150 years old and the city of Woodruff is booming. New businesses are opening, BMW is building a $700K plant in the city, and housing developments have been on the rise for several years.
The population impact of these investments can be visualized in the building of the new Woodruff High School, which is coming up on one year under construction on Cross Anchor Road.
The new high school will be approximately 250,000 square feet and three stories on a 108-acre campus. A $100 million referendum approved in August 2022 is funding its construction.
The foundations of the building have been laid, and the concrete blocking of the building is almost complete. What passersby see from the road is a fairly complete exterior footprint of the building, showing the full length and, in most areas, the full height of the building.
“We’ll (lay) brick, starting in about two months, the exterior brick,” said Matthew Elliot, project engineer with Harper General Contractors, during a site tour in June. “Inside, we’ll do MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) overhead, your finishes.”
Construction started last July, and the project is scheduled to be completed by October 2025, according to the district’s facilities director Clark Simpkins.
The finished high school and campus will feature three floors of classrooms and labs, band and choral classrooms that open onto a band field, a theatre with seating for about 600 people, a 2,000-seat gym, and new sports fields behind the school.
Multiple common areas will also be available for students to eat or socialize indoors and outdoors. One that Simpkins felt would be popular among students is a courtyard outside the lunchroom. The space was inspired by one school officials saw in Charleston while researching ideas for the new school’s design.
“The courtyard will be an area where they can socialize at lunch,” Simpkins said. “It’s the size of a football field. They’ll have artificial turf in here where they can play.”
Building for 2,000 Wolverines
Importantly, the new school will also have 17 shell classrooms to allow for future expansion. The unfinished rooms will be sealed off when students begin using the building but will allow for quick renovations in the future.
According to District 4’s interim superintendent Aaron Fulmer, the new school can accommodate 1,500 on move-in day and 2,000 at total capacity. Simpkins said the district expects to start at the new school with 1,200 students.
Fulmer said that the high school will have an estimated 900 students when school starts in August. However, the district is seeing growth and working to address it at all grade levels.
“We’ve got so many new homes in the community, in the Woodruff area. We feel like people are coming, and we’ve been seeing growth from kindergarten up to the high school level,” Fulmer said. “It’s steadily coming, and we hope it continues to be steady and not overwhelming.”
The new school building fulfills not only the space needs of the high school but also the anticipated space needs for the elementary and middle schools. When the occupation of the new high school begins, the middle school students will move into the current high school, and the fourth and fifth grades will form a new intermediate school housed in the current middle school. These moves will allow more room to grow inside the current elementary school.
While the new high school is expected to be complete a few months into the 2025-26 school year, Fulmer said the hope is to postpone moving until the following school year.
“Some of that's going to be driven by our population. Obviously, if we're so bursting at the seams that we have to move mid-year, we would do that, but it would be a much smoother process if we could delay our move until the fall of the next year,” Fulmer said. “We're taking a little bit of wait-and-see approach.”
Woodruff population to triple in next five years
Growth is also a strategic part of planning within the city of Woodruff.
Woodruff City Manager Lee Bailey often says that 7,000 rooftops are coming to Woodruff, an estimate of the units from the various housing projects that are set to be built and completed withing the city’s municipal boundaries in the next five years.
Once filled, these projects are expected to more than triple the city’s population, currently sitting at about 5,000, to 18,000.
“It's exciting. It really is exciting, but it offers challenges, trying to navigate the growth and to make sure the community's got everything to sustain itself,” said Woodruff City Manager Lee Bailey.
Things like parking, for example. Work on a new downtown public parking lot to be located behind Arthur State Bank is slated for this summer. Traffic conversations are also underway with the Department of Transportation, says Bailey, since most of the city's roads are DOT roadways.
There are also projects in the works, like a new sports complex to be located at the corner of Fountain Inn and Godfrey Town Roads near the new BMW campus, that are built for the entertainment of the growing population. Still in the design phase, the complex is expected to have baseball, softball, lacrosse and soccer facilities.
Bailey noted that the growth will likely bring in even more amenities for new and old residents.
“With growth, you get more retail offerings, more restaurants, more shops. You got to have the people moving here to support them, so you'll see a lot more of that,” Bailey said. “We still will be Woodruff and hold our core values, but it'll just be a little bigger in terms of offerings that our people have.”
Samantha Swann covers city news, development and culture in Spartanburg. She is a University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College alumna. Contact her atsswann@shj.com or on Instagram at @sam_on_spartanburg.
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