This Midlands high school feels overlooked after rival gets $7.5M stadium upgrade

As the 2022 high school football season approached, the Dutch Fork Silver Foxes had two concerns. One was how the team could regain the 5A state title after coming up short in the championship game the year before. The other, parents who spoke to The State say, was whether the Foxes would be able to play on their home field that season.

As the date approached to kick off the football team’s home schedule, an ongoing project to replace the turf on Dutch Fork’s home field left the top-ranked Foxes’ usual surface unplayable.

“On June 4 (last year) they tore up our field and it was supposed to be done by July,” said Warren Bolton, a Dutch Fork parent. “And it just sat there week after week.”

The delay heightened some Dutch Fork parents’ concerns about the perennial state champions’ facilities — and how, when or even whether the district will be able to fund the needed upgrades.

Those concerns are heightened because, up the road at rival Chapin High, work is underway on $7.5 million in improvements to the Eagles’ football stadium, projected to open this fall. And that has some Dutch Fork parents worried their school 10 miles away and in the same Lexington-Richland 5 school district isn’t receiving equal treatment.

“It’s like Chapin got this sweetheart deal, and we’re left scratching our heads why Dutch Fork and Irmo got left out,” Bolton said.

Lexington-Richland District 5 has four high schools, including Chapin, Dutch Fork and Irmo. The fourth, Spring Hill, is an all-magnet school that does not compete in football.

The work at Dutch Fork last summer left the Foxes without a place to practice even as they planned to challenge for their seventh state championship, parents say. The junior varsity had to play its early season home games at Chapin and Irmo, while the varsity team wasn’t scheduled to play its first home game until late September. But it wasn’t certain that the field would be ready for the varsity until just days before the game.

For Chapin Eagle Club president James Burns, the renovations at Chapin High, including the addition of about 1,100 seats, are just bringing a smaller stadium up to where its neighbors already are. The Chapin Eagle Club is the school’s athletic booster organization.

“We’re addressing the South Carolina High School League requirements for a 5A school to host a home playoff game. The current amount of seating wouldn’t permit us to host home playoff games,” Burns said. “This just brings us to the requisite seating capacity for a 5A school.. I think expanding access for our students and our community is a good thing.”

In 2021, the Lexington-Richland 5 school district approved spending $8.5 million to expand Chapin High School’s football stadium. The Eagles had moved up in classification with the S.C. High School League as its student body expanded in recent years, as the area has seen an overall growth in population. but its former stadium, with less than 4,000 seats, was not large enough to host a playoff game in Class 5A. It was the smallest in the district.

The S.C. High School League requires a minimum of 4,000 seats for a first or second round 5A playoff game, 5,000 for a third round or semi-final game, and 6,000 for a final. Expansion will increase Chapin’s seating capacity to more than 6,000, compared to 6,665 at Dutch Fork and 8,200 at Irmo.

Dutch Fork football coach and athletic director Tom Knotts did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.

Kim Werts, the past president of Dutch Fork’s Touchdown Club — the parents’ booster club for the Silver Foxes football team — was left wondering when she saw a post from Chapin’s Eagle Club about progress on their stadium improvements, thanking the school board and the superintendent for “making it a priority that we play football in our stadium this Fall.”

“I just thought, ‘we couldn’t get our field done (before the start of the 2022 season), and they’re getting a whole new stadium,’” Werts said.

The Foxes say their press box needs a major upgrade. When Dutch Fork hosted North Carolina’s Mallard Creek for a nationally televised game in 2019, the broadcast crew from ESPN was “packed in like sardines,” said Touchdown Club vice president Eric Betts. One parent likened it to a construction trailer mounted on the top of the stands. They also said the stadium’s scoreboard needs to be updated.

Werts couldn’t place a dollar amount on what it would cost to upgrade Dutch Fork’s facilities, “but it’s not going to cost $7.5 million,” she said.

Burns points out the most recent bond referendum in 2008 included funding for seating additions at both Dutch Fork and Irmo High that weren’t covered for Chapin.

“Chapin’s stadium and press box have not been addressed since 1976,” Burns said, noting the stadium’s old press box had a “soft floor” and a handrail that at one point was held together with zip ties. “There’s a difference between ‘not nice’ and unsafe.”

But the parents at Dutch Fork are upset that Chapin received extensive renovations when their stadium has not.

Werts said Dutch Fork parents aren’t opposed to Chapin’s extensive stadium renovations. “We understand they need the seating,” she said. “And if they wanted to give me $9 million, I’d take it too.” But if district officials wanted to move forward with Chapin’s stadium upgrades, “I wish they had said, ‘We’ve got to do this for Chapin, so what can we do for you?’”

As parent Stephanie Hinton said, “They may say, ‘you’ll get treated after Chapin,’ but it’s not an equal playing field.”

Burns rejects that Chapin’s renovations are the result of any special treatment from the district.

“As a Lexington Richland 5 high school booster and active member of our community, I want to see all of our students and student-athletes be successful and achieve their dreams — regardless of where they live,” he said. “I’d hope our friends around the area share that same goal. Many of them I talk to do, and that keeps me motivated.”

Dutch Fork’s stadium is slated to get some improvements, parents who spoke to The State said. The stadium will get new paint and a new bathroom floor. A new sound system for the stadium and new lights for the practice field are in the offing. A sewage leak that left the visitors’ locker room with a particularly foul odor will be fixed, using an ozone machine to improve the air quality, Werts said.

Spartanburg High Coach Mark Hodge, whose team faced off with the Foxes at Dutch Fork in the 2022 playoffs, said he was unaware of any problem with the visitors’ locker room, because his team changed in the school gym for the game.

“It’s not uncommon, because some places have really nice field houses and nice locker rooms, and some don’t,” Hodge said, adding it primarily depends on when those facilities were built. He said it’s “uncommon” for Dutch Fork not to have nice locker rooms for visitors given the success it’s had in football.

But “for when it was constructed, it’s not unusual to have a home locker room and nothing really for the visitors. It’s only in the last four or five years everybody’s really started upgrading their facilities.”

The Dutch Fork stadium was completed in 2003.

In response to questions emailed from The State, Lexington-Richland 5 said that just within the last few weeks, the visiting locker rooms under the home side of Dutch Fork’s stadium have been renovated. “New flooring, painting, lights and repairs to the drainage system have been completed,” the district said. “There are also plans to install new bench seating.”

Following the 2008 referendum, Dutch Fork received a new health science center, upgraded press boxes at its baseball and softball stadiums, and improvements to the football stadium’s visitors’ restrooms and concession stand, according to the district’s website. Irmo High received a new field house and lighting for football and baseball. For its part, Chapin also received a field house, softball field, practice field and a “gymnatorium,” according to a list of referendum projects on the Lexington-Richland 5 district website.

Lexington-Richland 5 is currently undergoing a master facilities review that will determine future plans, the school district said.

“McMillan, Pazdan and Smith Architecture is in the process of reviewing each school and their athletic facilities to identify any repairs or upgrades that may be necessary,” the district said. “Once complete, they will recommend a timeline based on the needs of each area, as well as a 5-year plan to address the identified needs. It is expected to be a rolling list so that as one year is completed another year will be added. Funding sources for any construction projects have not been determined.”

A 2019 needs study conducted by M.B. Kahn Construction rated both Chapin and Dutch Fork high schools as being in “fair” condition, and Irmo High as “poor.” That report said Dutch Fork needed $16.2 million worth of upgrades, Chapin $25.8 million and Irmo $43.9 million.

That study specifically addressed the need for a stadium upgrade at Chapin — then valued at $4.8 million — that would expand seating capacity to 6,000, construct new press boxes and add visitor and band entrances. The study does not address a stadium upgrade at Dutch Fork.

Dutch Fork parents have taken their concerns to the district at school board meetings and in meetings with district officials, but don’t believe they have gotten a good answer for when their school’s needs will be met.

“I left without a clear understanding of what the plan was,” Bolton said of one meeting. “It felt like if we got anything, it would be very basic.”

Two years ago, when the school district approved the Chapin stadium improvements, the board approved several other projects across the district. Superintendent Akil Ross pitched the overall plan as a way to put more resources into schools that had received less attention as the Chapin area grew, including construction of a $50 million wing to Irmo High School.

Lexington-Richland 5 initiated the projects without incurring debt levels that would have required voter approval. That happened in part by allocating money from anticipated energy savings and funding from federal coronavirus relief measures.

Parents at Dutch Fork were hoping their 6,600-seat stadium would also get upgrades and improvements. But members of the Touchdown Club say they were told by Ross that those needs would be addressed in a planned referendum that would have happened in 2022.

Instead, the school board last year ultimately decided by a 5-2 vote to punt on placing the planned $150 million referendum on the ballot, citing ongoing inflation concerns.

But board members also cited a controversial audit into the district’s spending habits. That audit flagged a potential for “significant fraud, waste and abuse” in the district’s past spending decisions related to the 2008 bond referendum.

That report by the New Mexico-based Jaramillo Accounting Group has been controversial, however. One company criticized in the report — Contract Construction of Irmo, which built Chapin’s new Piney Woods Elementary School — fired back with a list of alleged factual and mathematical errors in Jaramillo’s report, calling it “an opinionated, derogatory, and many times erroneous account.”

In May, the Lexington-Richland 5 school board voted to end its contractual relationship with Jaramillo, partly in response to the controversy around the report. Parents who spoke to The State said the release of a partial audit last year, and the questions it raised about district spending, played a role in the decision to defer any new bond referendum to address facility needs.

Now even if the district eventually places a bond referendum on the ballot, parents worry Chapin voters, who already received upgrades to their stadium, will be less inclined to support it.

“I don’t think there’s the support on the board now to even get it voted on,” said Betts, the Touchdown Club’s vice president.

The Touchdown Club is not just a forum for parents to support their kids. It’s also the main fundraising arm for the Foxes’ football team, with responsibility for maintaining the stadium and the scoreboard.

“One thing I learned from the Touchdown Club is that whenever we do a fundraiser, people say ‘Why do they need that? They pull in so much money,’” Hinton said. “But we have to supplement a lot of that. We’ve paid for buses, we’ve always paid for some level of what they need.”

With the Foxes’ seven state championships, Hinton said it’s been difficult to get area businesses to sponsor the team, since they assume such consistent success means the players must have everything they need.

“We lose some of them to other schools,” she said. “They think we have enough money.”

Dutch Fork isn’t alone in needing improvements to its athletic facilities. Irmo High School needs similar improvements, Yellow Jacket Club President Jeff Rivers told the school board in February. He said the football stadium’s aging press box was in such bad shape that the company delivering Irmo’s new sound system expressed concern about mounting speaker boxes on it.

But Rivers told The State he understood the need to manage the limited amount of money available for all of the district’s needs, and that many at Irmo High accepted that their equivalent of a refurbished football stadium is the $50 million being spent on the new academic wing.

But he still wants the needs of all three high schools’ athletic programs addressed equitably. “I grew up in this district, and if one school got something, they all got it,” Rivers said. “If one school got new turf, the other ones did too.”

For now, the parents at Dutch Fork will continue to hope that some money from somewhere will come through to meet what they see as the neglected needs of their school.

Her children might have graduated, but Hinton said Dutch Fork will always be a special place to her. “You don’t want to see the place your kids went to school go through this,” she said.