Editor’s note: This story was updated on Nov. 20 to reflect the updated status of the ELD class.
While some fluctuation in class numbers is normal and expected as students change courses at the start of the school year, class sizes skewed in the direction of especially unbalanced this year compared to previous years. To address the largest problems, the administration created additional sections for the especially large Health, World Geography, World History and English Language Development classes.
Class size balance is defined as having approximately the same number of students in all sections (class periods) of a particular course. Classes become unbalanced when students request schedule changes and student movement is unequal.
By design, almost every individual course is as balanced as possible across all sections the day before school starts. During scheduling, traditional academic courses — such as English, History, Math and Science — are targeted to have 32 or fewer students. While the median class size was approximately 30 at the start of the year, the average is now 28. (Note: these calculations exclude Special Education, which tends to have smaller classes, and P.E. and Performing Arts, which tend to have larger classes.)
In an average year, there are over 1,000 student schedule changes, registrar Robert Wise said. He added an estimated 70 students’ class schedules had to be changed in efforts to rebalance class sizes this year. Rebalancing efforts for the fall semester ended Sept. 15, with the student deadline for changing course levels.
“Usually the rebalancing process only impacts a handful of students and maybe one or two teachers,” Wise said. “This year is unusual.”
Severely unbalanced courses pose a problem due to overcrowding when there are too many students in a classroom at a time. For example, if 20 students leave Algebra 2 Honors across all sections and 10 of those students go to a third-period Algebra 2 class, it will go from having a comfortable 24 students to an overcrowded 34.
While classes never exceed fire safety regulations, large class sizes make it challenging for teachers to spend enough time with individual students. Large class sizes may also result in physical crowding of the desks, or may exceed the specific limited classroom resources such as the number of lab stations available in science classrooms.
This year, the courses that were especially unbalanced were the semester-long freshman Health and World Geography courses. At the start of the year, the average Health class had 35 students, the average World Geography class had 33 students and the average World History class had 34 students. After rebalancing, the averages became 29, 27 and 29, respectively, Wise said.
Another cause of unbalance within classes this year was the district’s underestimation of freshman and sophomore enrollment, resulting in budget constraints and not enough class sections.
“Usually the district’s preliminary estimate is pretty good,” Wise said. “This is the biggest miss I’ve observed in my seven years.”
The incorrect estimate primarily affected ninth and tenth grade courses. The initial teaching budget allocated for eight term sections of Health, seven term sections of World Geography and six year-long sections of World History — fewer sections than principal Greg Louie would’ve liked from the district.
Additionally, there were a significant number of late-enrolling students this year, which surprised some district staff — many of whom were new to the district.
“We built a schedule at the end of the spring semester based on the number of students who were enrolled,” Louie said. “However, we had additional students enroll after we built the schedule and this inevitably created the need that we had to address. I don’t think there’s much more we could have done with the information we had at the time.”
To rebalance classes, Louie approached district leadership after the start of the school year and made an appeal requesting additional money to reduce class sizes to something more reasonable.
The district granted a teaching budget increase of 0.8 Full Time Equivalency (FTE). A typical teacher workload for 1 FTE is five sections; the school received funds to cover four additional sections of teacher salary.
“The good news is Mr. Louie’s budget grew and he was able to add sections after the school year started,” Wise said. “But it meant more students and teachers were impacted in the balancing process.”
Louie alleviated the biggest issues by allocating an additional section for Health, World History, World Geography and ELD, which had a larger number of students than were anticipated in original planning.
After receiving additional funds, the guidance department worked with department chairs to identify crowded sections. Guidance counselors reviewed student schedules in those sections and met with students who were able to adjust their schedule with minimal impacts to their other courses. If students agreed, their schedules were changed. An estimated total of 60 students were moved around to accommodate for the rebalancing of these four courses.
In early November, existing teachers took up some of these new classes, and history teacher Chris Rasmussen was hired to take over the new sections of World History and World Geography. ELD students were placed in SOAR classes at the start of the year, which hindered the ability of teachers to cater to the specific needs of ELD students — a problem that was exacerbated as the class grew. The school created a separate ELD class on Nov. 15, which is taught by French teacher Elaine Haggerty.
“Student scheduling is one of the most complex things that a school must do every year. There are many constraints on student schedules that make ‘balancing’ a particularly challenging problem, especially after the school year has started,” Wise said. “Hats off to our excellent guidance department for identifying and then correcting the worst problems.”