Governor's School students to get more elbow room

Groundbreaking ceremony to be held this morning

Mary-Kate Spillane knows plenty of motivated Lowcountry high school students who could benefit from the rigorous education offered at the S.C. Governor's School for Science and Mathematics.

Spillane, a former Fort Dorchester High School student who now attends the residential high school in Hartsville, said she's received top-notch instruction and learned other lessons, such as time management, by living away from home. The school's size limits the number of students accepted each year to only 130 juniors and seniors from across the state.

A long-awaited addition will change that. A groundbreaking ceremony with Darlington County lawmakers and community members will be held this morning for a new $15 million building that will complete the Governor's School campus. The new facility will house an auditorium, gym and science labs and also provide enough space for the school to more than double its current enrollment.

"A lot of students really want to be here, but it's competitive," Spillane said. "It will be great when more students can come."

State lawmakers approved the expansion last year, and their decision was a relief for school President Murray Brockman. The school's current building opened in 2003 but was always viewed as a partial facility, Brockman said.

Although the school was promised additional space, it took years of lobbying to convince lawmakers to fund the addition, he said. As the school community waited, students walked to Coker College to use chemistry labs and played basketball at the Hartsville YMCA.

"Our kids have been extremely flexible, but everyone has agreed that we needed better facilities to further help our young people succeed here," Brockman said. "For the first time now, we'll really have the right stuff."

Students at the two-year residential high school boast some of the highest SAT scores in the state, and 80 percent of faculty members have doctorates. The graduating class of 2007 earned more than $9.2 million in scholarship offers, and half of the students chose to remain in-state for college.

Brockman said he hopes the new addition can open by fall 2009 and further the school's reputation. Plans for the building include an engineering projects room where robotics teams can practice, an advanced physics lab and an auditorium with enough seats for the entire school to gather in one place. Moving the science activities to the new building will allow the school to use a music room and language instruction lab in the current facility that have been converted to science spaces, Brockman said.

Spillane said the space crunch doesn't bother her or her classmates, even though she attends sporting events at off-campus gyms and treks to Coker College for science class. Still, she said she was surprised to come to Hartsville and see that the state's top students were asked to learn in a building without some of the updated technology present in traditional high schools.

"It will be great for students in the future," she said. "But all of us came here for the experience and the education, which is still more than you'd get at a regular high school."