Santa Rosa schools may increase class sizes, combine grades

<p>Santa Rosa City Schools are bracing for a potential spike in the number of combination grade level classes as administrators prepare for budget cuts and an increase in class size.</p><p>The anticipated jump in the number of combination classes is another fallout from a long list of budget cuts the school board is expected to approve Wednesday night.</p><p>The board is also considering increasing the number of students in kindergarten through third grade classes from 20 children to 22. In addition, the board is mulling plans to freeze more than $3.7 million in spending on a variety of programs that fund everything from art classes to new textbooks.</p><p>“It was hard news to take at first,” said Proctor Terrace Elementary School Principal Stephen Mayer, describing the prospect of increasing class sizes in the primary grades and having four combination classes on campus next year.</p><p>“When I first broke the news to (teachers), everybody was deflated because we fought so hard to get class size reduction statewide,” he said. <NO1><NO>“Every kid you add to a class it is going to make a difference.”</p><p>District officials, who have overseen $3.4 million in cuts or revenue losses, are making more cuts to reduce spending an additional $5 million for the next school year. </p><p>That number could swell to an estimated $13 million, due to a growing state budget deficit and the potential failure of a number of propositions on the May 19 special election ballot, according to Associate Superintendent Doug Bower.</p><p>The recommendation to the board will be to freeze a wide variety of expenses until “the air clears on this,” he said.</p><p>The board will decide whether to temporarily withhold more than $3.7 million in funding. It would affect <NO1><NO>more than $1 million in art, music and physical education spending; <NO1><NO>$1.1 million in textbooks; $1 million in deferred maintenance; $170,000 in programs for gifted and talented students; $100,000 in English language classes for parents; and $309,000 in discretionary block grants designed to target school improvement needs.</p><p>The money could be unfrozen, reallocated or cut, depending on how the district’s financial picture changes in the coming weeks.</p><p>Principals are now estimating how many combination classes their campuses may have next year. An accurate number may not be known until August when kids walk through the door on the first day of school.</p><p>“We are very sensitive to this. We don’t want to have combination classes more than anyone else does,” Superintendent Sharon Liddell told members of the Teacher Advisory Committee last week. “We know it’s very difficult on staff members and it’s difficult on students, especially in the primary grades because they are so young.”</p><p>Teachers have expressed increasing concern that schools will have less flexibility to avoid combination classes if the district increases the student-to-teacher ratio in kindergarten through third grade.</p><p>“It’s impossible if you have two curriculums,” said Randi Megonden, a second grade teacher at Steele Lane Elementary.</p><p>Megonden taught a first/second grade combination class seven years ago and remembers it as a struggle, bouncing back and forth between sometimes very different concepts in the same classroom.</p><p>“I put the second graders on one side of the room and the first graders on the other,” she said. </p><p>She would give one grade “busy work in their seats and I would hop over and start teaching” the other grade.</p><p>“It was a real difficult time,” she said.</p><p>The emergence of standards-based instruction through the federal No Child Left Behind law is a reason why the district made a dramatic shift away from combination classes about five years ago, said assistant superintendent Greg Espinoza.</p><p>“It’s hard, very hard,” Espinoza said. “You have two sets of standards ... with the same expectation that the students master that and move on to the next grade level.”</p><p>In 2002-03, the district had 16 combination classes in grades kindergarten through third. This year there are three.</p><p>“The board was making it real clear at that time that they did not think the combination class is the best decision,” he said. “To the degree that they can be avoided, they should be.”</p><p>Today the board will also consider cutting back funding for Lewis Education Center to $50,000 to continue only credit recovery programs for kindergarten through 12th grade students but drop its adult programs.</p><p>The board is expected to consider a proposal in June to relaunch the adult education program as a self-sustaining, fee-based entity.</p>