Frank Smith Says NB: Concessions accepted - The New Britain Herald (newbritainherald.com)

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Concessions accepted - The New Britain Herald (newbritainherald.com)

By James Craven

Staff Writer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: 107 teachers won't even be noticed. What is that, one more student per class? Big deal.; May 21, 2010 at 12:53 AM
Nicholas Mercier said...: 107 teachers is about 1/8 of the teaching staff. As far as the affect on class sizes it isn't that simple to calculate. If a school has four 3rd grade classes with 22 students each and you eliminate one of those teachers the remaining three each pick up 7 or 8 students. The problem is that you can't just shift students around from school to school to make the numbers even, so if you have 10 extra students at one school and 10 extra students at another school you can't combine them to make a class of 20, you either have to hire an extra teacher at each school and have smaller manageable class sizes or you have to use one less teacher at each school and have extremely large class sizes.

The other option is to redistrict your schools to attempt to even out the numbers - unfortunately you can never really draw the lines perfectly and within a few years the numbers will be less than ideal again. It is easiest to eliminate teachers at the high school where all your students are in one building, but even then you run into scheduling problems due to classes being taught at different levels and the sheer complexity of scheduling all classes so that they function together.; May 21, 2010 at 9:29 AM

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)