Jammed classrooms are forcing students and teachers into some difficult learning situations.
By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK
Published January 25, 2004
[Times photo: Dan McDuffie]
Wesley Chapel Elementary School art teacher Juliana Frain has no classroom because of overcrowding, so she pushes a cart from room to room.
SPRING HILL - Sometimes it's the incessant hum of a floor buffer that interrupts Martha Myers' speech lessons. Sometimes it's the loud talking and clanging from the school cafeteria nearby.
Her students' attention darts from her to the noise to the other children and back again. With mixed success, she tries to compete with the help of a microphone and speaker.
"It's not ideal," Myers said of her classroom at Suncoast Elementary School in Hernando County, a converted cafeteria-stage dressing room that is slightly larger than the average walk-in closet. "It's something I've just had to learn to live with. But I won't ever be comfortable with it."
Booming population growth pushed Myers from a much larger classroom into the tiny space. Suncoast Elementary, which last year had 800 students, now has close to 930 students. That forced principal Jean Ferris to "get creative."
She has lots of company.
Surging demand has forced schools in high-growth areas throughout the Tampa Bay area to hold classes on stages, turn storage rooms into class space and put art classes on a cart.
Wesley Chapel Elementary School in Pasco County is using portable walls to create space. Teachers in many Hillsborough County schools are forced to double up, increasing the number of students in each classroom. Teacher planning areas are being sacrificed as part of the never-ending effort to find somewhere to put students. And the state's class-size reduction requirement will make the space crunch even more dire, as districts work to maintain required student-teacher ratios while more children pour in their doors.
"The issue is really trying to keep ahead of the curve," said Mary Ellen Elia, chief facilities officer in Hillsborough.
During the next five years, Hillsborough expects enrollment to rise by 12.6 percent, to 200,367. To keep up, Elia said, the district needs to build 48 new schools. Thirteen are expected to open next year.
Plans also are in the works to expand several existing campuses, using money from the state's Classrooms for Kids initiative, she said.
Pinellas County is the rare exception in the Tampa Bay area. Enrollment growth for the district has been modest because the county is largely built-out. New construction of schools has been related to a court order to desegregate, not space problems.
But the area's smaller school districts face challenges more akin to Hillsborough's.
The 59-campus Pasco district is asking voters to approve a sales tax in March to help pay for the construction of 25 new schools in the next decade. The Hernando district has a sales tax referendum on its March 9 ballot, because it needs to add six new schools to its 19.
Meanwhile, schools with more kids than seats are struggling to cope.
Consider Wesley Chapel Elementary School in the rapidly growing State Road 54 corridor of Pasco. The school opened in fall 2002 filled to its 900-seat capacity. It now has just fewer than 1,200 children.
The school has added 12 portables to its grounds. It also has jiggered existing space.
"We've taken our really nice-sized computer lab and turned it into a classroom, and moved it into a smaller TV production room," principal Cynthia Harper said. "We have art and music on a cart."
The school reading specialist no longer has a classroom, Harper said. Even the school's stage houses a class.
McKitrick Elementary School in fast-growing northwest Hillsborough opened three years ago with 898 children. It now enrolls 993. To help McKitrick and nearby Bryant Elementary School, the district is looking to build a new school in 2005.
McKitrick Elementary principal Lisa Yost said she is using portables to house the additional students. But she is prepared to make teachers move from class to class if necessary.
At Spring Hill Elementary School in Hernando, the principal had to create an outdoor cafeteria area because the existing dining space could not accommodate all the students.
To deal with unexpected crowding at Suncoast Elementary, Ferris moved the gifted classroom into the former in-school suspension room and moved the suspension program into a former work room. She turned an exceptional student education suite of rooms into a fourth-grade classroom and moved all the ESE teachers into the media center.
A science lab became a classroom. A computer lab did, too. The idea of turning the teacher lounge into a kindergarten classroom got nixed, because Ferris could not convince herself that she would want her own children to be in "this closet."
Myers, the school's speech teacher, inherited what she called her worst situation "ever, without a doubt" in her 27-year career.
She said she tries to make the best of things; her job is to help the kids, not complain about circumstances beyond her control. So Myers has adapted, scheduling most students before and after lunch or outside her classroom when possible.
When children must come to her classroom during lunch, she works through it, telling herself the noisy environment is more realistic than a quiet classroom.
But there is a clear downside.
She has told parents that they can't observe her classes because they can't fit in her room. She has abandoned dozens of helpful computer programs because there is no space in the room for computers.
"I have had a couple of times this year when people didn't tell me they had something scheduled on the stage and had to cancel work with kids," Myers said. "There have been some days when I've gone home from school angry."
Myers does not know whether her students' performance has suffered. That information will come with year-end testing.
Still, she refuses to be negative.
"To me, these are things that happen. They're happening all over the county. You just deal with it," Myers said. "The bottom line is, the school is for the kids, and we work here. ... I feel like part of my job is to try to create an environment for them that is most workable, under the circumstances."
