Women's Clothing Boutique Near Me Shell Point, SC

The weather Friday -- sunny with a few drops of rain -- was fitting as faculty and students at Shell Point Elementary reveled in one last bash to mark the closing of their school.

"Life Celebration Day" turned the school grounds into a carnival, complete with a giant bounce house, water slides, games, snow cones and balloon animals. Children in kindergarten through fifth grades raced around in bathing suits, basking in the ultimate form of recess, while faculty members laughed and teared up, sometimes at the same moment.

The Beaufort County Board of Education voted in August to close Shell Point at the end of this school year, estimating the closure could save up to $890,000 next school year. The building will be leased to Riverview Charter School for the next two years.

The last day of school at Shell Point is Thursday.

Social worker Alana Tokar said she's "heartbroken" over the decision. She spoke about the pain the decision caused for about two minutes before leaving to fulfill a promise to a student to go down the water slide. Soon, she was soaking wet and laughing with students.

A group of rising fourth-graders gathered around a dunk tank.

Adeline and George Cooler, 9-year-old twins of Shell Point teacher Debbie Cooler, said they're excited to move to fourth grade but agreed another school "won't be as fun as" Shell Point.

"I'll miss this school," Adeline said. George added that other than Friday's bash, hanging out with his teacher was his favorite part of the school year.

The students will be divvied up among other elementary and middle schools next year. Most teachers also will go to other schools in the area.

Switching schools is part of growing up for most kids, physical education teacher Mike Woods said, but it's different for those who teach them.

"The kids are resilient. They'll be okay," he said. "But the teachers here have built some great relationships."

Woods has taught at the school for 25 years. He said he'll teach at Beaufort Middle school next year. His two children attend Riverview and will walk Shell Point's old halls next year.

Woods smiled as he looked around the playground.

"I won't be around when they take the Shell Point sign down," he said. "I don't think I could watch that."

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This story was originally published June 1, 2012, 8:31 PM.

For her 43rd year of educational work, Cynthia Hayes wants to be on the Beaufort County Board of Education.

Hayes, a faculty supervisor for the University of Phoenix, filed as a write-in candidate in September because there are no candidates on the ballot for District 5, which is the Okatie, Burton, Shell Point areas.

Hayes will be running against one other write-in candidate, Gwyneth Saunders, a U.S. Navy veteran and local freelance journalist.

“I just felt that we needed to be represented in that area and servicing the students in Beaufort County,” Hayes said.

Hayes’ career in education started as a special education teacher in Kingstree, South Carolina, in 1979.

In 1988, she began teaching in Beaufort Co. as an adult education teacher and continued in the county for 31 years. Hayes worked as an adult education teacher, special education teacher, assistant principal, special education coordinator, assistant superintendent and administrative lead.

She spent the past 10 years as a faculty supervisor at the University of Phoenix.

“Education is an important thing and it has been very important for me for all those years,” Hayes said. “Even growing up, it was the highlight of my life.”

If elected, her priority with be college and career readiness.

“My priority will be to make sure that all of the students are getting quality teaching in the classroom and preparing students with the skills that they need to be college and career ready,” she said.

As a write-in candidate her name won’t appear on the ballot, and those who want to vote for her will have to write in her name completely and correctly.

With two write-in candidates, the one who gets the most votes will win, election officials said.

“[A challenge is] making sure that I get the information out there for people to write in the name because it will be easy for folks not to write in anything,” Hayes said. “I’m talking to folks, getting some fliers out. I’ve got some signs out on the highways and I’m sending it out on social media.”

The general election is Nov. 8 and early voting in South Carolina begins Oct. 24.

This story was originally published October 13, 2022, 2:46 PM.

Just before sunrise on Thursday, there were reports of Hurricane Dorian’s damage across Beaufort County.

Sections of the county were without power, and trees were reported downed.

Just before sunrise, firefighters with Burton Fire District responded to a mobile home fire on Bonaire Circle near Shell Point. The building was in flames and being fed by the wind when firefighters arrived around 4:45 a.m.

Beaufort City Council member Stephen Murray said in a Facebook post there was little water on the roads in downtown Beaufort just after high tide about 2:30 a.m. in areas that had flooded during storms in past years.

“Still breezy with wind increasing, but hopefully less flooding than what was predicted,” Murray wrote.

Hilton Head Fire & Rescue Division called off service for the island at 1:55 a.m. Thursday morning, citing high winds associated with Hurricane Dorian.

The department planned to restart service around sunrise Thursday, according to fire chief Brad Tadlock.

In the hours when crews were not responding, the department was cataloging calls and prioritizing which ones they would respond to first. Medical calls and downed trees that block roads were the first priority, operations chief Chris Blankenship said.

One tree was down over Hospital Center Boulevard, and another was down across Main Street at Brookdale.

On Wednesday, the department evacuated the three lowest-lying fire stations to the base camp at University of South Carolina campus in Bluffton. Four stations remained operational.

Once it’s safe to cross the bridge, those crews will come to the island and help with cleanup, according to Blankenship.

A station at the Hilton Head Island Airport recorded sustained winds of 36 mph and 58 mph gusts, according to fire rescue.

Bluffton Township Fire District had no emergency calls after midnight.

As of 5 a.m., Hurricane Dorian was a Category 3 storm with 115 mph winds and was moving north at 8 mph. It was located about 80 miles south-southeast of Charleston.

Beaufort County remained under a hurricane warning and a storm surge warning, with the potential for strong wind and life-threatening storm surge, according to the National Weather Service in Charleston.

This story will be updated.

Are you seeing damage across Beaufort County? Send photos, videos or information to newsroom@islandpacket.com or direct message our Island Packet Facebook page or Beaufort Gazette Facebook page.

This story was originally published September 5, 2019, 7:40 AM.

While schools in Beaufort County’s high-growth areas are looking for ways to cope with overcrowding, those in another area are experiencing a contrasting, but equally as concerning problem — dwindling student populations and vacant classrooms.

The total student population for schools in southern Beaufort County has increased by nearly 25 percent over the past five years, according to the district’s annual capitol budgets.

During that same time period, the number of students attending schools north of the Broad River has declined by 7 percent, estimates show.

The district’s ideal capacity for a school is 85 percent, according to Robert Oetting, the district’s chief operations officer. Yet 12 of the 16 schools north of the Broad River are below 70 percent capacity — and most of those are expected to decline even further over the next five years.

Beaufort County School District administrators called the declining student population trend “concerning” in the December update of the district’s 2020-29 Ten-Year Plan and Capital Budget.

“If the trend continues it will be brought to the Board (of Education) for consideration,” the district’s ten-year plan said. “... Where growth is stagnant or in decline, BCSD will need to modernize older buildings, close unused buildings, and develop mechanisms to address population decline.”

When a school reaches a capacity of 50 percent or below, the Beaufort County Board of Education previously had a policy to start considering consolidation.

Two Beaufort County schools — St. Helena Elementary and Lady’s Island Middle — are at that mark and district forecasts show further declines in the coming years at the two facilities.

Lady’s Island Middle School, which can hold up to 1,088 students, is only at 49 percent capacity. If the district added the 226 students who attend Lady’s Island Elementary School to the middle school two miles away — transforming it into a K-8 school — its capacity would still remain below 70 percent capacity, according to district data.

Rich Bisi, founder for the local education organization CARE, said consolidating schools would be an effective way for the school board to responsibly deal with the declining numbers.

Bisi would like to see the district use money saved from closing schools and forgoing the maintenance on those buildings to be put toward increasing compensation for teachers.

“I think there are numerous schools that consolidation would not hurt,” Bisi said in a recent interview. “If anything, it would help the kids and teachers salaries and follow what the school district says itself in its 10-year plan.”

A community committee tasked with reviewing projects for the referendum may recommend that the school board forms a separate committee to look into possible consolidation in the future, Oetting said.

The idea of consolidation, though, has only been mentioned “briefly in passing” at the committee meetings and would likely not play a role in the upcoming referendum, which is planned for November.

At that point, a consolidation study would take at least 8 to 12 months, he said.

Closing schools — whether in Beaufort County and in any county in the county for that matter — is almost always a contentious topic met with blow-back from community members and educators.

A 2008 University of Dayton studied examining the pros and cons of school consolidation found a wide array of benefits to consolidation including additional extracurricular offerings for students, increased student diversity and social stimulation, elevated expertise and experience shared between teachers and faculty and cost savings by decreasing the number of taxpayer dollars spent on facility maintenance and upgrades.

Despite the benefits, consolidation has also proven to have negative effects on students.

A 2000 study by the Rural School and Community Trust, which examined test results from thousands of schools in Georgia, Ohio, Montana, and Texas, found that as schools grew, the negative effects of poverty on student achievement increased. Based on the results, the researchers concluded that the more impoverished a student body is, the smaller the school should be in order to maximize student performance and growth.

If the district does consider future school consolidation in northern Beaufort County, it would not be the first time.

In 2011, the school board spent months debating the closure of one of at least four schools and in the end, decided to close Shell Point Elementary in 2012.

District administrators, citizens and board members considered the school’s capacity, growth potential, building age and condition, distance to other public schools, number of students affected and the marketability of the property for sale or lease.

At that time, the district estimated that the closure of Shell Point Elementary would save the district up to $890,000 the following school year, according to reports by The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette.

But the decision to close Shell Point — just narrowly passed with a 6-5 split vote — faced great opposition from both board members and community members. While some board and community members at that time viewed the closure as a financial necessity, opponents called the decision short-sighted and unjustified, touting the school’s success.

“This is not what any of us want to do, but this is reality,” then-board member Julie Bell said during a 2011 meeting. “We have to make decisions that can benefit all 20,000 kids, not just 500 of them.”

Oetting, the district’s chief operations officer, offered similar sentiments when talking about the potential for consolidation in the coming years.

“The most painful thing you can do to a community is close a school,” Oetting said. “It is not something you look at lightly.”

This story was originally published March 7, 2019, 2:56 PM.

There is so much surrounding us and so much to see in Beaufort SC. The Lowcountry’s amazing natural landscape offers amazing water vistas, beautiful grand oaks draped in Spanish moss and rows of palmetto trees always placed in just the right spot. Surrounded by a myriad of rivers and estuaries, Beaufort is also a haven for watersports, fishing, kayaking and a whole host of other activities.

It’s a nature lover’s paradise around here.

With all of the natural landscape of Beaufort, and with being a coastal town with plenty of large unincorporated areas, our wildlife is something to behold as well.

Among the variety of deer, alligators, turtles, hundreds of species of birds, and even dolphins, one in particular sticks out.

The American bald eagle. They’re everywhere around Beaufort and the sea islands because the national symbol of the U.S.A. loves Beaufort, too.

We see them on Parris Island. We see them on our sea islands. We see them in the maritime forests of Hunting Island beach & state park.

We even see them perched in backyard trees throughout the whole area. You know they’re thriving when you see them while your sitting on the porch enjoying your sweet tea.

That’s because Beaufort is the perfect home for them.

Bald eagles love virtually any kind of wetland habitat including seacoasts, rivers, large lakes or marshes or other large bodies of open water with an abundance of fish.

In 2017 it was estimated that there are a whopping 69 nesting pairs of bald eagles in Beaufort County…compared to only 5 in 1990.

According to the SCDNR website, when tracking of bald eagle nests began in 1977, biologists found just 13 occupied nesting territories in all of South Carolina. In 2016, the agency monitored more than 350 bald eagle nests.

Once a common sight across the entire country, the bald eagle was severely affected in the mid-20th century by a variety of factors. It’s estimated that once upon a time, the bald eagle population was 300,000–500,000, but by the 1950s there were estimates of only 412 nesting pairs left in the U.S.

The bald eagle was declared an endangered species in the U.S. in the 1960s. Through preservation and protection, their numbers began to grow again and the population began to rebound.

In the early 1980s, the estimated total population was 100,000 and that grew to about 110,000–115,000 by 1992. It was officially removed from the endangered species list in 1995, when it was reclassified from endangered to threatened. After spending a few years on the threatened list, bald eagles were officially de-listed altogether on June 28, 2007.

Today, it’s estimated there are over 143,000 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states.

There’s nothing more spectacular to a nature lover than being able to observe wildlife in its natural habitat. Beaufort is a fantastic example of this, with its abundance of nature and beauty, surrounded by water; it’s the perfect home for bald eagles.

Read more about nature in the Lowcountry in our Beaufort Outdoors column.

Everybody’s favorite seafood is back in season in South Carolina. Commercial shrimp trawling opens in all approved South Carolina waters at 8am on Wednesday, May 27th, and a good 2020 shrimping season has been predicted by South Carolina Department of Natural Resources staff biologists.

SCDNR believes that white shrimp abundance this year should be about average or slightly better in comparison to previous similar years and officials set the opening date for shrimp season based on the conditions of the shrimp themselves.

Aboard both commercial and agency vessels, biologists sample and study white shrimp frequently in late spring. One of the things they’re looking for is evidence that a majority of female white shrimp have already spawned at least once, because opening the season too soon could reduce the size of the fall white shrimp crop, which are the offspring of the spring white shrimp.

Shrimping season in South Carolina typically starts in spring with the opening of provisional areas that allow shrimpers to take advantage of the harvest offshore while still protecting the majority of shrimp that have yet to spawn.

This year following a mild winter, South Carolina’s provisional trawling areas opened unusually early, on April 15, 2020.

A local way of life

Shrimping vessels have trawled South Carolina waters since the 1920s but of late they have faced growing challenges. Making ends meet grows harder every year, but today’s shrimpers, like their predecessors on the water, seem to have it in their hearts. Though they talk freely of the obstacles, they find enough benefits to stay in it.

Each new season brings hope for a bountiful catch.

South Carolina’s commercial shrimp calendar typically has 3 seasons. In the spring, there’s an influx of larger roe white shrimp. The summer months are typically defined by a peak in brown shrimp, which are similar to white shrimp in size and taste. Then, in the fall and winter, shrimpers bring in a second crop of white shrimp; which are the offspring of the spring roe shrimp.

Shrimping has been around in South Carolina since long before anyone can remember. In fact it’s been a labor of love for fishermen since before the Civil War and is still alive and kicking today with a thriving market served by a force of dedicated commercial fishermen in the Palmetto State.

Please buy local shrimp and support our local Beaufort SC fishermen.