Cows at the Governor’s School for Agriculture on Feb. 21, 2025. (Photo by Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)
McCORMICK — Cows compose the greeting committee at the Governor’s School for Agriculture, flocking to the fence just past the entrance to watch visitors drive past.
Established in 1797 as a farming school for poor and orphaned children, the campus known for centuries as John de la Howe has changed missions several times. The latest turned it into the nation’s only residential public high school providing an agricultural education.
Pastures of horses, sheep and cows dot the 1,310-acre property tucked off a rural road in McCormick County inside a national forest.
The campus’ dozen residential halls are full, and for the first time since the new mission began, officials are having to turn away prospective students because of a lack of space, said Tim Keown, the school’s president.
Two more halls sit mostly empty as they await decorations from the school’s alumni committee and, next year, a new batch of students to fill them.
After a rocky start, including findings of ethical and financial mismanagement during the school’s first year after the change, things are looking up, Keown said.
Last year, the school regained the accreditation it lost in 2016. And for the first time in 25 years, auditors last year found no problems, a rare accomplishment for a state agency, he said.
Driving through the expansive campus, where classrooms abut greenhouses and open pastures, Keown described a vision for the school’s future, including continuing to expand its capacity and offering more classes to cover the full spectrum of agriculture.
His ideas have gotten support from the House of Representatives’ budget writers.
That chamber’s state spending plan for 2025-26, passed last week, includes $2 million for continuing renovations and $4 million for a new meat processing plant.
“We don’t expect (students) to all go back and be full-time farmers,” Keown said. “But there are hundreds of thousands of jobs across South Carolina that need young people to enter those jobs.”
Becoming a school for agriculture
The mission adopted in 2020 is a return to the school’s roots.
Dr. John de la Howe, a French doctor who immigrated to Charleston in 1764, wrote in his will that he wanted the farm he had purchased to be an agricultural seminary for “12 poor boys and 12 poor girls,” giving preference to orphans, Keown said.
For years, that was what the school was.
During World War I, John de la Howe became a state agency and a home for orphaned children, which it remained until the 1980s. Then, as orphanages waned in use, its purpose adjusted again to become a public residential school for sixth- through 10-graders with serious behavior problems.
That, too, fell out of favor over the years, as more counties established programs that kept troubled teens closer to home.
Attendance dropped, and costs per students skyrocketed.
In 2003, then-Gov. Mark Sanford recommended, without success, closing the school and sending its students to a military-like public school in West Columbia for at-risk teens. In 2014, Gov. Nikki Haley recommended putting the Department of Juvenile Justice in charge.
In March 2016, with the school’s accreditation on probation, House budget writers recommended temporarily transferring oversight to Clemson University.
Weeks later, the state Department of Education made a final decision to yank the school’s accreditation. Deficiencies cited by inspectors included classes taught by uncertified teachers, the school not meeting the needs of students with disabilities, and the lack of online access.
That forced the Legislature to make a decision.
Legislators eventually settled on creating a third residential high school offering a specific education. The agriculture school joined existing governor’s schools for the arts and for science and math.
The year the school was supposed to open its doors to its first new class of students, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Distancing restrictions meant students could no longer share rooms, so the school halved its capacity and began its first year with 33 students.
The next year, the school’s population doubled.
At the start of the 2024 school year, 81 students were enrolled, and another 81 had graduated. Once renovations in three dorms are complete, the capacity will increase to 124, plus day students, Keown said.
“It’s been like putting together a huge puzzle with many missing pieces over the last couple of years,” Keown said. “But we’re finally finding all those pieces, and it’s all making more sense.”
The new mission
Blake Arias knew he wanted to study plants. Other than that, he had little interest in agriculture when he applied for the governor’s school.
“If you looked at my application, it was very obvious that I didn’t have a background and that I didn’t know much,” Arias said.
When he first arrived at the school nearly three hours from his home in Summerton, he wasn’t particularly interested in handling animals. And he really, really didn’t want to learn to weld.
Three years later, Arias, who graduates this spring, still focuses primarily on plants.
However, he also spends hours every day after class helping a rabbit, Chunky, lose some weight before he takes her to shows. He’s working on earning a beekeeping certification. And he even learned how to weld.
“Am I the best welder? Absolutely not,” Arias said. “But I really enjoyed it, and it taught me something new because they gave me the opportunity.”
Arias is part of about half of the school’s population that comes in with little background in agriculture, Keown said. Applicants must have at least a 2.7 GPA. The goal is to take all kinds of students, whether they grew up on a farm or in a city and show them all sorts of opportunities in agriculture.
That’s not limited to farming.
The school offers four designated pathways: agricultural mechanics, horticulture, plant and animal systems, and environmental and natural resources. Students choose a focus, but they’re introduced to a sampler platter of what’s out there, Keown said.
“It really shows you all the possibilities that there are in each field,” said Emily White, a senior from McCormick.
Day to day
The days typically begin long before students report to the cafeteria at 7:45 a.m.
Like on any farm, horses, pigs and rabbits need feeding and cleaning, and plants need tending.
Students take a blend of core classes, such as English, math and social studies, and classes focused on agriculture, Keown said.
Even the core classes, which are all honors-level courses, typically use agriculture as a touch point for students, said Lyle Fulmer, a recent graduate.
Math problems, for instance, might use real-life examples of balancing a budget on a farm. For students interested in agriculture, that adds excitement to what might usually be their hum-drum classes, he said.
“Even if it was frustrating and I didn’t know how to solve the problem, I would work through it and I would know that this was something that I very well could be doing someday,” said Fulmer, who is now a freshman at Clemson University.
Once classes are over, students have the rest of the afternoon to do as they please.
White said she typically goes to the pig barn to clean, feed and work with Hank the Tank, a pig she’s planning to show.
Other students might practice rodeo riding or clay shooting, two of the sports the school offers. Some gather at the saw mill to help process trees salvaged when Tropical Storm Helene swept through campus last September.
By 6:15 p.m., students are expected to return to their residence halls or other communal areas for an hour of study time. Like college students, they have the run of their residence halls under the watchful eye of a residential advisor.
Along with accumulating credits to get ahead in college courses, the freedom Fulmer had as a high school student helped prepare him for living in the dorms and all the challenges that accompany that. He already knew how to keep his space tidy and handle disagreements with roommates, which many incoming freshmen don’t, he said.
“It really did prepare me a lot for college,” Fulmer said.
What the future holds
Standing on the front lawn of the president’s mansion, glimpses of the dining hall visible across an expansive open lawn, Keown described his vision of the school’s future.
In the next couple of years, the school will start offering classes in culinary arts and hospitality management, which will help students who want to go into the growing industry of agritourism that creates attractions out of farms.
“Our ag kids learn to grow (the food), our culinary students prepare it, our tourism hospitality students manage the banquets,” Keown said of his vision.
Also in the near future is the meat processing plant, which Keown hopes to have finished in the next three years. That will give students skills to land high-paying jobs straight out of high school and fill a gap in the agricultural industry, Keown said.
A decade from now, Keown hopes to see 300 students roaming the grounds. He also wants them to grow about half of what they eat, compared with 20% now.
In Keown’s mind, the school presents a bright spot for the future of agriculture. While the number of farmers under the age of 35 has grown slightly in recent years, the average age of farmers is 58, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture.
Photos of recent alumni hung from flagpoles on campus. Driving under them, Keown named each graduate and where they went to school. Many go to Clemson, though some went to schools in other states.
Most are still pursuing degrees in agriculture.
“They are making us really proud,” Keown said.