Oregon Public Broadcasting

Tuesday, we heard about a typical school district east of Portland, where class size has gone up. Now, we’ll look at a not-so-typical district east of Portland.

Rob Manning looks at the class size challenge facing high schoolers in the Reynolds school district.

Reynolds High vies for the title of “Oregon’s largest high school” every year.

In recent years, growing student enrollment has helped fund enough teachers for all those students. But as math instructor Debbie Lindow looked at her classroom before the start of the school year, she talked about what it would mean to have 40 kids in her room. Last year, she had 30.

Debbie Lindow:  “Walking around in the classroom to monitor students is going to be really difficult, because you have to be able to actually fit between the desks.”

The Reynolds district has felt tight for at least a year, since the last superintendent left amid a financial meltdown. A veteran administrator credited with once rescuing a California district from bankruptcy took over a year ago.

Bob Fisher says he was alarmed at some of Reynolds spending practices, like spending $23 million it didn’t have, to buy property.

Bob Fisher: “They borrowed the money with the anticipation that a bond measure would pass. And the bond measure never went out, because a survey indicated it wouldn’t.”

Last school year, Fisher needed to cut $3.5 million, just to get out of the red.

Fisher says he got union support for cutting nine days from last year’s calendar. But he still needed to cut about 10 percent of the teaching staff this year.

The bottom line at Reynolds High is bigger classes.

Reynolds High principal Jeff Gilbert says research shows bigger classes won’t necessarily affect achievement.

Jeff Gilbert:  “Will the teachers feel that, and the students feel that in the room, in terms of the physicality? Yes. In terms of achievement on statewide assessments here? No, it should be negligible.”

Gilbert’s teachers are concerned, though, and not just about the challenge of squeezing between the desks.

Jesse Vella is an English teacher at Reynolds. He also studied class size during his teacher training at University of Portland, and says the ideal class size in middle school is between 17 and 22 students. 

Jesse Vella: “That all follows principles of group dynamics. So, when you get too big, you’re not a cohesive unit. It kind of falls apart.”

In part to make the staffing reduction work, Reynolds High School has abandoned its block schedule of 80 minute classes.

Math teacher, Debbie Lindow, says the shorter classes will make it harder to reach each kid.

Debbie Lindow: “With 40 kids in a class, and 46 minutes, are some of them going to fall through the cracks? Yeah, probably so.”

That’s bad news for a school that a Johns Hopkins study labeled a “dropout factory” two years ago.

Principal Jeff Gilbert insists things are improving, in spite of the budget cuts. Gilbert points to an effort last year to target 130 struggling seniors recover enough credits to graduate. 

That effort has been expanded this year. Math teacher Bill Miller agrees it will help.

Bill Miller: “I’m really hopeful that those kids, who didn’t have any hope at all, will suddenly go ‘wow’.”

Reynolds also plans remedial classes for students who are below state standards in core classes.

Debbie Lindow says kids will need to take more responsibility  for their work because it isn’t realistic for teachers to grade 200 pieces of daily homework.

Debbie Lindow: “So that my handing them a piece of paper, their homework, with a grade at the top, doesn’t make any difference. Rather they’re using feedback from within the classroom – so that I don’t have to see every single paper, every single day.”

Will all that add up to a better year for Reynolds? Math teacher, Bill Miller.

Bill Miller: “We’re going to battle and do our best, dang it. That’s what we’re going to do. There’s a lot of quality people here, who work here, and they’re going to try.”