Three South Carolina Districts Are Sliding Backward as the State Hits Record Highs

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

South Carolina's graduation rate reached 86.7% in 2025, an all-time high. Twenty-seven districts posted their best rate ever. The state produced a record 54,980 graduates.

But not every district is riding that wave. Lexington 2^↗ dropped from 87.9% in 2016 to 75.0% in 2025, a 12.9 percentage-point decline while the state improved by 4.1 points. Darlington^↗ fell from 94.5% to 83.5%, giving up 11.0 points from what was once one of the highest rates in the state. Spartanburg 4^↗ went from 89.4% to 78.8%, losing 10.6 points.

These are not tiny districts where a few students can swing the rate. Lexington 2's cohort is 703 students. Darlington's is 683. These are mid-sized districts with large enough cohorts for the rates to be meaningful, and for the declines to represent hundreds of students who are not graduating on time.

Lexington 2: the steepest fall

Lexington 2's decline is the most dramatic. The district graduated 87.9% of its class of 2016, slightly above the state average. By 2025, it had dropped to 75.0%, 11.7 points below the state average and among the lowest rates of any non-Corridor district.

The decline was not a single cliff. It progressed in stages: 87.9% to 82.1% (2016-2019), then a sharp drop to 70.5% in 2022, a partial recovery to 77.0% in 2023, another dip, and a slight rebound to 75.0% in 2025. The gender gap tells part of the story: male students graduated at just 69.4% in 2025, compared to 81.6% for female students, a 12.2-point gap that is the widest of any large district in the state.

Darlington: from 94.5% to 83.5%

Darlington's story is the most puzzling. The district posted a 94.5% graduation rate in 2016, one of the highest in South Carolina. By 2025, it had lost 11.0 points, landing at 83.5%.

The decline happened almost entirely between 2016 and 2022, when the rate bottomed at 80.2%. The last three years have shown partial recovery: 80.2% to 82.0% to 83.5%. But the district remains 11 points below where it started, and the recovery pace (about 1.1 points per year) would take another 10 years to return to the 2016 level.

A 683-student cohort is large enough that this is not random noise. Something changed in Darlington between 2016 and 2022 that undid years of strong graduation outcomes.

By the numbers: If Lexington 2 had maintained its 2016 graduation rate of 87.9% through 2025, approximately 91 more students would have graduated from just this year's cohort of 703. Over nine years, the cumulative shortfall is roughly 650 students.

The contrast that matters

The declining districts are not clustered geographically or demographically. Lexington 2 is a suburban district south of Columbia. Darlington is a Pee Dee district along I-95. Spartanburg 4 is an Upstate district. They do not share obvious structural characteristics that would predict synchronized decline.

What they share is timing: all three were above the state average in 2016 and are now below it. All three experienced their steepest drops between 2018 and 2022. And all three are now improving, but slowly, too slowly to return to their former levels anytime soon.

The statewide improvement narrative (seven consecutive years of gains, 27 districts at all-time highs, a record number of graduates) is accurate. But it is an average. Beneath it, these three districts represent communities where the graduation pipeline is producing fewer completers per cohort than it did a decade ago, even as the state around them improves.

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

One in Four Students With Disabilities Won't Graduate on Time in South Carolina

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Students with disabilities in South Carolina graduate at 61.6%. The state average is 86.7%. The gap between them (25.1 percentage points) is the second widest in the state's data, behind only youth in foster care at 44.8%.

The gap has narrowed. In 2016, it was 30.5 points, with the special education rate at 52.1%. Over nine years, students with disabilities gained 9.5 percentage points, closing the distance by about a point per year. That pace is consistent and meaningful. It represents hundreds of additional graduates from a cohort of 8,381 students.

It is also, at the current trajectory, a 25-year project to reach parity.

The math of the gap

The special education graduation gap has narrowed in every era of the data: pre-2018, post-2018 methodology change, through COVID, and after. In 2016, the gap was 30.5 points. It compressed to 26.2 by 2019, widened slightly to 26.7 during the COVID years (2021), then resumed closing: 25.7 in 2022, 25.3 in 2024, and 25.1 in 2025.

Both lines are moving upward. All students went from 82.6% to 86.7%. Special education students went from 52.1% to 61.6%. But the special education line moves slower. In the last three years, all students gained 2.9 points; special education students gained 3.5. The gap is closing, but at a pace measured in fractions of a point per year.

By the numbers: 8,381 students with disabilities entered South Carolina's class of 2025 graduation cohort. About 5,163 graduated on time. The remaining 3,218 did not, more than the total enrollment of most SC school districts.

District variation tells a different story

The statewide 61.6% rate obscures enormous district-level variation. Among districts with at least 100 special education students in their cohort, rates in 2025 ranged from 44.3% at Orangeburg^↗ to 80.6% at Anderson 1^↗.

Five districts had special education rates below 55%: Orangeburg (44.3%), Limestone Charter Association (49.6%), Darlington^↗ (50.0%), Oconee (50.4%), and Lexington 2^↗ (52.9%). At these rates, roughly half of students with disabilities are not graduating on time.

At the top, several districts demonstrate that much higher rates are achievable. Anderson 1 graduated 80.6% of its special education students. York 4 (Fort Mill)^↗ reached 74.6%. Horry^↗ hit 70.1%. Greenville^↗, with the largest special education cohort in the state at 856 students, posted 69.9%, up from 50.8% in 2018, a 19.1 percentage-point improvement.

Greenville's trajectory is particularly instructive. The district improved its special education rate by 19 points in seven years while growing its special education cohort from 744 to 856 students. The improvement was not achieved by narrowing the denominator. It was achieved by graduating more students from a larger pool.

What 38.4% failure looks like

A 61.6% graduation rate means 38.4% of students with disabilities did not earn a diploma within four years. Some of those students will graduate in a fifth year. Some will earn alternative credentials. Many will not finish at all.

South Carolina's Employability Credential (an alternative pathway for students with significant cognitive disabilities) provides a route to completion outside the traditional diploma. But it does not count toward the four-year graduation rate, and it serves a narrow subset of the special education population. The bulk of non-graduates are students with learning disabilities, emotional disabilities, and other conditions that should not be incompatible with diploma attainment.

The 25-point gap is not a reflection of disability severity. It is a reflection of a system that has improved for students with disabilities at roughly the same absolute pace as for all students (gaining about one point per year) but started from so far behind that decades of improvement would be needed to reach parity.