headcount

South Carolina funds districts through a weighted pupil formula tied to Average Daily Membership. When enrollment drops, state funding follows. Greenville 01^↗, the state's largest district at 76,398 students, lost 1,376 students in 2025-26 after losing 590 in 2024-25, back-to-back declines after years of growth. With more than 40% of local public school funding tied to headcount, those losses translate directly into fewer teaching positions.

"What this is, is a disparity in State Aid to Classroom funding that gives charter school students ten times more in new money than traditional public schools." -- Tim Waller, Greenville County Schools media director, Fox Carolina, May 2025

In the 2025-26 state budget, approximately $90 million in State Aid to Classrooms funding went to charter schools serving roughly 57,000 students, about $1,500 per student. Traditional districts serving roughly 710,000 students received approximately $22 million, about $30 per student. Charter leaders argue the disparity reflects their lack of access to local property tax revenue; traditional district leaders call it a structural inequity that compounds enrollment-driven funding losses.

The pipeline question

The 2025-26 reversal is hard to dismiss as a temporary correction. South Carolina's pre-COVID growth pattern was steady: the state added 30,203 students between 2015 and 2020, growing every year. COVID erased 20,250 of those students in a single year. The recovery was real, with the state clawing back to a peak of 796,780 by 2025. Then the 2025-26 cliff dropped enrollment below the 2023-24 level.

Sixty-four of 81 districts declined. The 17 that grew added a combined 5,279 students. The 64 that shrank lost 12,973. That 2.5-to-1 ratio between losses and gains means the state's enrollment trajectory now depends on whether charter operator growth can continue to offset traditional district losses, and whether the ESTF program accelerates the migration or merely absorbs students who would have left anyway.

The distinction matters for districts like Sumter 01, which has declined for 10 consecutive years, losing 3,878 students (22.6%) from its peak. For a district already at its smallest, another year of loss does not simply shrink the budget proportionally. It creates per-student cost increases as fixed costs for transportation, facilities, and administration spread across fewer students.

The number of districts at record lows spiked to 62 during COVID's nadir in 2020-21, then fell to 33 by 2022-23 as recovery took hold. It has now climbed back to 38 and rising, without a pandemic to blame.

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How a Small College Built SC's Sixth-Largest School District

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: SC 2025-26 Enrollment.

Erskine College is a 187-year-old liberal arts school in Due West, South Carolina, a town of fewer than 3,000 people. In 2017, it declared itself a charter school authorizer, a move permitted under state law but anticipated by no one in the Legislature. By 2025-26, the Charter Institute at Erskine^↗ enrolls 28,376 students across 28 schools statewide, making it the sixth-largest school district in South Carolina. Two students separate it from Richland 02^↗, the fifth-largest.

Seven years ago, it enrolled 8,450.

A 235.8% Surge, Mostly in One Year

The growth trajectory reveals a critical detail often lost in the headline number. Erskine did not add 19,926 students gradually. In a single year, between 2019-20 and 2020-21, enrollment jumped from 10,003 to 23,750, a gain of 13,747 students, or 137.4%.

That spike coincided with a reorganization of the charter sector. The SC Public Charter School District^↗, the state's original charter authorizer, saw enrollment drop from 20,761 to 15,773 in the same year. Schools moved between authorizers, carrying their students with them. The net effect: Erskine absorbed a substantial share of the existing charter sector rather than growing purely through new enrollment.

Since that reorganization, Erskine has continued to grow, adding 4,626 students from 2021 to 2026, a 19.5% increase over five years. That is real expansion, but it is a different story than 235.8% growth implies. The headline number reflects a structural rearrangement layered on top of genuine enrollment gains.

The Authorizer Landscape

South Carolina's charter sector runs through three operators. Their trajectories are starkly different.

The SC Public Charter School District, established by the Legislature and governed by a state-appointed board, grew steadily from 17,024 in 2015 to 25,873 in 2018. Then it contracted, dropping to 15,773 by 2021 as schools transferred to Erskine. It has since recovered to 22,115, essentially flat over 12 years.

The Limestone Charter Association^↗, authorized by Limestone University, appeared in the data in 2023 with 1,888 students and grew to 8,650 by 2026, a 358.2% increase. But Limestone University closed in May 2025, leaving its 13 schools to find new sponsors. Most transferred to the SC Public Charter School District, carrying roughly $99.4 million in state funding. Limestone's explosive growth curve will end as abruptly as it began.

Combined, the three charter operators enrolled 59,141 students in 2025-26, or 7.5% of South Carolina's total enrollment. In 2015, one operator enrolled 17,024 students, 2.2% of the total. The charter share has more than tripled.

Where the Students Came From

The charter sector gained 30,378 students between 2019 and 2026. Traditional districts lost 22,785 over the same period. The state's total enrollment rose by 7,593, meaning charter growth did not merely absorb the state's overall gains. It exceeded them by a factor of four.

Among traditional districts, 49 of 68 lost students from 2019 to 2026. Sumter 01^↗ lost the most in absolute terms: 3,273 students, a 19.7% decline. Berkeley 01^↗ and Horry 01^↗, two of the state's largest districts, gained 3,135 and 2,907 respectively, but those gains mask a broader contraction across the traditional sector.

It is not possible to determine from enrollment data alone how many of those traditional-district losses represent families choosing charter schools versus families leaving the state, shifting to private schools, or choosing homeschooling. The charter sector's growth and the traditional sector's decline are parallel trends, not necessarily a direct transfer.

How Erskine Became a District

South Carolina law allows institutions of higher education to authorize charter schools. The provision was designed for research universities partnering with laboratory schools. No one anticipated that a small private college would use it to build a statewide network of dozens of schools across multiple counties.

State law allows authorizers to retain 2% of state aid flowing to the schools they sponsor. For Erskine, with 28,376 students, that amounts to roughly $5.6 million per year. The S.C. Legislative Audit Council completed a review in 2025, clearing the institute of favoritism and conflicts of interest but flagging $820,000 in travel spending between 2023 and 2025.

"No one in the Legislature anticipated that a private college would declare itself a charter school authorizer and, having done so, appropriate for itself tax funds to distribute to as many charter schools as it chose to authorize." — The Post and Courier, Dec. 4, 2025

The audit's "all clear" on legal compliance did not quiet critics. Stanford's CREDO, in its 2023 national charter study, found South Carolina charter students underperforming their peers in both reading and math, one of only three states where charter students did not outperform traditional public school students. The state Senate passed a bill in February 2026 creating additional oversight for charter school authorizers.

Erskine's Student Body

Erskine's demographic profile diverges from the state as a whole. The institute's student body is 56.1% white, compared with 45.8% statewide. Black students make up 25.1% of Erskine's enrollment versus 30.0% statewide. Hispanic students: 10.1% versus 14.8%.

The economic profile is closer to the state average: 55.1% of Erskine students are classified as economically disadvantaged, compared with 59.9% statewide. This is not a sector serving exclusively affluent families, though it does skew whiter than the state's public school population as a whole.

The Sixth-Largest District

Greenville 01^↗, the state's largest traditional district at 76,398 students, is nearly three times Erskine's size. But Erskine is larger than 93.1% of South Carolina's traditional districts. It enrolls more students than Aiken 01 (22,742), more than Dorchester 02 (25,716), and more than five of the seven individual Spartanburg districts.

A new funding bill, Senate Bill 774, would require the Department of Education to redirect local revenue per pupil from traditional districts to charter authorizers for each student attending a charter school. The bill would affect 70,000 to 80,000 students statewide. If enacted, it would formalize the financial transfer that charter growth already represents.

What Happens Next

The charter sector is projected to keep growing. Erskine alone plans to add at least eight new schools in the coming academic year, with projections to reach 40,000 students. The Limestone schools that transferred to the SC Public Charter School District will inflate that operator's numbers in future years. The combined charter share could approach 10% within two to three years.

A school building does not get cheaper to heat when 50 students leave. A bus route does not shorten. Per-pupil funding follows departing students, but the superintendent's salary, the bus fleet, and the boiler bill do not scale down. In a state where 49 of 68 traditional districts shrank over the past seven years, charter growth is no longer a policy experiment. It is the second-largest enrollment story in South Carolina.

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White Students Fell Below 50% Seven Years Ago. The Gap Keeps Widening.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2019, for the first time in the state's history, white students dropped below half of South Carolina's public school enrollment. That crossing was not a one-year anomaly. It was a hinge. In the seven years since, white share has fallen another 4.2 percentage points, from 49.98% to 45.76%, and the rate of decline is speeding up.

Between 2015 and 2020, white share fell 2.3 points over five years. Between 2020 and 2026, it fell 3.7 points over six years, a 33% faster annual rate. This is not a state that tipped and stabilized. South Carolina is a state where the underlying demographic engine is still accelerating.

The arithmetic under the headline

The statewide numbers mask a counterintuitive pattern: South Carolina's total enrollment actually grew 4.3% over this period, from 756,866 to 789,086. The state is gaining students. But the students it is gaining look nothing like the students it is losing.

White enrollment dropped by 30,633 students (-7.8%) since 2015. Black enrollment dropped by 41,256 students (-14.9%), a steeper decline in both absolute and percentage terms. Together, these two groups lost 71,889 students.

Hispanic enrollment nearly doubled over the same period. From 60,023 students in 2015 to 116,754 in 2026, a gain of 56,731 (+94.5%). Hispanic students went from 7.9% of enrollment to 14.8%. Multiracial students, tracked separately since 2017, added 21,312 (+73.2%). These two groups alone added 78,043 students, more than offsetting the combined white and Black losses.

The result is not simply a Black-to-white story or even a white-to-Hispanic story. It is a shift from a two-group state to a genuinely multiethnic one. The Shannon diversity index, which measures how evenly enrollment is distributed across racial groups, rose from 1.019 to 1.281. South Carolina's student body in 2026 is measurably more pluralistic than at any point in the data.

The acceleration is real, but uneven

Year-over-year declines in white share were remarkably consistent from 2016 to 2019, hovering between -0.42 and -0.49 percentage points per year. Then COVID hit. In 2021, the drop doubled to -0.84 points, the largest single-year shift in the dataset. After a partial snapback in 2022 (-0.39 points), the rate climbed again: -0.61 in 2023, -0.60 in 2024, and -0.87 in 2025, the steepest year on record.

The 2026 figure, -0.37 points, looks like a deceleration, but this follows the record -0.87 drop in 2025. One moderated year does not break the trend: the post-2020 average decline is -0.61 points per year, compared to -0.46 points in the pre-COVID era. At the current pace, white share will fall below 40% before 2035.

What is driving the shift

Three forces are reshaping South Carolina's classrooms simultaneously.

The most visible is Hispanic population growth. South Carolina is the fastest-growing state in the country, adding nearly 80,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025 alone, with 66,622 net domestic migrants. The state's Hispanic population grew to roughly 436,000 by mid-2024, about 8% of the total population. But Hispanic students are 14.8% of the school-age population, nearly double their share of the overall population, reflecting higher birth rates and younger household composition.

The growth is geographically concentrated. Greenville 01^↗ added 6,764 Hispanic students since 2015, more than any other district. Horry 01^↗ added 5,241, Charleston 01^↗ added 4,748, and Berkeley 01^↗ added 3,851. These four coastal and Upstate districts account for more than a third of the statewide Hispanic gain.

But growth is also reshaping rural districts. Jasper 01^↗ is now 58.4% Hispanic. Saluda 01 is 48.0%. Beaufort 01^↗ is 33.2%. In these communities, the classroom demographic arrived ahead of the political infrastructure to support it.

The second force is multiracial identification. The 73.2% surge in multiracial students since 2017 partly reflects families choosing the "two or more races" category who previously selected a single race. Federal reporting standards changed in 2010 to allow multiracial identification, and adoption has increased steadily since. Some of this growth represents genuine demographic change through interracial families; some is a reclassification of students who already existed in the system. The data cannot distinguish between the two.

The third force is Black enrollment decline. Black students dropped from 36.7% to 30.0% of enrollment, a loss of 41,256 students. This decline exceeds the white loss in absolute terms and far exceeds it in percentage terms (-14.9% vs. -7.8%). The mechanisms here are less clear. South Carolina's overall population is growing, not shrinking. One contributing factor may be the growth of school choice. The state's Education Scholarship Trust Fund awarded all 10,000 ESA scholarships worth $7,500 each for 2025-26, with the cap rising to 15,000 for 2026-27. Declining birth rates among Black families nationally offer suggestive context, but no South Carolina-specific research directly links demographic change to this enrollment pattern.

11 districts crossed the line

In 2015, 48 of South Carolina's 89 districts were majority-minority. By 2026, 50 of 81 districts are. The raw count has not moved much, but the composition has: 11 districts that were white-majority in 2015 have crossed to majority-minority.

The largest flips are instructive. Lexington 04^↗ saw its white share fall from 66.2% to 45.8%, a 20.4-point drop, driven heavily by Hispanic growth (26.9% Hispanic share in 2026). Aiken 01^↗ dropped from 53.4% to 42.0%. Anderson 05^↗ went from 54.7% to 44.2%. Greenville 01^↗, the state's largest district, crossed below 50% on its way from 56.5% to 47.4%. Dorchester 02^↗ and Berkeley 01^↗ both flipped, part of the broader Charleston metro transformation.

These are not urban-core districts. They are suburban and exurban communities in the state's growth corridors. The demographic shift is no longer confined to historically majority-Black rural districts. It is arriving in the districts where white families have been moving.

What this means for schools

A state where no racial group holds a majority faces a different kind of operational challenge than one where a single group dominates. Bilingual education staffing, for example, is calibrated to a population that has nearly doubled in 12 years. Districts where Hispanic enrollment was 5% in 2015 and is 20% in 2026 have had to build language programs from scratch.

The fiscal question is equally pressing. South Carolina's school funding formula distributes weighted pupil allocations that adjust for student characteristics. A student body that is growing more diverse in linguistic background and shrinking in its historically largest groups creates a mismatch between the districts experiencing the most rapid change and the ones with the institutional capacity to absorb it.

For Black enrollment, the 14.9% decline poses a separate set of questions. The state's Birth-to-Five data shows that 26.7% of births are to Black mothers, compared to 30.0% of current enrollment. The pipeline is narrowing. Whether this reflects families choosing private options, leaving the state, or declining birth rates is not yet clear from enrollment data alone.

South Carolina did not reach a demographic plateau after crossing below 50% white in 2019. It accelerated past it. Every district in the state will get more diverse. The only variable is how soon.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.