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| DPS classrooms getting supersized |
| By PETER MARCUS, Denver Daily News - December 10, 2006 |
Denver Public Schools teachers are reporting classes as large as 39, above the contractual union agreement of 35, making it difficult to advance student performance. The administration says the burden falls on the shoulders of individual schools to report and correct overcrowding in the classroom, despite frustration from the teachers union and individual teachers.
The solution seems to fall somewhere in between.
A Denver Daily News study found classes at North High School with 37, 38, and 39 students. One of the district’s newest schools, Florida Pitt Waller, has classrooms with as many as 38 students thanks to an over-projection of 250 students. Classrooms at Brown Elementary School, Grant Middle School and Newlon Elementary School also have overcrowding issues.
Approximately 40 schools have filed appeals with the Denver Public Schools administration to report overcrowding situations, said Brad Jupp, senior academic policy advisor for DPS.
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association says that the problem stems from an increase in enrollment, difficulty hiring teachers and retaining them, and budget hardships. The administration says that hiring more teachers would only slightly solve the problem, and the real solution comes in the form of better scheduling at the school’s end.
While some DPS classrooms have as many as 39 students, others have as few as 13, said Jupp.
The frustration mounts on both ends.
Dealing with overcrowding
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association, representing more than 3,200 educators in Denver, said it has been receiving numerous phone calls from both teachers and parents describing a problem of overcrowding in specific classrooms.
“It’s becoming harder and harder for teachers to do their jobs,” said Kim Ursetta, president of the DCTA.
The classroom size limit in the teachers contract agreement with DPS is 35, but the union is having trouble getting the administration to lower class sizes across the board, said Ursetta.
The result is that teachers have an overwhelming number of papers to grade and students to manage. At Florida Pitt Waller, Jenny Rasmussen, a Fourth grade teacher, is dealing with a fourth grade/fifth grade split that she handles with her colleague, Michael Varney.
“It’s very difficult because that teacher has to teach two curriculums,” Rasmussen explained.
She added that having almost 40 students in one class transforms teaching from being solely about education into more of an exercise in “crowd control.”
Melissa Underwood-Verdeal, an English teacher at North High School, shared Rasmussen’s dissatisfaction.
“If you’ve got a big classroom with younger kids, freshman, you can imagine,” she said.
Jupp said it is an “embarrassment to public education,” to consider teaching a form of “crowd control.”
The obvious outcome to overcrowding is that teachers are having a problem increasing student performance and raising test scores.
“If we’re talking about quality education, I don’t think that 38, or even 30 students in a class is really quality education,” said Rasmussen.
She added that in her 13 years of teaching in Denver Public Schools, she can’t remember one year in which she had fewer than 28 students.
“(Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael) Bennet needs to understand that if you want to increase test scores, you can’t do it with 38 kids in the classroom,” Rasmussen said.
The administration understands that teachers are frustrated, but suggested that teachers need to work with the administration to get to an ideal condition for teaching, said Jupp.
He also does not recognize classroom overcrowding as a pervasive problem in Denver’s schools.
“It’s a problem that occurs at individual schools and a problem that schools are expected to solve,” he told the Denver Daily News.
The problem
The problem exists because the district is unable to attract teachers and retain them, Ursetta said.
“If you look at the DPS Web site you see where position are still open,” she said. “The district can’t fill them.”
There are currently 25 teaching positions posted on the DPS Web site, including a position at North High School.
“It’s a good news, bad news thing,” said Underwood-Verdeal, who was happy with the enrollment progress the school made in the past year, but noted that it has led to overcrowding. “We were actually in a position to hire more teachers, but we’re having difficulties filling those positions.”
Jupp said the problem has little to do with attracting teachers and more to do with neighborhood growth, and the individual schools responsibility to file an appeal with the administration regarding overcrowding.
He said that Brown Elementary School never filed such an appeal, while more than 40 other schools have.
“We have got to empower our schools to solve the problems, we can’t have a superintendent, or some single boss manage class size in 5,000 classrooms,” Jupp said. “So we have high expectations of the teachers and the principals in the schools to solve the problems.”
Certain classes have only 13 students in them, which leads Jupp to believe that some schools should be doing a better job of scheduling to fit students into more reasonably sized classrooms.
“There are issues we have around attracting teachers, but that’s not causing overcrowding,” he said.
It is difficult to attract teachers to Denver Public Schools when the school year has already begun and when salaries don’t compare to neighboring districts such as Cherry Creek, where teachers are paid more than $5,000 more per year at a minimum, said Rasmussen.
She noted that teacher retention is also a problem, stating that 33 percent of Denver teachers transferred to other districts last year.
“That’s a huge amount of movement,” Rasmussen said.
Teachers reported feeling under appreciated and said meetings to discuss teacher performance adds to that. An example used was with the city’s most recent snow storm.
“There was no reason students should have been in buses and teachers forced to drive to school that day,” said Rasmussen. “It shows us that you don’t value us...like we’re not good enough. It’s not always about the money, it’s also how we’re treated.”
Jupp said the districts teachers are valued and that the administration understands how difficult their jobs are.
“We know that the work we are asking our teachers to do in Denver is very, very hard and that it requires great expertise,” said Jupp, who was a teacher himself for 20 years.
Budget cuts don’t help either and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association would like to see changes on the federal, state and local level to free up money to increase salaries and get more teachers into the classroom.
“Until we really are willing to make the financial investment to limit class size, nothing will change,” said Underwood-Verdeal. “DPS inherited this financial disaster at the state level, but ultimately someone has to say we care enough about class size to fund fixing it.”
The solution, or immediate lack thereof
The administration recognizes that more teachers would “slowly diminish” class size and that low salary inhibits that process, but the money is simply not there, said Jupp.
The average starting salary for a DPS teacher, including benefits, is about $43,000, but the administration can’t afford to give everyone a raise or hire many new teachers.
“Michael Bennet and the district is committed to reducing class size, but we just can’t magically print money,” said Jupp.
The administration was able to move around a significant portion of its budget last year and reorganized federal funds to assist schools with overcrowding situations. Most of those schools included the city’s poorest students, said Jupp.
He said the administration plans to set aside more money for next year to deal with overcrowded classrooms and perhaps attract more teachers. Administrators and the teachers union were pleased with the way contract negotiations went between the union and the administration over the summer, and Jupp said the administration plans on working with the union again next year to keep everyone appeased.
“We will keep the discussion on class size on the table again,” he said.
A task force was expected to meet today to look at ways to alleviate some of the problems teachers are facing in the classroom and to take some of the load off of teachers, said Ursetta.
“We also need to look at long-term solutions for how to give teachers time to do their jobs,” she added.
At the very least, the union would like to see more paraprofessionals in the classroom to help teachers, at least as temporary assistance, said Ursetta. But stringent federal guidelines outlined by No Child Left Behind, as well as low pay at $10 per hour, makes it difficult to attract paraprofessionals into the classroom, said the teachers union.
“We’re supposed to have paras, but you can’t get anyone to come out for $10 an hour,” said Rasmussen.
Jupp does not believe that paraprofessionals are the answer, even as a temporary fix.
“What’s best in the life of the child is the teacher,” he said. “I’m not sure that hiring more paras would make a big difference.”
The administration plans to stick with the policy of the Denver Plan to continue to work to reduce class size and create a high quality of education in Denver’s public schools.
“This is a city than can build a light rail, get a beautiful world class art museum, get a convention center, we should be able to get a great school system as well, and the Denver Plan intends to do that,” Jupp said.
So why do the city’s teachers do what they do?
Without wanting to sound cliche, the teachers themselves say they do what they do for the kids, despite meager wages, overcrowding and frustration with the administration.
“There’s a magic about North that the press never seems to get,” said Underwood-Verdeal, who has taught at North High School since 1988. “I can’t imagine teaching anywhere else, I have the best kids, it’s an amazing community, there’s magic in the halls of north.”
“I guess we like punishment,” said Rasmussen. “We always think we can make a difference.” |
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