Classrooms traditionally have problems during the first week of school as fickle students swap around classes until they either find a setup they enjoy or are barred from doing so again. How is this year bearing?
My English class was completely full on the first day of this year. On the second and third days, the room looked a bit less like a clown car. On the fourth day, there are no longer enough desks for all the students.
Southwest Middle School and Ahlf Junior High both had rather sizable additions built on over the course of the past couple of years to accommodate the influx of new students.
The student body has undeniably grown in size this year. Almost all of the classes I have are nearly completely full, and even the traditionally deserted electives, such as graphic arts and journalism, are veritable parades thus far.
While I’m happy that Searcy alumni are branching out and using their education to try new hobbies, pastimes, and possible career fields, smaller class sizes are generally more efficient. They allow the teacher to know the students better and better adapt their teaching style to suit individual pupils as opposed to a homogenous one-size-fits-all straight-from-the-textbook method favored by some educators.
Can anything be done to improve the time spent in school and get the most out of each day of teaching? Absolutely. Perhaps we could spend a minute every morning doing absolutely nothing.
There are too many people attending this school to simply shuffle students around like solitaire cards until the amount in each room is optimal.
The perfect solution to a class size problem is to just build more classrooms and hire more teachers to help ease the burden on the faculty’s shoulders.
It’s obvious, even obvious enough that those in charge of the district saw this issue coming quite some time ago.
What makes that apparent? The additions to the middle school and junior high that were just built.
Did a building get constructed at the high school? Yes. Another fieldhouse. Fantastic.
While the athletics department has a cushy indoor area to practice and the middle and junior high schools have extra room for the new faces pouring into Searcy, the high schoolers get to be crammed into huge classes unless, and until, someone decides that having more space for teaching is a good idea.
I understand that the money for the budget doesn’t just get wished into existence as the situation calls for it, but maybe a concerned group of individuals could take a good, long look at what the recent constructions say about their priorities.
At least I can take solace in the fact that at least a few classes got new textbooks they don’t have enough of for the students to use.
