As The Post and Courier's Allison Bruce reported, the new law grants school districts more flexibility in choosing sites for future schools by eliminating acreage requirements or allowing waivers on school square-footage requirements. Such standards had forced many districts to local large new schools on the outskirts of communities.

Numerous studies show that many students are lost in the crowd at such megaschools, with individual contact between teachers and pupils, and pupils' parents, undermined by the vast scale of those campuses and their enrollments. That, in turn, undermines academic achievement.

And the placement of those schools at significant distances from the centers of communities forces longer commutes for educators, students and parents, exacerbating population growth patterns that threaten what's left of our state's natural heritage. That's a likely drawback of the large new Wando High School, near Awendaw, scheduled to open for the 2004-2005 school year as the only high school serving all of Mount Pleasant. The town has experienced remarkable population growth over the last two decades.

Neighborhood schools, conversely, minimize commutes. At Moultrie Middle, for instance, one-fourth of the students reach school by walking or riding their bicycles.

Wando Principal Lucy Beckham told our reporter that she was concerned about the bill's effect on schools' physical size, warning that without a sufficient tracts of land, the space needed for athletic fields could be jeopardized.

But school districts, with input from the community, surely can gauge sufficient needs in that area. And that input should intensify as smaller schools enhance a sense of community participation in our schools.

Gov. Sanford, in January's State of the State address, correctly lamented the trend toward "construction of massive, isolated schools." The bill he signed last week should help reverse that trend.