Her journey to Erskine started in a small charter school that ‘clicked’
Jhoelle Osbourne graduated this spring from the Royal Live Oaks Academy of the Arts & Sciences (RLOA), a school in Hardeeville, S.C., that is sponsored by the Charter Institute at Erskine (CIE). This fall she’ll head to Due West to attend Erskine College.
Her path to Erskine was an unexpected one. Due to an abrupt middle school redistricting, Jhoelle enrolled in a private school as she looked ahead to high school. The interim school was in Ridgeland, some 15 miles from Hardeeville, and as a private school was not affordable for her family for high school.
Jhoelle and her family investigated potential high schools and chose Royal Live Oaks because of its geographical proximity and its strong academic reputation in the region. Despite RLOA’s strong reputation, Jhoelle still had some trepidation about its size.
“I thought, ‘This is way smaller than the schools I’ve been at. It’s probably going to be a really lame school,” she says. RLOA is a K-12 school and has a high school student body of approximately 215.
Her negative sentiments quickly changed. “After three months there, the tight-knit community and just everything about the school really clicked with me,” Jhoelle says. “I liked the smaller classrooms. I liked the one-on-one time with the teachers.”
Now that she has graduated, she realizes that RLOA had many of the resources of a much bigger school, yet she experienced its benefits in a small-school learning environment. Her public non-charter options in her district were all larger schools.
“They would have been bigger, and I don’t think it would have given me as many opportunities as I had at Royal Live Oaks,” Jhoelle says.
Jhoelle heard of Erskine College through CIE and decided to visit Due West during an Erskine Charter Day. She later returned for the college’s presidential scholarship competition earlier this year.
Jhoelle will receive a scholarship from Erskine as a CIE graduate, but what ultimately sold her on Erskine was the dual-degree program she’ll be entering this fall. She will complete three years studying math in Erskine’s small-school environment and then spend her final two years at Clemson focusing on electrical engineering.
“I had never experienced an engineering class or anything engineering-related until I went to Royal Live Oaks and took the Intro to Engineering Design class,” Jhoelle says. “We were working on electrical circuits, with light bulbs and stuff, and it just interested me so much that I thought ‘this is something I want to do in the future.’”
In high school, Osbourne was a four-sport athlete, but at Erskine, she plans to participate in intramurals and hopes to join clubs and organizations to “experience a little bit of everything.”
Jhoelle is one of six CIE students who will be attending Erskine College this fall. The others include Aden Allen (South Carolina Connections Academy) Thomas Belflower (South Carolina Connections Academy) Nicholas Birchmore (South Carolina Connections Academy) Mitchell Birket (Gray Collegiate Academy), and James “JT” Shorter (Thornwell Charter School).
