Fewer Students Prompts Look at Fall Class Sizes

There are 46 fewer students than projected for fall in Katonah Lewisboro elementary schools, prompting discussions among officials on "out of the box" solutions for next year and highlighting the need to begin a community conversation on long-term plans for shrinking the district's physical space in light of the district's declining enrollment.

"The downward trend that we know is happening is a slight acceleration this year," said Superintendent of Schools Paul Kreutzer at the July 26 school board meeting. "There is a birth dearth and the decline is from the bottom-up."

The local issue may be part of a national trend, according to a recent New York Times story that highlighted the issue of declining enrollment in some of the nation's largest school districts. In some cases, the story reports, "the collapse of housing prices has led homeowners to stay put, making it difficult for new families — and new prospective students — to move in and take their place."

Kreutzer highlighted figures in a status update (posted with this story) presented by Alice Cronin, assistant superintendent of instruction. She discussed the drop in overall enrollment at each school; Katonah Elementary had the biggest decline, from 437 students in fall 2011 to 408 projected for this fall.

is the smallest elementary school with 308 kids and more "volatile" class sizes, as compared to , the largest school where there is a more even distribution of students across grades, according to Kreutzer.

"Our geography and size works against us," he said at the outset of the meeting, and later, "This is a charged conversation and important to our families. I agree we have a short-term concern to talk about...And we need to have a long-range plan that possibly takes that conversation off the table."

Class sizes for next year

In her presentation, Cronin highlighted two sections to which the board could consider adding instructors in order to reduce class sizes.

At , there were 75 students projected for third grade but 78 are enrolled, resulting in three sections at 26 students each—which could remain as is, or be changed to four sections at 19 or 20 students each.

And at MPES, there are 46 students enrolled in first grade, which could be taught as three sections of 15 or 16 students, or two sections of 23 students each. The latter is more closely aligned to the first grade sizes at KES and IMES of 20-21 students each.

Given that two kindergarten sections did not materialize, staffing remains available in the budget to ease those sections.  (There are 31 fewer kindergarteners this year across the district, though administrators cautioned the data could change prior to the start of school.)

There was some disagreement among board members about how to allocate staffing for next year but they agreed to continue the conversation at their meeting later this month.

"I want to do right by the kids and wherever we can we should do smaller classes," said Stephanie Tobin.

Possible scenarios discussed by the governance team included floating an instructor at MPES that would support students in ELA and math instruction; providing more support through the district's program; combining grades into a hybrid educational model or implementing a "parallel block" schedule whereby a whole grade would receive instruction in one subject at once, supported by more than one teacher.

The issue of class size arises most every budget season, and will continue to, say officials, until some sort of space consolidation occurs in the district.