By Tom

By now you’ve probably heard that there’s a campaign afoot to gather signatures for Initiative 1351, which, if passed, would significantly lower class sizes in Washington State. The campaign to get the initiative on the ballot is sponsored by Class Size Counts, an organization whose name pretty much sums up their mission. But the campaign picked up most of its steam last month at the WEA Representative Assembly when the delegates voted to support it.

This initiative would mandate class sizes of 17 for primary grades and 24 for fourth grade on up. High-poverty schools would have class sizes of 15 and 23.

All of this sounds great, of course, except for the issue of money. 1351 would put half of the financial burden on the state and the other half on local districts. And that financial burden is definitely not nothing.

Consider my school. We have upwards of 600 kids with class sizes between 23 and 30, which pencils out to about four teachers for every hundred kids, or about 24 teachers. Under 1351 our youngest 300 kids will need about six teachers for every 100 students, creating six new classrooms.

The problem is where to put them. Right now we’re completely full, with the orchestra practicing in the library and the band playing on the stage, which is one thin curtain away from the gym; a gym that is completely booked, either with PE or our three lunches. The short-term solution is adding portables, and we’re scheduled to get two of those this summer to accommodate our already over-crowded situation. Adding six more portables isn’t really feasible: we simply don’t have the space or infrastructure to support them.

This situation is not unique to my school. The Mukilteo School District recently had to turn down state funding for all-day kindergarten simply because they didn’t have the space for those kids and they couldn’t afford to build it.

Initiative 1351 sounds great, and I’m sure I’ll end up gathering signatures, signing the petition and eventually voting for it. But I wonder if we’re missing and opportunity here. And by “here” I mean this moment in time when the state legislature is under pressure from the state supreme court to increase funding under the McCleary ruling.

What if instead of adding more classrooms, we simply added more teachers? And what if those teachers were primarily learning-support teachers? Imagine what it would be like to have one learning-support teacher for every four classrooms.

I don’t even have to imagine it, since I’m essentially living it. I have the luxury of working with a learning-support teacher for one-fourth of the day, and it is wonderful. Not for me, necessarily, but for my students. You see, I voluntarily took on most of the IEPs in our fourth grade in exchange for co-teaching reading and math with our LS teacher. It enables us to collaborate on our approach to the neediest kiddos and the results are amazing; we’re seeing student growth that I never thought I’d see when I signed onto this project.

Imagine what our education system would be like if we took this to scale. If schools could hire LS teachers at a rate of one per every 100 kids we could dramatically change the learning landscape. It could also transform the profession. Think about it: learning support teachers could be fresh out of college, learning from the master teachers to whom they’re assigned. At some point – when they’re ready and when they want to – they could move into a classroom position, opening up a position for another newbie. (Just to be clear: I do not consider learning support a “junior” teaching job; I have tremendous respect for the job that these people do. But if one LS teacher were assigned to four experienced teachers, it would be a great position for someone new to the profession and still learning how to manage a classroom.)

So yeah, I’m in favor of Initiative 1351. Sort of. But what I’d really like is a smarter, more sophisticated change to education staffing.