Officials for Fox Creek High School are renewing the charter school’s long-sought project of establishing a middle school.
Josh Trahan, principal at Fox Creek, said the school is now finalizing its application with the USDA’s Office of Rural Development and hopes to get notice of funding by end of September on what’s estimated to be a $22 million endeavor.
Should that notice come through on time, the school would then go out to bid for a contractor and, at earliest, break ground late next summer.
“With a little luck, we’d open the building in the fall of 2027,” Trahan said. The school, for grades six through eight, would be on the same property as Fox Creek High School.
Established in 2004, Fox Creek High School was originally located on West Martintown Road in North Augusta before moving in 2009 to its Edgefield County location on Shortcut Road.
Even then, just five years in, establishing a middle school was in the mix as a likely future need, Trahan said. Trahan was at the time serving as Fox Creek's assistant principal.
“Once we got out here, that conversation began to grow,” he said. “What do we need to do? How do we continue to establish ourselves. That conversation got louder at times and quieter at times.”
The school picked it up in earnest in 2019 before dropping it when the pandemic hit. Now, that new middle school is back in play at a time when a recent year’s enrollment at the high school gave the “positive scare” of 724 students.
Fox Creek High School has capped enrollment at 800 students — 200 each for grades nine through 12.
State lawmakers are meanwhile looking at expanding school choice: a bill that would extend the state's school voucher program to all South Carolinians, regardless of income, and include charter schools as options for where to take those vouchers, passed the South Carolina House 69-32 March 20.
If that bill becomes law — and makes it through an ongoing state Supreme Court tangle over constitutionality of the first voucher program, passed last year — Trahan said traditional schools may also instate caps on enrollment.
“We better have a plan because they’re building communities around us like crazy,” Trahan said. “We know people are coming into our community. We know the local middle schools are relatively full.”
Being “on the cusp of Aiken County, where everyone has moved out this way” puts Fox Creek in a supportive role for traditional schools while also providing another option, Trahan said.
Of the Merriwether area in particular, “I think the lines are beginning to get crossed because everything is so close to everything else — which is a good thing; it means our community’s booming — it’s just providing all the educational choice you want to put out there for them and making sure that everyone has what they need to be successful,” he said.
“Parents are anxious to have another option,” Sara Ellis said. Ellis is guidance director at Fox Creek High School and is the one giving tours of the school to new families.
Merriwether’s Edgefield County residents rely on just two middle schools: Merriwether Middle School and, 25 miles away in Johnston, JET Middle School.
In Aiken County, Highland Springs Middle opened in time for the current school year and alleviated some of the crowding at Paul Knox Middle.
But Ellis said there’s still a need for another location.
“It would give an opportunity for those students to have a place where they can find their niche that they may not otherwise find somewhere else,” she said.
Tiffany Shepherd, Fox Creek assistant principal, agreed. “We have students here that, if they were at a bigger school, they’d get swallowed by the masses,” she said. “At a smaller school, their personality was able to shine more and they’re able to get involved in more things.”
Part of the push, as Ellis said she’s gotten from parent feedback, is for streamlining a student’s athletics participation.
State High School League rules do not permit a student from another district or organization to practice with another district’s team. For Fox Creek to establish a middle school, it would allow a student to get started where they plan on ending, Ellis said.
“The parents are anxious. And I think when our mission originally started, it was for the Merriwether community,” she said. “Now the parents are like, ‘Bring more. We have younger kids; when will there be a middle school?’”
