Sue Flicop

I recently wrote this on the Newton Parents Group listserve in response to a question about the problem of class size in Newton.

I think the issue of class size is complicated–it’s not just about money. Over the years I’ve been involved in the schools, the problem has been a moving target, affecting some schools for a year or more, and then jumping to others in the next years. Adding teachers can solve the problem temporarily, until class size issues hit the next school.

If one were to add enough teachers to keep class sizes at the ideal level every year, we would run out of space in some schools. A few years ago, Bowen had the problem of getting a reasonable number of teachers for an endlessly growing student population, but not enough classrooms for them. Even after adding one modular, we still had two teachers sharing a classroom space. But the current plan to add extra capacity as schools are rebuilt/renovated to alleviate some of the potential space crunches in Newton’s future hasn’t received a lot of support.

Our community also values neighborhood schools, which also puts stress on class size. Margaret [Albright] suggests redistricting, but this is an extremely painful process–people volunteer neighborhoods other than their own to be moved to another school. To me, it’s not fair to redistrict unless you can at least “grandfather” in the current students and their families. This means that redistricting is not a short-term solution that can alleviate immediate class size problems.

I met with a Swampscott School Committee member and their superintendent last spring–they changed from neighborhood schools to a system where the school department added new families/students to schools that had capacity in the appropriate grades. This essentially did away with large class sizes across their three elementary schools. However, Swampscott is far smaller–both in terms of population and geography. Still, there might be some hybrid solution in Newton, if we are willing to be more flexible and feel that smaller class sizes are worthy of rethinking an established element of our school system.

These issues haven’t been discussed very much, partly because parents are often focused on their own school and don’t get a chance to see what is happening from a larger perspective. The idea of changing neighborhood schools is also a bit of a “third rail” in terms of discussions. It’s been far easier to figure out how to add a teacher or an aide rather than work on the underlying problems.

In terms of what to do right now, we should be looking carefully at the new model this year at Countryside and Peirce–instead of thinking about 1 teacher to 25 students, they are thinking of a whole grade with a team of teachers, aides, and other support staff. In the end, we are all concerned all about how well the school system meets our students’ educational needs–perhaps this new model can do this well and allow more flexible staffing.